Scaremeister Koontz Is at Home on the Radio

If it isn’t Rochester, it’s Boston. Or Tampa. Or Toledo. Or Chicago. . . . Like with the Bill Murray character in “Groundhog Day” who keeps encountering the same day over and over, the questions--and answers--begin to take on a familiar ring.

It’s a Morning Drive Radio Tour, and the featured guest needn’t leave home to do one. It’s done over the telephone via a teleconferencing company in Montgomery, Ala., that links up authors with radio stations around the country.

Authors such as Dean Koontz, with a string of bestsellers to his credit and a hot new book out.

“I shower and have a diet cola beside me, and I’m ready to hit the airwaves,” says Koontz in his Newport Beach home at 4 a.m., which, when the three-hour time change is factored in, is prime drive time on the East Coast.

Beginning with “Brother” Wease on WCMF-FM in Rochester, N.Y., at 4:20 a.m., Koontz spends four hours crisscrossing the country, fielding questions from radio show hosts and callers. In all this morning, there are 16 back-to-back radio interviews. (Later in the day, there will be several newspaper phone interviews and two photo shoots, including one for a newspaper in Australia.)

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Tell us, they all say, what “Intensity” is about.

Koontz’s newest suspense thriller is the latest in a string of publishing successes.

Koontz tells Wease in Rochester: “With the new one I tried to write one that would scare even me and also one that would leave you feeling kind of uplifted at the end.”

To that end, “Intensity” (Knopf), is about a young psychologist who risks her life to save the next intended victim of a serial killer who has just murdered the family the young woman was spending the weekend with in the Napa Valley.

The Friday morning radio tour, the second of four Koontz will do this month, is a guaranteed boon to sales.

“The author can reach about 4 million people in one morning,” says publicist Laura Donnelly of Planned Television Arts, the New York City-based book publicity company that arranged Koontz’s drive-time media blitz.

The company has conducted Morning Drive Radio Tours, telephonic newspaper tours and satellite television tours for Howard Stern, Michael Crichton, Jackie Collins, John Grisham and other high-profile authors.

The advantage of a radio tour over a cross-country book tour, Donnelly says, is that the author avoids having to live out of a suitcase for weeks. “It’s very comfortable,” she says. “They have a lot of fun, and they can do it from their bedroom if they want.”

In Koontz’s case, it’s from his book-filled upstairs office in his home in gated Harbor Ridge.

Outside, it is as dark as Koontz’s imagination as he sits down at his glass-topped desk to await his first interview. Down the hall, his wife, Gerda, is asleep.

For Koontz, who resists going on national book tours because they take too much time away from his writing, a radio tour is a godsend.

“You can reach out to people in all these different cities and not spend all your time traveling to accomplish it,” he says before going on the air.

Koontz did his first radio tour last year to promote “Dark Rivers of the Heart”: He did 28 interviews in seven hours.

Koontz has also done satellite television tours, where he sits in a studio and answers questions from television show hosts. They can see him, but he can’t see them. “That makes it rather unnerving,” says Koontz, who prefers radio.

“That’s because 95% of the time people on the radio have read the book; on television, almost never,” he says.

“Beyond that, the on-air personalities on radio tend to be livelier. A lot of them have a very good sense of humor. As a consequence, the interviews are often more fun than television.”

And unlike TV interviews, which are usually taped and edited, he says, “on radio what you have to say goes out there 100% the way you want to say it.”

Despite the repetitive nature of the questions asked during a radio tour, Koontz says time goes by surprisingly fast.

“Because you have to be quick on your feet, you’re focused, and one interview leads right into the next,” he says. “If one interview is not all that wonderful, the next one will perk up. There’s no time to get bored.”

Meanwhile, Fisher, Todd and Erin from WJIM-AM in Salt Lake City are on the line: “Your new book is called ‘Intensity,’ and if you had to encapsulate just enough to get someone interested to crack the book open, what would you tell them?”

“Well,” Koontz says, “I wrote this one because I really wanted to crank up the suspense and scare myself. . . .”