Los Angeles, LA84 Foundation, Book signing: Sunday, October 24, 2010
Book tours are grueling. Adversarial people show up. Nobody shows up (well, not really). Your hand gets cramped signing lots of books. You wish your hand got cramped signing more books. Back and forth. The usual, except that the national book tour -- maybe like bookstores -- is now pretty rare, soon to be extinct, they say.
So, it has been a wonderful and a little sad but sweet privilege to be sent out by Knopf on a proper book tour for NATIVE AMERICAN SON. I am acutely aware that even having a hardcover, beautifully designed and edited non-fiction book to my credit is, in 2010, rather like owning the last Model T to roll off the Ford assembly line.
This Christmas, so the news feed says, will be the "tipping point" when e-readers may overtake books themselves as holiday gifts. Last weekend, at the Kingston, NY Barnes & Noble, as I headed to the back of the store for my scheduled book signing, I passed a booth right inside the front door with an employee demonstrating the Nook. Hedging their book bets.
In my next blog I'll list the highlights of this official, publisher-sponsored, book tour. As it might be the last I'll ever do, I'll try to bury it with honors -- while I enjoy every single minute.
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