Metro Pulse/Gamut/Book Tours

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Ah, the glamour of a book tour

by Jeanne McDonald

The Fantasy, circa 1960: The book tour. I'd dreamed about it from the moment I decided to be a writer. In my fantasy it always began with the publisher's party in an exclusive New York hotel or a fancy apartment on the East Side. Something so New York. The literary elite would be there: Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Willie Morris, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer—maybe even a young Shelby Foote. Tom would be wearing his signature white three-piece suit. Norman and Willie, flushed with champagne, would be discussing a piece for Harper's, and Truman would be sashaying around the room, slashing people with his sharp, nasal wit.

I'd be wearing a little black dress and three-inch stiletto heels and a smug but accessible smile. Oh, and sipping coyly from a glass of champagne, even though champagne gives me a headache. At the end of the evening Knopf would offer my agent a six-figure deal for a book that was still in my head. And this would be only the kickoff.

Thirty years later, I actually do get to go on my book tour, but it's not the Great American Novel I've written, it's nonfiction called The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith; and my husband, Fred Brown, is co-author. Truman Capote is long dead, and Willie Morris, alas, has also recently passed away. Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer wouldn't walk across the room to see me, although Shelby might drop a polite note to say he never attends book-launching parties (Shelby is unerringly gracious about saying no).

Friday, May 26, Knoxville: The actual book party, financed by John F. Blair, our publisher, is held at the University Club, whose scarred but elegant entrance columns have recently come down in a remodeling project that makes the venerable old house look more like a Holiday Inn than a faculty club. I've outgrown the little black dress, and we're serving wine instead of champagne. The banquet room is as cold as a meat locker, but by the time about 50 of our friends arrive, things begin to warm up. The wine disappears, and we spring for four more bottles at $15 each. Sue Ludwig, manager of the UT Book Store, sets things up, and we're off to a great start—48 books in two hours, sold as fast as we can write our names. The hors d'oeuvres are gone, and somebody has complained that we need yet more wine, but all in all, it's been a successful party.

Thursday, June 1, Knoxville: Borders hosts our first local signing. We sell 16 books in an hour, but we quickly learn that writing a book about serpent handlers makes us vulnerable to all sorts of weird religious fringes. A man who has been circling us all evening finally comes forward. He's dressed in a navy blue jacket with a polka-dotted handkerchief flaring from the breast pocket, a pocket also stuffed with pens, sharpened pencils, and a small spiral notebook, as if he might have to record something important at any given moment. He tells us he is God's special messenger and begins a litany of miracles he's been instrumental in bringing about—most notably, the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Gulf War. To stop his sermon, we stand up to leave, and he hands us a book to sign. He's actually buying one.

Sunday, June 4, Middlesboro, Ky.: Flush with success, we're off on the first day of the tour, driving through countryside green and juicy with spring. Along Highway 25E, almost every yard is set up with folding tables and rugs piled high with artificial flowers, dolls, glassware, and children's clothes. Everybody in Middlesboro today must be going to garage sales, or, in the case of serpent handlers, to a 1-to-3 p.m. church service, because almost nobody comes to Bookland at the mall except for a Baptist preacher who tells us he believes every word in the Bible, but not the part about picking up serpents. We sell one book. One. The hem of the fantasy begins to unravel and flap in the wind.

Tuesday, June 6, Louisville, Ky.: We inquire at the Marriott downtown, but it's $102 a night, and our lodging limit is $70. The woman at the desk sends us to a Days Inn next to the interstate, which I turn down flat after I check out the barbed wire fence, the security guard in the parking lot (in broad daylight) and the adjacent pawn shop, liquor store and gas station. Back at the Marriott, I talk the woman down to $82 a night. We'll pay the difference.

We're scheduled for a TV interview with "Good Morning, Kentuckiana," at 5:20 a.m. Do viewers really get up that early? We struggle out of bed at 4:30, catch a taxi from the hotel to WHAS-TV. Where's the limousine I dreamed about? Where's the tour director? I think we ended up with Seinfeld's agent. The morning is pitch black and rainy, and the station has instructed us to ring the bell to be let in, but there's no bell in the front of the building. Fred circles the block while I huddle in the doorway, trying to keep the wind from uprooting my hair. Finally, the security guard across the street notices me and offers the use of his telephone. Eventually, we rouse somebody at WHAS. We get maybe five minutes on air, a plug for tonight's book signing, and then we walk back to the hotel for a 10 a.m. radio interview with WHAS radio.

At 7 p.m. a small crowd is gathered at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers. Among the group are a practicing serpent handler, a woman doing research on the Shakers, and Peter Smith, religious reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The person who attracts (and frightens) me most is Richard, a burley man wearing jeans, flip-flops, a sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and lots of tattoos. Because of his bulk and his shaved head, he reminds me of Mr. Clean. When he later comes forward to buy a book, I discover that he's not only sweet, he's extremely knowledgeable about the Bible. "Jesus Christ," he tells me, "means the anointed one."

