How book talks became the hottest ticket in town
After Michelle Obama’s sell-out tour, and ahead of her own stage debut, Bryony Gordon says authors are the new rock stars
The call, when it came, was a bit of a shock. My agent had a proposition for me, and that proposition involved doing a one-woman show at the Southbank Centre in London to launch my new book. I laughed like a drain for about 30 seconds before pulling myself together for her actual proposition, not this trick one (was it April Fool’s?), but it wasn’t forthcoming. And so I was left to process the fact she was being serious.
“I’m not joking,” she said, in her most un-jokey voice (she has to use it on me quite a lot, especially around deadlines). “A production company that specialises in doing author events has been in touch. It wants you to do a stage show, and I think you should.”
And because I always do what my agent tells me to do (she is wise, and I am not), I now find myself staring down the barrel of my first proper live book event, in an auditorium that seats almost 1,000 people, as if I were some sort of performer and not a writer who spends 98 per cent of her professional life sitting alone, in her bedroom, at her dressing table-cumdesk, in her pants, occasionally – but not always
– going downstairs to talk to her daughter’s guinea pigs for company.
It used to be that writers did just that. They wrote. They wrote and
they wrote and then, sometimes, when their writing was published, they would venture out and do a “book tour”, which would involve heading to some branches of Waterstones or Foyles and their local independent book shop to do the odd signing.
Now, a book tour is a tour, similar to the kind that rock stars go on, only with fewer demands for blue M&MS, whisky, and cocaine (or not any more, in my case).
Earlier this month, Michelle Obama took part in an “intimate conversation” at London’s O2 Arena, which seats a not-so-intimate 15,000. It was one leg of an entire 21-date European tour to discuss her memoir Becoming. Next week, Michael Morpurgo will embark on a series of stage events across the country to celebrate his 75th birthday. Adam Kay, whose book about his life as a junior doctor, This is Going to Hurt, continues to sell squillions of copies a week, is finishing up an extensive national tour as I write. And then there’s Dolly Alderton, author of instant millennial classic Everything I Know About Love, who recently did a tour of UK theatres, which culminated in her excitable fans drinking the bar of the London Palladium completely dry. The success of Alderton’s tour is part of a wider phenomenon, whereby young people are actually eschewing after-work drinks and traditional networking events, in favour of attending talks. We know that many millenials don’t drink any more (in 2015, one in three 16 to 24-year-olds were completely teetotal), so it sort of makes sense that they would rather listen, learn and have the option of socialising (à la Alderton’s fans) after the event. Spaces like the women-only Allbright members club and The Ned in London are becoming known for their impressive roster of talks on everything from entrepreneurship to burnout, as well as author events.
At the weekend, Bret Easton Ellis caused a bit of a hoo-ha by announcing in an interview that millennials don’t read books. Clearly what he actually meant was that millennials don’t read his books. In fact, the publishing industry is in rude health. Last year, the UK book market reached its fourth consecutive year of growth. Philip Jones, editor of The
Bookseller, called the continuing boom “another glitch in the eye of those pundits who thought physical books would go the way of the CD, the DVD, or even vinyl.” The seemingly vacuous world of social media has not killed off books – indeed, it might even have been a factor in its growth, with people following authors in much the same way they might a Kardashian (take the wonderful poet Nikita Gill, who has more than half a million followers on Instagram, where she regularly posts her poetry).
Matt Haig is a quiet, seemingly unassuming man, whose book about his crashing depression and suicidal thoughts, Reasons to Stay Alive, has turned him into a deity in the eyes of many of his readers on social media. He has hundreds of thousands of
‘It’s a new culture… young people get tattoos of favourite quotes’
followers, is himself in the midst of a book tour, and one of his novels is currently being made into a film starring Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins and Kristen Wiig.
It would be fair to say that this is not how Haig saw his life going when he sat down to write. In response to Easton Ellis’s comments, he tweeted at the weekend: “This idea that there are no millennial readers is ludicrous. Am privileged enough to be doing a book tour at the moment. Whole theatres packed with readers. Average age I’d put around 25. There is total passion for books out there. It’s a new book culture … young people write fanfic[tion]. Get tattoos of their favourite quotes. Young people travel the country to see their favourite authors. And more movies and TV shows have their source DNA in a book than ever before. As a retreat from [the] world, books are keeping a generation sane.”
I had seen the writing on the wall, while doing book events at literary festivals such as Hay, Henley, and Cheltenham – a whole phalanx of festivals that now rival the summer music calendar (last year, I found myself “performing” at Latitude and Wilderness, both music festivals that have broadened themselves into “cultural” experiences.)
These mass participation events are not actually anything new in the world of literature. It was Charles Dickens who created the concept of the book tour when, in December 1853, he took to the stage of City Hall in Birmingham and, in front of 2,000 people, performed A Christmas
Carol. A review in the Birmingham
Gazette at the time noted “the high mimetic powers possessed by Mr Dickens”, which “enabled him to personate with remarkable force the various characters of the story, and with admirable skill … The reading occupied more than three hours, but so interested were the audience that only one or two persons left the hall previously to its termination, and the loud and frequent bursts of applause attested the successful discharge of the reader’s arduous task.”
Still, I am no Dickens, and the thought of standing on stage in two weekends’ time, presenting my new book to an auditorium (hopefully) filled with people, fills me with a kind of nervous dread I have not felt since playing a camel in my primary school nativity. But I’m sure stage fright is not much different to writer’s block, and on the plus side, I’ll at least be giving the guinea pigs some much-needed peace.