Category: My Rise to Fame

Today, after six weeks of beta testing, BookTour.com has gone live. Our CTO Adam Goldstein did a kick-tuchas job coding the sucka and it hums like a top.

If you haven’t visited yet, BookTour.com is a free online service where authors on tour can search for venues to set up speaking engagements and book lovers can see when their favorite writers are coming to their home town and have the information delivered by email, rss or iCalendar. (full description).

Our CEO is Chris Anderson who posted this morning on his blog about the project. I’m the Chief Evangelist and Community Director which means education and outreach are my domain.

I’ll be spending much of the rest of the summer getting authors, book stores, libraries and interested parties into our database.

You can sign up for own free BookTour.com account and start tracking your favorite authors as they come through town. Takes about 3 minutes and the rewards, he boasts, are priceless.

I’m going to be on my dear friend Felicia Sullivan’s radio show Writers Revealed tomorrow at 7 PM EST. The topic is “building book buzz online” and I’ll be throwing in a little about BookTour.com with any luck.

You can listen to all the shennanigoats here.

So New York was great, exhausting, bewildering but amazingly great. We got great support, twice that many ideas and launched in public beta in an interview Chris did with my friend and mentor MJ Rose. It was a neat merging of two halves of my life I’ve been trying get joined up for years.

Some specifics. At Book Expo last week–myself, Chris and our partner and CTO Adam Goldstein pulled the ripcord on BookTour.com, a web-based service enabling authors, readers and venues to connect up with one another for live events. We describe it thusly…

BookTour.com is a free online service that connects authors on tour and potential audiences of all sorts, from book lovers to professional groups. Authors create their own page (biography, books, our dates and availability) and any group looking for a speaker can find them and contact them directly to arrange for an appearance. We include fields for authors wishing to handle speaking engagements through their speaking agents and/or in-house publicity departments. Relevant author information can be added in minutes. Connecting authors with potential audiences is as simple as searching (by geography, book titles, subject, dates of availability) and sending an email.

My job is Chief Evangelist/Community Director which means I speak on behalf of our service, assure a smooth user experience and facilitate relationships with the publishing industry and future partners.

It’s a whole new way of living for me as I haven’t worked fulltime for anyone since these people over a decade ago. Also building something from scratch, even something as focused as this service, is a bit like designing a civilzation. There are few precedents. No one’s even laid the roads yet. You talk a lot about how your decisions will play out but fundamentally you can’t know for sure. You do a lot guessing, knowing you can always fix it should it not work. It’s its own kind of relief.

You can sign up right now to find out when your favorite author is coming to a town near you. And I’ll be posting about the gig here from time to time.

My review of Nirvana: The Biography appeared in the LA Times last week. An idea of what I thought…

Back then, if MTV or commercial radio didn’t speak to you, you had a single alternative: an underground society of fanzines, tape trading, self-promoted concerts and college radio. This alienation from a heartless mainstream gave birth to punk in the ’70s, hip-hop in the early ’80s and the rock scene that birthed Nirvana. It also played into the central myth of rock ‘n’ roll itself: Society wants to squash you and your friends, and music is your liberation.

All of which seems lost on True. Does he really believe he’s delivering blows against the empire by calling MTV “the absolute enemy”? His final assessment of Cobain’s life (“The system kills you”) blows right by the point: The system killed Cobain, a conflicted artist both ambitious and afraid of success, in large part because he was born too early for more than one alternative to it. Well-deployed bluster, as rock critic Lester Bangs illustrated, is the spun gold of the medium. But bluster in service of an outdated mythology is noisy where it should be compelling, aimless where it should be incisive. And True’s lecture-gossip-anecdote-rant-repeat prose rhythms do him no favors.

• First chapter of my book as recommended by agent.
• An essay for a Soft Skull anthology on working in retail.
• Book review for the SF Chronicle
• A couple of top secret projects that, with any luck, will see me into the end of this very difficult year with a minimum amount of pain

• A speech I’m giving at the Hillel General Assembly on Monday.
• Wasting energy obsessing about a phone call this week with my agent.
• A book review for the SF Chronicle
• A proposal for the San Francisco Film Society

I have achieved a level of fame I am rather proud of. I am friends with people who some other people might recognize. And that suits me fine. Because I don’t get strange emails from wannabe geek-boys (a few booky girls but I digress) and can still get into some neat places and get few trinkets thrown my way.

It’s a good life.

I was thinking about this yesterday when my Sunday New York Times arrived which not only an essay from my friend Wendy McClure but a piece by Steven Johnson. Miss McClure and I became friends last year when both on book tour (hers beat mine into bloody submission and then pulled its pants down in front of the entire school). Mr. Johnson I’ve never met but would commit several acts unholy, up to and including window watching, if we could hang out just once.

The reason I bring up Mr. Johnson is I am friends (jeez, I sound like Perez Hilton) with his editor Sean McDonald, who was kind enough to send me a copy of The Ghost Map, SJ’s new book which I’ve been eager to read.

It needs no more press here (see for yourself) so let me just say thank you to Sean for sending it my way, that I will be reading it soon, hello to Wendy and we should hang out, girl, Mr. Johnson, say the word and my bucket and squeegee will be right there and this level of fame is just fine. For now.

• Book proposal v. 2.0.
• Another assignment for Fast Company
• Wrapping consulting projects for Houghton Mifflin and the Idea Festival
• Speaking at the Idea Festival this week!