BOOKING A TOUR

It was all Jacqueline Susann’s fault. She took millions of readers around the world into The Valley of the Dolls.

And launched a style of selling books that has since taken hundreds of writers into the valley of the book promotion tour.

Jacqueline Susann (later followed by another hugely successful Jackie as in Collins) was the first popular author to hit the TV and radio talkback circuit to shamelessly plug her books.

I remember seeing her, spruiking her wares, on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show. “Serious” author Truman “In Cold Blood” Capote, a bitchy literary queen, was so incensed by Susann’s calculated commercialism that he referred to her on the same Carson show as looking like “a truck driver in drag”.

Susann sold millions of books, especially in paperback in airports. Now Grisham and Courtenay and Cornwall and Smith have walls of titles in bookstores and airport outlets everywhere.

And, no matter how famous, or how rich, their typewriter pounding has made them, they all do the talk circuit on publication. Most publishers actually write the commitment into the contract when signing the author up to write a new book.

So if this is Wednesday it must be Adelaide. This week I took a week’s leave from 3AW to “do” the interview circuit. Radio, newspapers, magazines and television.

Over about ten days I would have done between thirty and forty interviews plus book signings in bookshops in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.

A Current Affair, Bert Newton on Good Morning Australia and covered reams of paper in newspaper interviews. The book – The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch – also took me into the bowels of enemy radio territory.

In Melbourne: Nova, Mix, Gold, Nightline on my own 3AW (from which I was sacked as host several years ago) and even my first foray into the hallowed halls of the ABC for a studio interview with a gentlemanly and erudite Jon Faine.

Radio 6PR in Perth and ABC stations in the Northern Territory, Canberra and points east. Publishers love you to be interviewed on the ABC. They refer to ABC listeners as a 24-carat AB demographic. Which means they buy books. I also discovered that ABC interviewers seem to have read the book before they talk to you – or at least parts of it.

Let’s not delude ourselves here. If radio and TV interviewers read every book that came over the transom they wouldn’t have enough time to host their programmes.

Once, Jacki Weaver, a voracious reader at any time, was selected to judge a major and prestigious Australian book prize. She read 55 books in 52 days. It’s no wonder our marriage lasted so long. She was thrilled that I could happily sleep with the light on so she could guiltlessly read through the night.

In store book signings are an interesting experience – especially when HardieGrant, the publishers, have had made up life-sized cardboard cutouts of a bearded broadcaster.

I walked into a bookstore in Toorak last weekend and when I spoke a female customer with her back to me jumped like a startled rabbit. As she pointed out, it felt like I was omnipotent and everywhere. In front of her was this towering cardboard effigy. Behind her the real thing.

Funny things happen. A person will shuffle up through the queue and take the just-bought book out of the plastic bag for a personal signature. You ask: “Who shall I say it’s to?” And they’ll say: “To me”.

As gently as possible you try to find out who exactly “me” is.

It’s an old author’s tour story but a golden one that is worth repeating. It is true because my mate Bob Rogers was the MC at the book signing in Sydney.

Monica Dickens, granddaughter or maybe great granddaughter of Charles – and a famous writer in her own right – was visiting Sydney.

A woman thrust a copy of her latest book in front of her and Ms Dickens asked her for her name.

“Emma Chisett”. The author diligently started to write “To Emma….” when the agitated customer said “ emma chisett, emma chisett”.

Monica Dickens’ dulcet and cultivated English accent had missed the Australian idiom. The woman was actually asking a question: “How much is it, how much is it”?

The worst thing about in store book signings comes under the category of what I call “I took my harp to the party and nobody asked me to play”. It is every author’s dread unless you are Bryce Courtney.

They set up a table with a glass and a pitcher of water, an expensive pen, and a pile of books to be sold and signed. And you sit down, feeling self-conscious and think what if nobody comes past and buys one?

The trick then, if there is a buying oasis, is to fervently sign books anyway. “That’s Life, Derryn Hinch….. that’s life, Derryn Hinch, that’s….”

According to those in the trade who know “a signed book is a sold book”. I tell people I’ll give them one of the rare books – one of the Unsigned ones.

The other gossip I have learned, as part of this week of nationwide literary tap-dancing, is that 65% of books in Australia are bought by women and that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful sales tools.

“I’m reading such-and-such right now and loving it. You must read it”.

Books also walk out of stores after authors have appeared on Bert or Kerri-Anne or Rove.

When I was hosting “Midday” on the Nine Network I used to often hear a story from publicists that I thought had to be apocryphal. They claimed book sales would boom within minutes of an author being on the programme.

It turned out that wives would see the interview and call their husbands and ask them to buy the book during their lunch-hour.

It is a crazy, unpredictable, and exhausting business. But I must love it. This week I am about to sign a contract for my tenth book.

May 9, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004