Tales of Three Book Events

Author events are critical to the image and perhaps the very survival of large independent bookstores. Go to the website of any major store (Powell's in Portland, Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. or Vroman's in Pasadena) and you will find the upcoming signings prominently displayed. It's one of the main ways that independents are able to distinguish themselves from the chain stores in the area. We are more than a bookstore, we are a literary and cultural hub to our communities.

That is certainly true in Boulder. The Boulder Book Store hosts about 200 events a year. We generate most of our local publicity through these events and almost all of the advertising that we do is directly tied to the author events. It's fair to say that our profile is much higher in town because we've been able to bring our customers face to face with David Sedaris, Garrison Keillor, Jon Krakauer, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joyce Carol Oates and hundreds of other authors over the years.

You would think that with our track record, we would be experts at putting on successful events. Unfortunately, many of these events are fraught with peril and difficult decisions. The line between a great event and a terrible disappointment is often just a matter of a few books, a moody author, a bad sound system, or an unruly customer.

Over the past month, we've had several major ticketed events and I thought I'd look closely at three of them and lift the veil on our decision-making process and the results. One of the events (Neil Gaiman) was wildly successful, another (a video presentation with Philip Roth) started off as a dud but now must be considered a winner and the third (Philippa Gregory) never got off the ground.

Neil Gaiman

I was a big Sandman fan when the comic first appeared in the late 1980s. My old original issues of the first dozen or so books are still sitting in a box in my sister's attic in New Jersey. I hope she doesn't figure out what I'm storing up there and list them on ebay. I haven't really followed Gaiman in his transition to more traditional novels, but still this is the man who made Death a likable character.

We were ecstatic to get an event with him. There is heavy competition between independent bookstores for top-flight authors and Gaiman was only appearing in nine U.S. cities. We put in a detailed proposal to HarperCollins and hoped for the best, but never really expected that he would come to Boulder. Once we were awarded the signing, then the decisions had to be made.

Where would we have the event? How much would we charge for tickets? Would we require customers to buy a book in order to get into the event? Would customers get a discount on the book if they attended the event?

We decided to hold the event at Unity Church of Boulder. It's really the nicest offsite venue we have access to and boasts an excellent sound system. We charged $6.00 for tickets which is our cheapest rate. The ticket fee covers the cost of the venue as well as the extra staff needed to run an offsite event. Since, the tickets were so inexpensive, customers did not get a discount on the book. We reasoned that we didn't have a history with Gaiman and perhaps much of his audience would be young and not so well-heeled.

Ticket sales were brisk from the day they went on sale. People were finding us through Gaiman's site and also from our email blasts to our customers. It soon became apparent that we would probably sell out the 600-seat venue. I ordered 220 copies of his newest title, a young adult novel, The Graveyard Book for the event along with a liberal smattering of his other titles.

Before I could even decide if we had a enough books for the event, my Harper rep was on the phone insisting that we were way short on books. He wanted us to order 250 more books. I was astounded. How would we sell so many books? It's a young adult book which isn't Gaiman's core audience. He also would not be personalizing the book at the signing. Add that to our history of events in this venue where 250 to 300 was our absolute ceiling on sales, I just couldn't wrap my head around bringing in 470 books.

We finally settled on 200 additional copies and stopped hyperventilating for a couple of weeks. The next shock to the system came on the day before the event was scheduled. It was my Harper rep again. "Hey, Bubbe (for some reason I'm a Yiddish grandmother to my rep) you need another 100 books. Everyone has taken at least 500 books." In what reality? I wanted to ask instead I was much more diplomatic, "Are you crazy?"

"We'll overnight them," he said. I told him that I thought we would never sell that many copies. It wasn't mathematically possible. We might have sold 600 tickets, but some of those were families, some were couples, some were people that simply wouldn't buy the new book. Well, what could I do? God forbid I was wrong.

The night of the event was crazy. Gaiman arrived at the store to sign all of the stock before rushing over to the venue. He got to all of the new books but didn't have time to sign much of the back stock. As we arrived at the church there was a line of people snaked halfway around the building waiting to get in.

We frantically set up folding chairs in the aisles and behind the pews in order to accommodate any overflow crowd. We prayed that the Fire Marshall was not a Sandman devotee and flung the doors open. The crowd came pouring in and it seemed that they all lined up to buy books. What did they buy? The Graveyard Book. They bought it in pairs, in threes. I was never so happy in my life that my rep made me bring in more books. We rang and rang in the sales until Gaiman started talking.

I began to fear that 520 books would not be enough. We tallied up our sales as the last of the customers wandered into the hall and saw that we sold 202 copies. Wow. For most of our events that would be a great final number. Usually we sold two to three times as many books after the event as we did before. My God, if that was the case we would run out of books. We only had 318 left. Why didn't he insist I buy 400 more books?

