Dateline: Eliot Hotel, Boston MA, 3 May
After the blur that was last week, it was hard to avoid the feeling of letdown and loss of momentum over the weekend. First, the website was down basically the entire weekend. Power outage at provider knocks us off the web and leaves us feeling a certain lack of redundancy. So you make plans for mirrored sites while your ranking on Amazon drops progressively over the weekend, and you think maybe you were lucky as hell to hit 42 last Thursday morning, coming on the heels of the two national TV appearances (Headline News, Dennis Miller) and the various national radio shows (Diane Rehm, Laura Ingraham, Jim Bohannon). Putnam has a few more things planned for me this week (New England Cable News show tonight, David Brudnoy Show on WBZ-AM in Boston, local Dallas radio show [Kevin McCarthy] and then the Penguin Group/CUNY Author Series with Leonard Lopate Tuesday night in NYC), but I am basically done with them come Wednesday morning. Then it’s off to the Big Easy on a US Government trip for a big Naval Institute event where I’ll talk and sign books.
So all in all, a much slower week than last, but it’s hard to complain about the shot I got last week from Putnam. You hope it has an effect, and you know Putnam will try to gin up PR over the coming weeks, but I suspect the tail-off will be profound, in part because there are always more books around the corner, and you basically have your two weeks to strut upon the stage, hoping against hope you hit somebody’s definition of a bestseller, because after that you’re no longer a new release as new books crowd the stage, suck up your PR department’s attention span, and fill those author slots on TV and radio shows. In many ways, then, it’s a lot like movie openings: you need to score big in the public’s consciousness in the first couple of weeks to retain everyone’s sense of priority, to ride the wave, and keep the grand machinery in motion. Otherwise you slip back into the pack and hope you sell the remainder of your units the old-fashioned way: good reviews, word-of-mouth, and hopefully bulk sales to educational settings.
Coming into last week I really didn’t know what sort of expectations was realistic in terms of sales and rankings in lists. As the Amazon number kept steadily dropping down to 42 last Thursday morning, everything seemed in place and going according to plan. Hell, I felt like I was along for the ride in many ways.
But frankly, that seemed a bit too easy for the unknown author whose political book isn’t really political in the sense of targeting Bush or liberals in general, so it doesn’t point fingers in the way that elicits news coverage. I knew that jacking up the text in that manner would have given me a much better shot at bestseller status, and yet, I just couldn’t write that kind of book, because it tends to be so backward-looking and my stuff is best cast as futurology vice history. Still, it burns me somewhat that Joseph Wilson gets a bestseller basically for accusing the White House of outing his CIA-agent wife. I mean, that sounds more like an op-ed than a book. The guy really doesn’t have anything to say beyond that, filling up page after page with basically nothing but filler. His book will be important for several weeks and then basically disappear from history because it raises questions but provides no answers.
But this is whining, and I hate that sort of crap. I never could stand coming out of games when my team was losing. I always wanted to fight bitterly right to the end. I am a terrible loser, which is a big part of the drive—naturally.
I know it’s just the sense of let-down talking. My wife keeps saying let’s have this conversation in a couple of weeks after the Esquire article comes out (the last one triggered more media coverage than my entire life had up to that point) and what looks like a profile in the Wall Street Journal (possibly appearing in the next week or two). She’s right, of course, as is Mark Warren, who keeps counseling me that the book is simply too big and too ambitious to land with a splash, but that it is a book I’ll be proud of twenty years from now.
I keep telling myself to be patient, but it is hard. The book feels like a manifesto of my life and who I am, so it just seems terrible when I’m not feeling either the momentum of last week or the grand expectations of the weeks before, but rather just the sense of the downward trajectory back into . . . my life as I previously knew it. But since I loved that life (and frankly miss it terribly on this tour), I can’t for the life of me figure out my sense of disappointment here. I know the book will be huge in my field, but I want it to change America as well—or at least the way it debates national security. I had absolutely no desire to write a book just so I could say I wrote a book. I had done that already, and while it was okay, it didn’t seem worth the hours or sacrifice. Frankly, I would have traded it all for my two season tickets at Lambeau.
Then again, I can’t say I sacrificed that much for this book. It was more a matter of feeling like the moment and the material had met. But that feeling also generated a lot of expectations.
Hell, I think I’ve just spent way too much time alone by myself in hotels lately, and then the only contact I seem to have with humans is all sell! Sell! SELL! So clearly, things have gotten awfully distorted for me. Geez, I remember being 80k on Amazon and now I’m crying over sitting somewhere around 500!
