Book signing? Now I know how Robinson Crusoe must have felt

CHAIRING the Four Angry Men in the Opera House on Thursday last was a fascinating experience, not least because they played to a packed house.

Imagine that.

Almost a thousand people left the comfort of their homes on a filthy night to gather together for the purpose of being depressed by Pat Leahy, Matt Cooper, Shane Ross and Fintan O’Toole.

While the event, dreamed up by Penguin Ireland and sponsored by this newspaper and TodayFM, doesn’t have Riverdance potential, it could undoubtedly become a roadshow, judging from the impassioned response of the audience.

They were most participative, eager to make points and ask questions. Hundreds went home thwarted by lack of opportunity to do either. This was because the four guys on the stage are not just good talkers.

They KNOW they’re good talkers, and as a result have difficulty recognising a full stop when it timidly presents itself to them.

When you ask them for a brief answer, because they are obliging, they drop the length of their response from 10 minutes to eight.

Penguin has found an interesting new approach to both the direct marketing of books and the publicising of books. (And not all of those on sale in the interval were from their own presses: Fintan O’Toole’s is published by Faber&Faber.)

It beats book signing, at least from the point of view of the writers. Book signings are up there with that apocryphal nightmare where you find yourself, stark naked, greeting your new boss, prospective mother-in-law, President McAleese or the Pope.

The writer is put sitting in the middle of the bookshop behind a wobbly little table on which are piled a few dozen of their books. Robinson Crusoe was not more isolated from comfort and safety.

The first time you do a signing, you foolishly expect to be overwhelmed with purchasers eager to tell you how their lives were changed by your luminous prose, particularly the never-to-be forgotten insight on page 134 of your last novel.

That kind of welcome doesn’t happen unless you are Victoria Beckham, in which case your customer base has to be restrained behind a red rope and released into your presence in groups of three.

Less famous writers find that the minute they see you at your little table, customers in the bookshop pretend they haven’t seen you and concentrate fiercely on pretending you’re not there at all.

It’s as if they expect you to make indecent propositions to them or importune them for money on the spot.

The really humiliating bit is that they do an exploratory circle of you, sneaking sideways glances at your table when they think you’re not looking at them.

What they’re trying to read is the pyramid of stiff paper with your name printed on it, in order to find out who the hell you are, while reserving the right to suspect you are the kind of person they don’t want to get to know

Their suspicion is not helped, in some bookshops, by assistants eager to a) sell books and b) take care of you, who accost lurking customers and tell them you’d be delighted to sign a book and it’s available for sale just over here. Their response is a flinching smile and a speedy decamp to the children’s department.

In order to look happy and busy, you devote yourself to signing books for the shop to put stickers on, reading “Autographed by Author.”

This adds enormously to the value of a first edition. I have two signed copies of John Banville’s The Sea and regard them as insurance. If the finances get any ropier, I figure I can sell one of them for a tidy sum.

In one shop where I did a signing, the writer was expected to put the sticker on the cover, as well as signing their name, and the assistant who came to take away the processed copies and present new ones did so with such pressing urgency, I had the feeling that the last author must have been a speed merchant or else had owned a very short, easy-to-scribble name.

The people who DO come up to you at signings do not always come clutching purchased copies of your oeuvre. They come clutching a desire to be published, and want you to give them a tutorial in how to do it. Most writers, I’m told, get rude in this situation.

Me, I’m so grateful for the company and the implication that somebody finds me interesting that I tell them everything I know. The problem is that most of them have already done everything an aspiring writer should do and so end up disappointed.

The marvellous thing is that they end up disappointed with the free tutorial, rather than with their own book.

I’m convinced writers are born with a self-protective gene designed to convince them that publishers, agents and publishers’ readers are all morons and that sooner or later, someone will realise how wondrous is their book and bring it out to orgasmic critical acclaim.

“Well, thanks, anyway,” they say listlessly, having turned over a copy of my latest book and checked if the picture matches the battered saleswoman in front of them.

Even worse than the book signing is the media tour, where, if your book is published overseas, you are freighted from studio to studio to be interviewed by presenters who have never read any book, least of all your little offering.

When I prepare Irish writers for the American media tour, the hardest task is to half-obey one of the instructions issued by the US publicists.

“The writer,” says this instruction, “must name the title of their book every 45 seconds.”

Most Irish writers NEVER give the title of their book. A pronounced anti-marketing prejudice afflicts writers, who are secretly convinced that they would not have to do any publicity for their book if the publisher invested a decent amount of money in advertising, and so, when interviewed, go out of their way to avoid sounding venal and grasping.

They have to get over that, because research indicates that while listeners and viewers are willing to be turned into purchasers and readers, they need help, and if a writer can’t be bothered to name the title, the potential reader is lost at that moment.

Any first time writer, embarking on the marketing task for their book, would be well-advised to learn off by heart Baldassare Castiglione’s statement of determined resignation. Castiglione’s delightful The Book of the Courtier still sells, five centuries after it was first published.

“They can tell by natural instinct what seems good or bad,” Castiglione wrote of readers. “And without being able to give any reason for it, they enjoy and love the one and despise the other.

“Therefore if my book meets with general approval, I shall take it that it is good and will survive, and if, on the other hand, it fails to please, I’ll take it that it’s bad and will accept that it must fade into obscurity.”

It’s a marvellous statement of writers’ serenity.

And an absolute lie.

No writer ever accepts that a book they’ve written must fade into obscurity.