A Strange Death

An interesting book. And from the author... Jun. 23, 2005 13:19 Essay: Why bother writing books? (JERUSALEM POST) By HILLEL HALKIN I've just come back from a book tour in America. It's called a "book tour," it turns out, because of all the airplane flights and hotel rooms that have to be booked for it. Not that it didn't have its moments. In a Barnes & Noble's in Manhattan I read from a new book of mine for a turnout that filled every seat. A big part of my audience was rounded up for the occasion by my 91-year-old mother-in-law, who was proud of the poster with her son-in-law's picture in the window. Before I had left at the evening's end this had already been removed, in confirmation of Andy Warhol's well-known prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for at least 15 minutes. Elsewhere, the crowds were not as large. In Chicago, where I was scheduled at a university bookstore in the middle of final exam week, I appeared before an audience of 10, which included a cousin of my wife's, an old high-school friend, and the store's manager. Two people bought books - a reasonable percentage that almost covered the taxi fares. And then there was the night I arrived at my New York hotel after a grueling flight from Los Angeles. At the front desk was a note from my publishing house. I had half-an-hour, it said, to get to a broadcasting studio where I had been slotted into a Jewish talk show. I rushed, sweaty and unshaven, to the address given me, where I found myself in a recording studio in a West Side apartment, in the room next to which two little children lay fast asleep on the floor. My host, the father of five such progeny, informed me that on a good night he had half-a-million listeners. After we had chatted over the air about my book, he took telephone calls. The one caller to pick up the phone was someone anxious to know my opinion on disengagement. Before I returned to Israel we held a post-mortem at the publisher's. "You know," I said, "this was pointless. We wasted my time and your money. What did we do this for?" My publicist looked at my editor. My editor looked at my publicist. I had the impression that no author had ever asked them such a question before. "We didn't want to disappoint you," my editor said. SO now I knew: Book tours are designed for authors who love flying from city to city to entertain small groups of people who have been unable to obtain theater tickets or bridge club invitations for the evening. It would be cruel to disappoint them. What's for sure is that low-budget book tours don't sell books. But then, what does? Not good reviews. (I can vouch for that, because my books have had plenty of them.) Not the Internet either, which is useful for buying books that you've already heard about, but not for discovering ones you haven't. And certainly not bookstores, 80% of which belong to big chains that wouldn't display a new book prominently, even if it were a lost volume of the