Gaiman read over 40 pages from The Graveyard Book that night. On each night of the tour he read a different chapter of the book. We heard the second half of chapter 7, the penultimate chapter, that contained the climax to the story. His reading went on for over an hour and the audience hung on his every word despite the stuffiness of the hot church. Afterwards, he showed a trailer for the forthcoming movie Coraline and took questions.

By the time the event was let out, over two hours had elapsed. What a deal for $6.00. The crowd started surging towards our table of books and I grew concerned. My fears were short lived as many, many more people headed out into Boulder's cool night air. Perhaps two hours was long enough. Perhaps some of the audience didn't feel the need to buy the book after having the most exciting part of it read to them. We sold another 83 books and our final tally was 285 for the night in addition to dozens of backlist books.

It was a magnificent event. One of the best we ever hosted. The audience was thrilled, the author gracious and we actually did more business at the event then we did all day long in the store.

Philip Roth

Roth is perhaps my favorite novelist. One of the very first novels that my wife and I read aloud together was Portnoy's Complaint. I knew she was a keeper when she thought the salacious story of Alexander Portnoy was brilliant and hilarious as opposed to sexist and frivolous.

Roth simply does not tour. I had the pleasure and agony of meeting Roth last year in New York City at a cocktail party. Most of his readers never get that opportunity. Given that he was never going to come to Boulder, we jumped at the chance to be one of the bookstores that would show a live feed of an interview with Roth provided by his publisher Houghton Mifflin. In addition to the video, Houghton Mifflin gave us the option of purchasing up to 48 signed copies of Roth's new novel Indignation for the event.

Signed first edition Roth books. That's a big deal. I quickly got on line and found that you could not buy a signed first edition Roth novel for less than $60. Of course, the fact that Houghton Mifflin was putting on this event would dilute the market for those signed books, but still it seemed many book collectors might attend the event just to get a signed book.

We set the ticket price, which included a signed book, at $49.95. Before we could even publicize the event, two things happened: Houghton offered us 72 books instead of 48 and we started seeing that other stores were charging $35 or less. We decided to reduce our price to $34.95. Ticket sales were slow but still the enticement of a rare signed volume was definitely creating some interest. Days before the event, the rarity of the item was severely compromised. Houghton Mifflin now said we could purchase up to 300 copies of the book signed.

We kept our order at 72 and hoped for the best. On the night of the event, we had less than 10 people in the audience. It turns out that of the dozen tickets we sold, a few of the people just wanted to get the signed book and bought a ticket to guarantee they wouldn't miss out. I took my seat as the video feed began. It started off interestingly enough with Roth politely answering a few questions, but it soon veered off track. Our feed wasn't perfect and Roth's words raced ahead of the picture. Also, it took on a C-Span quality. It was quite static (two men sitting in chairs talking for an hour) and Roth is frankly not the most forthcoming of interview subjects.

My enthusiasm waned and I began to think that if this is the future of author events, perhaps we should go into a different business. No one would want to see this except the most hardcore Roth fans. It didn't have anything approaching the vibrancy of an actual event and that connection to the author that thrills our customers just wasn't there.

Perhaps we shouldn't have charged for the event. If the interview was on a DVD instead of a live feed, we could have avoided the technical difficulties. However, the real problem was that even if everything went perfectly and we had 50 people attending it still would have been a boring event. It wouldn't have been something that people would venture out to see on a cold winter evening.

I left that night thinking of the event as a failure. During the broadcast, the owner of the bookstore sidled up to me and asked, "this is it?" motioning to the screen and the scant audience. I shrugged and said, "we tried."

A few days later as I was buying our new fiction section, I noticed that the Roth book had sold a few more copies. It kept selling. The autographed copies were actually flying off our shelves in the weeks that followed. We have now sold over 50 books, double what we sold of his previous hardback, and Indignation is high on our bestseller list. Not bad. The buzz from the event and the autograph stickers seem to be working their magic.

Philippa Gregory

Tonight's event with Gregory, the author of The Other Boleyn Girl, was cancelled late last week due to low ticket sales. This was a painful end to what we had hoped would be a signature event during our 35th anniversary celebration. What went wrong? Why were ticket sales stalled when we drew over 250 people to Gregory's last event in the store?

We anticipated that the turn out would be stronger this year then when we hosted her for the paperback release of The Constant Princess two years ago. She was touring behind a new hardback, The Other Queen, the movie version of The Other Boleyn Girl had created added interest in her work, and we were going to have period costumes for the event.

Our last event with Gregory strained our in-store capabilities. More than half the crowd had to stand and our event space gets quite warm when there are that many people. It seemed like a natural to go offsite with Gregory. Also, the publisher, Simon & Schuster, was insisting that Gregory events were held in large venues. We set the ticket price at $10 with customers getting $5 off her new hardcover.