Wednesday, June 7, Lexington, Ky.: We find a hotel and head for our noon-time interview at WLEX-TV. Back at the hotel we have a message from Blair that our 1 p.m. radio interview with the University of Kentucky has been preempted because of a big football recruitment story. More flapping.

At 7 p.m. we're scheduled to sign books at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, centerpiece of the Mall at Lexington Green, and it's crowded with people. We sell only eight books, but meet George, a seminary student who has also done research on the serpent handlers. He knows Ruby, a serpent handler at Jolo, whose grandmother used to bark to chase away demons.

Thursday, June 8, Huntington, W.Va.: Because we have to be in Charleston early in the morning, we don't book a hotel room in Lexington. We find a waterfront park, where we read for a few hours on a shady bench, but the temperature climbs past 90 degrees and we're sweating and feeling displaced. A black car driving around the area looks like it's dispensing drugs. We wash our faces in the public restroom and then head for our signing at the Renaissance Book Company. Although we sell only six copies, we meet some fascinating people—among them, Homer Mays, a gentleman in his 80s who collects—of all things—John Deere tractors. He has 12 of them right now, he says, one a rice planter. Homer has traveled around the world and is now planning a 12-day trip to the North Pole.

Afterwards, we drive to Charleston and find a hotel only a couple of blocks from the TV station where Fred has to do a 6:30 a.m. interview.

Friday, June 9, Charleston, W.Va.: It's 5 a.m. Fred wakes up moaning, "I want to go home." So do I. I'm worried about my garden and the fish in our pond, but basically, I'm just exhausted. I tell Fred that real celebrities take uppers when they feel like this, but he ignores me and turns on the shower. Somehow I wake myself up to watch him on WKOK-TV. He looks great. We're blasé about interviews by now. It's just when I accidentally glimpse myself on a monitor that I get panicked.

The TV people like Fred so much that they send him on to their radio station for another interview. He comes back pumped with excitement, but we deflate when Sunny, our publicist, telephones to say that Publishers Weekly says that our book is good, but Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain is the definitive book on snake handling. Library Journal, however, gives us a good review, and that soothes our shriveling egos.

At 10 a.m. we do a radio interview from the hotel room with the Kingsport Times, and at 3:20 p.m., we go for a radio interview with WCHS.

Later, we plan to sleep a little, but the air conditioning goes out in our room, and it's 91 degrees outside. We climb into the car to explore the city, and when we return to clean up, the AC unit is pumping out mercifully cool air. Rejuvenated, we leave to face our ultimate disaster. The Taylor Bookstore on Capitol Street in Charleston has a small café and a charming art gallery, but the manager has gone home, and a sulky girl from the café begrudgingly sets up our table. Anybody who's done a signing in a bookstore can identify with the embarrassment and humiliation of being totally ignored by the clientele—and in this case, the management. We sell nothing, not a single book. A few people come in and order coffee but walk by our table as if we are invisible. At 7 o'clock we give up. As we leave, the young man at the cash register (he can speak) says that Friday evenings are their slowest nights. It turns out he's actually a manager, but hasn't bothered to come over to say hello to us. Flap, flap.

Saturday, June 10, Bluefield, W.Va.: Devastated by our Charleston experience, we arrive early at the mall in Bluefield for our signing at Waldenbooks. To kill time, we take a photo in a booth to see if we look as bad as we feel. We do. Worse. We sell only three books, but we have a surprisingly good time. Folks in Bluefield are exceedingly gracious. One of our sales is to a young girl who is engaged to a man from a snake-handling family. She's worried that he might one day insist that she join the church or have their future children join, and she wants to read the book to get information about the Signs Following religion. A man named Doug regales us with stories about snakes, including the time his daddy put a chain around a snake's neck (how?) and called it his "guard snake."

We drive home to be assured by our publishers that the tour has indeed been a success, that we garnered a lot of publicity, and our appearances would have a residual effect. We love our publishing staff—Sunny Nelson, Anne Waters, Carolyn Sakowski, Steve Kirk, and Ed Southern. They believe in our book, and they will do anything in their power to promote it. On the tour we sold 102 books—48 of which were sold at the kick-off party.

We've had other signings since Bluefield, and more are scheduled in the fall—Charlottesville, Falls Church and Virginia Beach, Va.; Frankfort, Ky.; Greenville, Tenn., Chattanooga. But in Nashville, we got a big boost. We were late because of a scheduling mix-up, and Grammy-award-winning singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams and Knoxville singer R.B. Morris' agent Dub Cornett actually waited an hour to hear us talk about our book. Lucinda's presence gave me hope. I still have some black spiked heels, and I can always buy another little black dress in a larger size.