While Julie Bosman seems only to have discovered that publishers are trying to tout select authors early on with pre-publication tours (it certainly helped for Charles Frazier and Dan Brown) the real meat of this New York Times story is how until January, when Steven Hall toured the midwest and northwest to meet Barnes & Noble and Powell’s, the author of THE RAW SHARK TEXTS had never been to America. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s America, there are beaches there,'” he said, shrugging.
Canongate and Grove/Atlantic have high, high hopes for this debut – already sold in 30 countries and here in the States, slated for a roughly 100,000-copy first printing. And the pre-pub tour will no doubt help Hall’s visibility. “I can go back to 70 employees in my store and say I talked to the publisher, and that will motivate them to hard sell,” said Russ Wilbur, the store manager of the Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis, at a dinner where he was seated next to Hall. “I’m telling you, that’s the book business. That’s how it works.” Never mind the co-op and $150,000 marketing plan, but Hall is crossing his fingers. “There’s a big part of me that’s saying, careful – not a single book has been sold,” he said. “Everyone loves me now, but if the book doesn’t sell, I’ll never be able to show my face in America again.”