Ticket sales started out slowly which isn't entirely unusual. Our event with James Kunstler for The Long Emergency eventually drew over 250 people even though less than 100 tickets were sold before the day of the event. Our marketing team kept sending out emails about the Gregory event, we displayed the book prominently and waited for the throngs of Gregory fans. It never happened. Finally, when we were four days away from the event with less than 40 tickets sold, we knew going offsite to a venue that held 600 was not going to work.

We had hoped to move the event back into the store, but the publisher was uncomfortable with that and so our only alternative was to cancel the event. It is a tremendous disappointment. Ironically, when I was at the register during Saturday's sale, two different people asked me about the Gregory event. They were upset and surprised it was cancelled even though neither one of them had tickets.

Perhaps we would have had a late rally and sold enough tickets to make it look respectable in the venue and recoup some of the cost associated with renting the space. Somehow, I doubt it. Between the election, the economy, and the weather (which turned miserable over the weekend) it just seemed we couldn't get this event off the ground. The saddest thing for me, was seeing the costumes packed up and sent off to the next tour stop without getting a chance to see anyone dressed as one of the Boleyns.

Meeting Philip Roth

Kashkashian's complaint

Book Expo America was held in New York City's sterile and hard-to-reach Jacob K. Javitz Center last week, but the show's real excitement happened in restaurants, bars, apartments, and the rooftops of Manhattan, where booksellers got to mingle with authors, editors and publishers. I'm usually immune to celebrity and consequently manage to get myself into in-depth, interesting and sometimes absurd conversations with various authors at these get-togethers. Heck, two years ago, I ended up talking to Edie Falco (her uncle wrote a book) about women's shoes.

My immunity met its match when I was invited by Harcourt to a fairly small cocktail reception with Philip Roth at Cafe Gray on Columbus Circle. Two weeks before leaving for New York, I gingerly held the invitation in my hands, frightened it might spontaneously combust. I called and R.S.V.Ped immediately, and then 10 minutes later I wasn't sure if the phone call had actually taken place, so I emailed. I was like a lifelong, devout Catholic getting a chance to drink with the Pope (you know, Pope John Paul II, not the current curmudgeon). My religion is literature, and the closest thing to the divine that I will ever get is the mind of Mr. Roth.

Once at the show, I stumbled around the hot, humid show floor in a daze on Friday, glancing at publisher's booths, scrawling incomprehensible observations into my tattered green notebook and greeting friends and colleagues alike with a blank stare. I could only hope that my stare and brief mumblings were written off as the byproduct of being intensely focused on the show. But I was really in a fog, thinking, "I'm meeting Philip Roth tonight. I'm meeting the man who created Nathan Zuckerman in a few hours."

Why this adulation? I first read Roth's Portnoy's Complaint when I was a junior in college, in a seminar on Jewish American writers. I wanted to get in touch with my literary heritage, and since there weren't any seminars on Italian or Armenian writers, I was left with my Jewish legacy. The course list was basically a hall-of-fame of living Jewish writers, including Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, I.B. Singer, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth.

Philip Roth's contribution to this class, Alexander Portnoy, made me laugh harder then I ever had in my life. I read passages out loud to my friends at night. The biology and economics majors would laugh until they were snorting and tearing up, not quite believing that this novel, filled with masturbation and sexual scenes, could be my homework while they stared at equations and deciphered lab results. Short of sex, what could be a better assignment for a 20-year-old guy than reading Portnoy's Complaint? It would take me years to see the psychological mess that Portnoy was, the unhappiness that prevailed. In college, we all wanted to be Alexander Portnoy. What a glorious misery that would have been.

I began devouring Roth's books once I graduated and was no longer fettered to endless reading lists. First, I picked up Roth's newest novel at the time, The Counterlife. My God, it's as good as Portnoy even though it is completely different, I remember thinking. Roth's narrative tricks, his ability to create fiction within fiction was truly illuminating. He was like a complex, ribald Vonnegut. He was an American Milan Kundera (another writer I was reading like crazy at the time). In the end, I realized he was truly like no one else. Like Faulkner and Bellow, he was simply an American original.

Over the years, I have read and reread virtually all of his books, including the complete tales of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, starting with the Ghost Writer and clear through to his upcoming novel, Exit Ghost. My other favorites include Patrimony, his marvelous memoir about taking care of his father, and Sabbath's Theater, perhaps his funniest novel. Roth has never disappointed me. His work challenges its readers, assuming that they are intelligent, well-read people who are willing to follow him wherever he may go.

It was with all of this knowledge weighing me down that I entered the Cafe Gray. I spotted him standing by the tall windows facing Columbus Circle. I was relieved to see that he has aged better than Nathan Zuckerman, who is incontinent, impotent and somewhat memory-addled in Exit Ghost. Roth was trim, vigorous and engaged in a lively conversation. He looked wonderful for a man approaching his mid-70s. I must admit, my first selfish thought was "he's got several books left in him."

