IRREPLACEABLE? Tonight I went down to Prairie Lights bookstore to hear Stephen Lovely read from his new novel, Irreplaceable. It's the story of the relationship between a young widow; the 34-year-old mother who becomes the recipient of his deceased wife's heart; and the driver of the car that caused the accident. Heavy stuff, yet so beautifully rendered. A large, rapt and appreciative audience filled the entire second floor of the store. You could have heard a pen drop onto the carpet while the author read the first 20 or so pages of the book. Lovely read for about 45 minutes, and then took questions for another 15. He’s the director of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, a summer creative-writing for high school students, and there were probably a good 40 or 50 teenagers there, which was inspiring to see. And plenty of other readers, and writers, and summer writing festival students were there, too. SRO. The way we authors like our readings to be. Most of us have experienced the other end of the spectrum, I imagine: the chain bookstore reading in a Chicago suburb where 5 people show up, and two of them are store employees who happened to be wandering by. Is there anything more demoralizing for an author when this happens? Or more wasteful for author and publisher alike? But is there anything more invigorating than reading to an appreciative group of 40 people in one’s hometown? And this has gotten me wondering if bookstore readings are still essential to the promotions process, or if they’re now dispensable or ripe to be replaced by something else. Because in-store readings aren’t just about the number of people who show up; they’re also about the signage and the book displays and the newsletters sent out to customers. I’m thinking a lot about this lately, because I’m very probably going to do two very different book tours this fall. The first will be organized by Random House, and will most likely take me to 3 or 4 cities in addition to Los Angeles, where I live. The second one will be designed and paid for by me, and will be a house-party/salon circuit to another five or six cities, mainly alternatively-minded communities and college towns. My first book came out in 1994 in the era of the big book tour. I remember traveling to 17 cities in three weeks, in a whirlwind of propeller planes and hotel minibars and luggage delays. The blitz was exhilarating and fabulous and utterly disorienting. That many cities + so few days + not enough sleep starts to really screw with your mind. I remember standing at a phone booth in the Cincinnati airport after two solid weeks on the road and trying to call in to my answering machine in New York to retrieve my messages of the past few days. Except after two rings, someone answered my home phone. “Hope Edelman,” the voice said. A wave of absolute, sheer panic came washed over me. Travelers and porters rushed around me engaged in their normal traveler and porter routines, and I just stood there, frozen, thinking Oh my god! I’ve been replaced! “Hope?” I blurted out, idiotically, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Hope?” the voice said. “Is that you?” Then, blessedly, I remembered: I’d given my friend Annie a key to stay in my apartment while I was gone. She’d answered the phone saying, “Hope Edelman’s,” but I’d missed the apostrophe S. Mystery solved. We got a big laugh out of it when we both realized what had just happened. Still, I boarded my next plane thinking, Whoa, that was close. Nobody I know does weeks-long book tours like that any more. Now it seems that if there’s to be any touring at all, it happens either pre-publication—visiting bookstores and having dinner with sales reps—or, more commonly, right around pub date. I don’t know if I’m making a good choice planning this secondary tour for late October and early November for a book that comes out September 15. I’ve never done it this way before, but this feels like the right way to go about it for this particular book, to first give people time to hear about it (hopefully) before deciding if they want to commit to an event. What’ll happen at these house parties? Well, that’s the part I’m trying to figure out right now. The standard format of reading and Q&A, where the author controls the content of the interaction and the audience asks the same old questions, feels tired and predictable to me. Lately, I’ve gotten the feeling that readers who still come to these events, the ones who haven’t yet given in to watching authors exclusively on YouTube, are looking for a sense of connection, for moments of engagement, for an opportunity to hitch a ride onto something bigger than themselves. They’re coming to see an author and hear part of a book, yes, but aren’t they also yearning for something more? Hearing me read a prepared passage, and then answering questions about how long it took me to write the book and what I’m working on next, isn’t the fast track for helping anyone reach that higher plane. Or is it? When I listened to Lovely take questions from the audience tonight, probably the same questions he’s been asked dozens of times before, I was struck by how earnestly and thoughtfully he tried to answer each one, and how by being his humble and gracious self he was able to elevate the room to a different state of consciousness. What he said mattered to everyone in the room, and by letting it matter, they were—at least for that hour—changed. And I realized that a reading is both all about the author and nothing about the author at the same time. How to somehow capture the essence of that and transmute it into an event where people can really take something worthwhile home with them, where selling books is an understood perk but not the only objective, where using one’s book as a springboard to engage readers in conversation about subjects that matter to them most: that’s what I’m really thinking about tonight.