I had a couple of ideas of moderately weighty posts that I might write, but this latest winter storm had dumped several inches of sleety crap on us, and between clearing the driveway and the kids being home for the day (a true snow day, not just a virtual-school day, hallelujah), I don’t have the energy. In part because I’ve been doing a ton of book publicity events (including recording a radio interview and doing a livestream lecture yesterday), so let’s talk about that.
A Brief History of Timekeeping is my fifth book (now available in both US and UK editions…), so I’ve done a lot of book publicity over the last decade and a bit, in pretty much every possible category. Some aspects have changed a lot, others not so much.
My absolute favorite type of event is the increasingly rare live appearance in a distant place. I don’t sell well enough for publishers to send me on a real book tour, but every now and then I’ve been invited to do something that involves both travel and speaking to a crowd. I greatly enjoy both of those things, so it’s a real treat to get to go someplace and give a lecture about science. Sometimes I fold these in with more academic talks— giving a seminar talk to some college or university department in the afternoon, then a public lecture in the evening. Those trips are exhasuting, but great fun.
It’s a little hard to explain why I like this so much— especially to the kids, both of whom have a bit of stage fright when forced to do presentations in school. I tried to explain to them that I still get nervous before these, particularly when I’m trying a new talk or speaking to a new kind of audience, but that’s part of the draw. There’s a real thrill to speaking live and knowing that you could absolutely go down in flames, but not doing it that’s hard to explain. This is particularly true of events with a Q&A component— I know that my prepared talks are good, but audience questions can come out of absolutely nowhere, and fielding those successfully is a rush.
Slightly more common but also with some of the same without-a-net feeling is the live call-in appearance, like the Cool Science Radio show I did last week. It’s got some of the same immediacy, because I don’t know what the questions will be in advance, and there’s no way to fix it in post. The stakes are a little lower, because if you bomb, you’re at least not physically present for the awkward aftermath, but it’s still a tricky line to walk.
Pre-recorded appearances, on podcasts or radio shows, or the Q&A I did with Scientific American last week are another step down the stakes ladder, because unless the host or interviewer is bizarrely malicious, they can and will tweak things a little to make the whole thing better— editing out any awkward pauses or tech glitches, etc. These can still be a lot of fun, particularly with a good questioner who can poke you out of giving canned responses. The radio show I recorded yesterday, which I think will air this weekend (I’ll link when they post the recording), was a great example— I started into a fairly canned spiel and the host punctured that in a funny way, and then we went on to have a good conversation.
There’s a special sort of subset of these last two, namely the appearance where the host clearly hasn’t read the book, which can be kind of hilariously awkward. I’m not going to name names, here, but I’ve done a few shows over the years where it’s clear two questions in that the host doesn’t know anything that isn’t in the cover copy. These are a really mixed bag— sometimes, it leads to just boring questions that deserve rote answers, other times it leads to completely unexpected questions about the host’s weird personal take on some adjacent subject, and it’s a fun challenge to find an answer to those that drags it back to the actual subject of the book.
The least interesting form of promotional activity, for me at least, is the email Q&A or guest essay. This is far and away the lowest stakes, because it just requires me to generate some more prose, which is a thing that’s always come easily to me. Plus, I can refine my answers and even get Kate to beta-read them to make sure I’m not accidentally saying anything dumb or insulting. These work pretty well, because I’m fairly good at what I do, but they’re nowhere near as exciting as any of the real-time conversational forms, especially the live sort. The only real challenge is finding a way to answer that doesn’t sound cut-and-pasted from the book itself.
Anyway, that’s your glimpse of my world for the moment. Now I’m going to make some more tea, and root for a few more inches of softer snow so I’ll have good skiing once it stops.
Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you’d like to invite me to do promote my book in some forum, you can do that in the comments (though you’d be better off sending me email…)