I was approached by two people at once as I started to slowly drift towards Roth. The first was his editor, Janet Silver. I have met her on a few occassions and hold her in extremely high esteem because she, of all the people in the world, edits Roth, and she is a gracious, down-to-earth, patient woman who is willing to answer a myriad of questions from nosy booksellers like me about Roth year after year. The second was a waiter carrying a tray of appetizers. All three of us converged at once and the waiter held up a tray of mushroom risotto balls for us to try.

I bit into one of the fried balls as Janet said hello. The volcanic insides of the risotto exploding into my mouth and searing my tongue, I tried to remain calm and respond to her. She offered to introduce me to Philip Roth. I nodded quickly and we spoke briefly as we crossed the room towards Roth. He was engaged in a conversation with a few other booksellers. I couldn't take my eyes off of him and felt some guilt for staring at him like he was an animal in the zoo. Here is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author in his native habitat, I thought.

Suddenly his eyes fell on me, and we were quickly introduced. Now was my moment to speak to Philip Roth. Over the past 20 years, I have come up with hundreds and hundreds of questions that I wanted to ask him about his fiction, about his relationships with other writers, about his views on the world. But now, as I stood before him, my mind was a complete void of all of those thoughts. I held his warm, dry hand for a beat too long and said, "Thank you for all of the years of enjoyment you have given me."

He became animated and said, "But I haven't given you years, I have given you books." I mumbled a reply to the books equaling years. He asked me where I was from, and I told him Boulder, which seemingly left no impression upon him. As I was about to speak again, a waiter popped up between us with a tray of raw tuna. I looked down at the tray and when I looked back up Roth was turning to his right to meet another bookseller.

I moved back and sought the solace of the bar. I had gotten one sentence in to Roth and I had been contradicted. I had been faced, in the parlance of my youth. Well, I thought to myself as I swirled my complimentary Scotch-on-the-rocks, it was a damn stupid thing to say. You've got to be precise when you speak to the master.

As the party went on, I spoke to several other booksellers I know. Almost everyone was jazzed-up and a bit frightened to be meeting Philip Roth. Some even seemed more obsessed with him than I was. As the evening wore on, the cocktails took hold and the waiters broke into almost every conversation with their trays of hors d'oeuvres, and I became determined to work my way back to Roth. About an hour later, he was leaning with his back up to the windows speaking to a friend of mine from Arizona. I wandered over to them and gradually entered the conversation.

I asked Roth about his new book, Exit Ghost, which I was only 80 pages into, and whether it was influenced by Bellow, particularly his novel Humboldt's Gift. Zuckerman ruminates and rereads a favorite short-story-writer from his past, who he had a brief meeting with in the 1950s. Roth said it wasn't, although he thought the Bellow novel was a wonderful book and that he could see how I could have that impression in the beginning of his novel. "It goes off in a much different direction. You'll see."

Just as another waiter threatened to come between us with a tray of oversized shrimp, I moved closer to Roth and boxed-out the waiter. "I have always thought that Sabbath's Theater is one of your best books, one of the greatest novels written in the last 25 years, and yet it doesn't seem to get the same acclaim as some of your other works. Why is that?" He took a deep breath, "I agree with you," he said, "but the women didn't like it." I instinctively rolled my eyes without even realizing it, and a smile came over his face. "You roll your eyes," he said. "I do too. But there you have it."

That was it. I thanked him for his time and moved away. It wasn't a great conversation, but I held the great author's attention for a few moments. It was more than I ever got to do with the rest of those Jewish writers that I admired so much in that class. That all-star cast of living writers, with the exception of Ozick and Roth, have all died in the intervening years, and I never got to look any of them in the eye or ask them a queston.

In the end, it's Roth's words straight onto the page that are what has added so much to my life over the years. Even hours of small talk at a cocktail party in New York could never match a single page of his well-written prose for me.

A few days later, as I read Exit Ghost, I came across the following passage. It sums up, in part, how I occasionally feel about all the hoopla that surrounds books these days, including reading groups, author dinners, Oprah and even blogs like mine. It speaks to the heart of why even the greatest of events, like meeting Philip Roth, can never equal the experience of just reading. In it a character rails against the cult of personality that surrounds literature and how to rectify it.

"I'd forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I'd forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak to one another. I'd leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own."

I read this passage out loud to my wife and told her that's how I feel. She laughed and said, "You love talking about literature. You do it all the time. Philip Roth probably doesn't even think that."

She was right, of course. The passage is part of a ranting letter to the editor written by a woman suffering from a brain tumor that has made her mentally unstable. Still, it was something to think about. I continued reading the book, and for the next hour I was lost in a creation from Philip Roth's mind -- true heaven.