The Author As Magical Bullshit Fairy (a few words on author events)

HMV is back and on course to wrest from Amazon the title of UK’s biggest music retailer. The key, according to HMV, is having artists turn up to stores to play gigs. Well, of course it is. Music is sexy and cool. And there are (extreme) differences between the book and music worlds which make direct comparisons in how to deal with digital and the new marketplace somewhat silly. That said, there’s something here worth looking at.

Traditional author events are boring.

I don’t mean they’re never fun. They can be. But the format is appallingly boring. Why do you go to an author event? To hear the author read, to get them to answer a question and sign a book. To be in the room with them. There’s another ingredient, but we’ll come to that in a sec.

In the meantime, good enough. Why does any of that entail sitting in lines like naughty schoolkids? And then, too, not all authors are very good at reading their own work. Not all bookshops have much of an atmosphere, or great acoustics. A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with — if you’re lucky — bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride. It’s like the worst inter-office cocktail party imaginable. At any moment it seems plausible that Dana and George from accounts will sit down at the piano and start doing really awful show tunes to jolly the whole thing up — and terrible though that would be, it might actually be an improvement.

This is partly because not all bookshops are very well designed, and certainly not all bookshops are well designed for events. It’s very often a case of squeezing everyone in as best you can by shunting stuff out of the way. Although that could also be a plus. Imagine going to a small bookshop event and sitting on unopened boxes of books in a half-circle around the author with the barest necessary amount of light. Award yourself a glass of something halfway decent. Are we talking about an event now? Could be. It’s a health and safety horror, but leave that aside for a moment.

There’s definitely an atmosphere in this new configuration. The key to whether it works has shifted: the burden is now on the author. Can she or he actually deliver? Because if they start by saying “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” and then talk for a few minutes about the traffic on the way in, that atmos is going to fade and a lot of people are going to switch off, start tweeting, or fall asleep in their neighbour’s lap.

So: bring the smoke and mirrors. Okay? If you’re an author, you are the talent. Like the bride at the wedding, you set the tone. If you’re brooding, Byronic and menacing, the event becomes gothic. If you’re sultry and slow, suddenly it’s just before the concert in a jazz bar in New Orleans. If you’re upbeat and puppyish, it’s almost a comedy gig. If you’re nervous, so are they, so transform your nerves into confession. Be intimate. Take your cue from what you’ve written.

Don’t get me wrong. Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing. If those things happen, I hate myself for prolonged periods of time. That is normal. Own it and move on. Get up and do it all again.

So now we have a small group of people in the dark listening to a story from an author who talks to the audience as individuals, as if this is a living room or a bar, as if it’s a bedroom. Now we have an author who reflects the text, who plays to the mood of her own writing, or his, and who acknowledges the reason that everyone is here. It’s not just for the personal experience of being in the room with the writer. The writer is the conduit, the intermediary. This is about touching the magic, the text, the other world, the sublime. Okay: that sounds like magical bullshit, and it is. That is your job tonight. You are the magical bullshit fairy, and you are here to sprinkle your magical bullshit fairydust so that the cardboard box full of unsold copies of Inferno on which they are sitting can take them to another place.

Once upon a time I did an interview, and the interviewer asked me a question I couldn’t answer about a special connection with the place we were in. Then when it was all done, she kissed me on both cheeks and walked away. Turns out there’s a story that I was kissed in my cradle by a Nobel-prize winning poet, and that’s where I get my mojo. I love that. It’s total nonsense. I was sixteen when I met the guy, and there were no smoochies. The important thing is that when this woman kissed me she was taking a fraction of that poet’s blessing directly from my skin. That fraction is what your audience is here for. Deliver, or die.

Right. So there we are. You turn up. You talk your best talk. You’re open, funny, or kind. You’re sad. You’re whatever you are that they show up for. Do not screw with them. You owe them. They’re your living, your vindication. They are your audience. Professionally speaking, and therefore in a very profound way, you do not exist without them.

You talk. You read. Don’t be constrained by the text. Don’t be constrained by one book, even. Read from more than one. You don’t even have to be constrained by your own authorship — bring something along that you love and read that as well as your own stuff, talk about where it hits you. Knit it all together into a tour of your subconscious. Let them in on a secret you don’t mind sharing. It’s just you and thirty people and whoever they tweet, after all. Just the world, and we’re all friends here.

And then you’re done. When it’s over, it’s over. That packing case is cool but it’s not cosy and it’s not a sofa. They can’t smoke in here, they can’t eat, they can’t dance. Let it go. Move to a bar, or vanish mysteriously into the night.

From the author’s point of view, that’s it. But from the bookshop’s, it’s just the beginning. Now they have to sell. Here’s the first thing: do not turn up the lights. Not all the way, at least. You just brought in — and once this is a thing you make money from, you should at least offer to pay for — a magical bullshit fairy. Do not do that and then throw out the magical bullshit fairydust as soon as the last word is spoken. Your audience is partway hypnotised right now. They are in the space. They want to stay there, but they know they have to move on. So tease them. Let them watch it fade away. They will buy books to keep the connection.

Or don’t. If you can, keep them. If you have a good space in your shop, lucky you — let the whole thing roll out into the book stacks and make that feel like the perfect ending, the logical (still magical) extension. Keep the mood, though. Do not shut the wardrobe door, by action or omission, or Narnia disappears and you’re just a bunch of people in a retail space. If you don’t have that luxury, hold your event in a local bar’s upstairs room so that you can bring in a mellow live music act and serve cocktails, even good food. Make the whole thing an Event. Borrow the magic and make a speed dating evening. It doesn’t matter what it is — judge the mood, the people, the book, the time and the day. Be flexible. You might end up with a profitable sideline that sells few books but produces a revenue stream from something else. It might be that your sales are deferred, that you allow people to leave stuff in the shop, collect books or cake or photographs or whatever from the night before — and when they come in, they buy more stuff. Create the connection and the moment, then sell.

But it’s all about the magic. The bullshit fairydust is all, one way or another. That’s what musicians get almost for free, and we in the book world have to work hard for. So please, everyone: don’t make the audience sit in straight lines in bright rooms staring at ugly wallpaper or pseudo-Lit Fest branded backgrounds and feeling as if they’re eight years old in a class with Mr Pusslebreech droning on about Charles Dickens and the Industrial Revolution. That way lies a polar wasteland of unsold books and customers who don’t go to live events.