Last week, I attended the Leipzig Book Fair.
Now, the Leipzig Book Fair isn't as big as the Frankfurt Book Fair, nor is it as important as the one in London. But still, it took me more than twenty minutes to find the exit.
While desperately looking for a way out, and being surrounded by readers, booksellers, publishers, underaged boys and girls (about whom, more later), and a fair amount of journalists, I had ample time to contemplate the miracles of book promotion.
There are seven miracles of book promotion, but the first and foremost miracle reveals to all of us that promoting a book is an act of masochism. It is something that can be compared to, let’s say, playing hockey.
Almost all authors have been subjected to spending time with journalists who are unable to pronounce their names. But plenty of us have been locked in a room with a journalist who has no clue as to the identity of the person in front of him. No idea of their name, book title, anything. Maybe they even harbor a vague suspicion on the question of the author's gender.
No sane author expects a journalist to come prepared to an interview, but you ought to know the name of the person who you are going to ask, “What does your mother think of all this?” Isn’t that Journalism 101? The author can say, “Well, my mother, thank you for asking, my mother thinks that I should stop wasting my time and find a well educated woman with a well educated bank account. I believe Kafka said something like, ‘There’s only ony alternative to marriage: booze’.” But in reality, the author remains polite always, which is another word for boring.
At the book fair in Leipzig, I was remindend of the documentary Our Brand is Crisis, which I saw in New York shortly before leaving for Europe. It is about a team of American spin doctors who help a Bolivian presidential candidate get elected. Very funny, important and, yes, instructive.
An author on book tour is his own spin doctor. The sad thing is that often, authors stop being authors and become just spin doctors.
There is a case to be made for obscurity.
Now to the underaged boys and girls. The bookfair in Leipzig doesn’t attract enough visitors, so the state of Sachsony-Anhalt has made it mandatory for all schools in the state to send their pupils to the fair.
This is another way of ending book promotion as we know it.