DITCHWALK

A Road Less Traveled

Topics / Books / Docs

About / Archive / Contact

Copyright © 2002-2023 Mark Barrett 

Home > Archives for book tour

The Writer’s Prompt Copy

November 24, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

Are you a writer? Are you planning to do a reading or a podcast? Will you be using your published or hopefully-to-be-published text as a part of your presentation?

If so, take a minute to consider what you’re going to be doing and how you’re going to do it. On the what front it’s tempting to take your text (fiction or non-fiction) and use that as your script. I mean, what else would you use, right? Right.

Except…that may not be the best choice in terms of how you connect with your audience. What you’re doing when you give a reading or put a podcast together is presenting your work, but it’s also a performance, and performances have their own requirements. Even if your audience is very nuts-and-bolts about the subject matter, and even if your text is very matter of fact, you still run the risk of presenting your information in a boring way. And boring is generally not good.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: book tour, literary, reading, text, writer

Book Tour Dreams

November 6, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Looking forward to your first book tour? Well, after reading the ravings of Bill Simmons (ESPN’s Sports Guy and all-around humorist), I’m not so sure being a New York Times best-selling author is all it’s cracked up to be:

My body clock is so screwed up that, on consecutive nights, I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. My right thumb has swelled to 140 percent the size of my left thumb. My back is crumbling like blue cheese. My immune system might turn me into Patient X of Swine Flu 2.0 before everything’s said and done.

Because Simmons is a celebrity of sorts, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. He may have had to grind it out, but he was grinding out a nation-hopping, flight-plan-driven barnstorming tour with various people in tow. This was not your covered-wagon book tour where the lone author’s nineteen-year-old Isuzu breaks down outside of Grand Forks in the dead of winter.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: book tour, ESPN