So you try to keep some perspective, get yourself psyched for New England Cable News and David Brudnoy (actually a sub—the local news anchor Jack Williams), and keep plugging along, telling yourself it’s a book to be proud of, one for the ages, and not some dumbass finger-pointing exercise.
Then again, what’s the use of being an “author” if you can’t wallow now and then in self-pity in some fabulously appointed hotel suite, consoling yourself with the mini-bar? I mean, shouldn’t I freak out at least once on this tour before it’s over and run through the lobby half-naked, drunk to the gills, shouting obscenities about how my “art” was “stolen” by “the Man”?
As Jack Black/Dewey Finn might strum: I didn’t get my bestseller today . . . and now I’m really pissed off!
So I say to myself: Step back! Step back! Step back! Step back!
[Okay, that last bit was for my kids.]
All whining aside, my guess is that the media stuff will die off fairly quickly in the coming days, albeit with a slight bump-up thanks to the Esquire article and the efforts their PR firm will invariably make (Dan Klores Communications). The WSJ story is a wild card, meaning I have no idea what impact that will have, although I’ll assume it will be overwhelmingly good in nature and fab for my ego.
What I mean by die-off is that the Putnam tour will officially end, followed by a few radio appearances, and once the book is separated from the follow-on treatment that Putnam’s bestsellers get (like Blue Blood), the calls will get fewer and farther between and I’ll settle back into the situation I know best and therefore I most comfortable with—I return to being my own publicist. For me, that means a schedule more driven by presentations than by appearances, and back to the rhythm of articles vice the huge and very lengthy arc associated with the book. Don’t get me wrong, I plan on spinning out the book for as long as possible, but I think I’ve made my peace with the logical trajectory of this sort of material given my status as an unknown author, and—in many ways—it’s more relief than regret that the book didn’t catch fire as some (including myself in my most optimistic moments) had hoped.
Simply put, I can’t really think when I’m all caught up in things like this, and if I can’t think, I can’t get my head in order, keep my life in perspective, maintain my sense of priorities, etc. What happens then is you lose track of who you think you are and you start defining yourself primarily in terms of how others see you (like the Amazon rankings—a curse to impressionable authors everywhere!).
Then there’s simply the sense of being depressed over my Dad’s passing, which hovers like a black cloud over everything, which in turn is just a poetic way of saying I’m still in mourning and that’s the way it will be with me for however long that takes.
I clipped some articles today, but frankly, none of them are really that outstanding that I can’t wait for the next trolley car coming down the tracks. My head is aching from the weather (deep fog and rain as only New England can provide) and I think I better fire off this pathetic missive to my webmaster, think about a shower to wake me up, and get ready for my ride at 6:30.
I hate this nighttime stuff, because the allergies don’t leave me so spunky after 6pm, but I’ll be going to 10pm tonight with the David Brudnoy Show, and being a trooper, I am committed to putting on a good show, even as I worry I sometimes repeat myself way too often in this media appearances. But that’s the reality of the game: same basic messages, always a different audience. You don’t get sloppy though, and try to really respond to each question as directly as possible.
But again, there is that feeling of peaking with Brian Lamb’s show, which I watched last night with my wife. That was clearly the best interview I have ever given, showing me at my most eloquent and relaxed, which for me takes a lot of effort but in this instance really came out of Lamb’s amazing touch as an interviewer. That interview will likely go down as the highpoint of this tour, and something I will treasure into my old years. Why so? You never get to do Book Notes again—ever. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal—no exceptions!
At least I have the CSPAN Book Notes coffee mug as proof. Lamb assured me only the guests get that special black one.
But I won’t submit to such pessimism: lotsa good performances left . . . always more audiences to conquer with the brief. Then there’s the chance to do the brief on CSPAN itself. That will be a gas, no doubt. Hell, new ideas always lurking around the corner, as are new articles. I’m just hitting an inevitable low spot in this marathon, and as I dive back in for another roughly 24 hours and four events, the sense of depression and self-doubt actually feel pretty reasonable. I mean, you can’t always be as high as I was last week. It just doesn’t work that way in nature.
How does that lyric from Paul Weller go?
I only feel sad in a natural way . . . I enjoy sometimes feeling this way.
The gift you gave was desire . . . the match that started my fire.
Not a bad description of a love affair, or the expectations fueling a book tour, or my burned-out skull right now.
So I rub my eyes, snort some Ocean nasal spray, pop a couple of Tylenol allergy and sinus, look into the mirror, flip out my hands on either side of my head and exhort . . . “Showtime!”
They say the neon lights are strong on Back Bay . . .
Take me home George!
