Going Live: A Rant on the Current State of Live Book Events

Geoff Herbach, author of the novel The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg, spoke at a Henderson Writers’ Group (HWG) meeting here in Las Vegas this week on the topic of narrative choice. His novel, an epistolary collection of suicide letters, uses humor, anger, and personal exploration that develop into a character study of the disturbed T. Rimberg.

I find it fascinating to hear fiction authors discuss how and why they develop their books and characters. How much is them and how much is truly fiction and, how fiction can, and often does, serve as a way to bridge reality and what ends up on the page.

To be honest, I’m also surprised at how few people turn up at author events. We have a rather large writing community here in the Las Vegas Valley. My best estimate is there are at least 300-400 writers here, over a hundred of them members of HWG. Yet, only about 25 were in attendance for Herbach.

Our library system, like many around the country, offers a lot of author events throughout the year, including monthly meet the author nights. These events, with both local and big name authors, are usually poorly attended even when the author is a “name” people know.

This is an ongoing reality here in Las Vegas. I’ve participated in many meet the author nights as a panelist and as an audience member and the low turnout is an ongoing phenomenon. And, this isn’t limited to libraries. I’ve attended author book signings, both as a buyer and a signer, at big chain bookstores and small, indy places and unless the signer is a huge, every household named author, no one really shows up.

Has it always been this way and I’m just now in the current generation to see it, as if it were new? We writers are raised with the author mystic that all events are well attended, but almost everyone I know who’s published a book has had similar signing and speaking experiences.

Now, I’ll admit that my view of signing events was formed in a skewed way. I lived in Manhattan for more than a decade and even the unknown writer events were well attended. I remember sitting on the floor of a bookstore listening to Joyce Carol Oats read from her latest novel a few years ago. I couldn’t get near A Different Light bookstore back when Greg Louganis was signing his autobiography.

Of course, times have changed. It’s cheaper to purchase on Amazon than in person. This is a relatively new change, but in real time, it’s been about eight years now since the discount, online book sellers came on the scene and wiped out the live, mom and pop experience. Depending on where you look for information, there are somewhere between 30K-300K books published in the United States annually. At the same time, similar reports come out frequently about the demise of readers. Have we burned out the reading public? Since just about everyone is a published author now, has the allure of meeting someone who has published a book diminished so much that we can’t get people out of their homes for an event?

Understanding this reality has me, like a lot of authors, rethinking live marketing events. Here’s a suggestion: If the audience won’t come to you, why not go to the audience? Herbach formed a literary project that stages live performance readings in bars. He admitted he wasn’t selling that many more books, but he was having a lot more fun than the usual signing events.