Lessons from the master of the bestseller: The book tour

I was profiling Irving Wallace some years ago at a time when his books were the No. 1 bestsellers in the world.

He wrote “The Robe,” “The Chapman Report,” “The Prize,” “The Fan Club” and a lot of others, the titles of which all began with the word “The.” It was his belief that if a title didn’t begin with “The,” it would never sell.

I was with him in San Francisco when he was out hustling his latest novel, “The Word.” When an unprepared interviewer asked him what it was about, he replied wearily, “Jesus.” Good enough.

He didn’t like doing book tours but agreed to take on this one, which he regretted thereafter until the day he died. It began nicely enough with a pleasant room in the Fairmont Hotel and a continuous supply of caviar and Diet Coke, both of which he consumed on a regular basis.

The tour began to fall apart during an interview at a local radio station, conducted by a woman who began the session with “Tell me about your book.”

Although generally good-natured, Wallace had a huge ego, which was immediately affected by the knowledge that the woman had not read his book. Not even the back-page summary.

“Which part would you like to talk about?” he asked, ready to trap her.

“You choose!” she snapped in a combat mode. And the whole thing went downhill from there.

The next stop was a large bookstore on Market Street. The clerk assigned to accompany him sat Wallace at a table piled with books, facing 50 chairs. During the hour he was there, not one of them was occupied. Absolutely no one came to buy a book.

To make matters worse, the clerk, one of those smirky kids who figures things out, had analyzed Wallace’s books and determined that there was a sex scene like every 39 pages. Informed of the kid’s conclusion, Wallace simply glared and said nothing. I never checked it out, having lost interest in literary sex scenes after reading “Forever Amber” in high school. Nothing could ever match the heat generated between Amber and the stable boy.

I was thinking about Wallace the other day in Reno. I have a new book out called “Barkley: A Dog’s Story” and am currently doing a somewhat modest book tour. In Reno, I was at the Sundance Bookstore. Before me, there were about 25 white plastic chairs. They remained empty for the entire time I was there.

As it turned out, I sold five books, three of which I purchased myself to give to relatives who lived in the area. I thought that I had sold one more to a man in overalls who stood in front of me leafing through the book but then made a sour

face and moved on. It’s just as well. I don’t sell to men in overalls.

There is a quality of melancholy to sitting alone at a little table with your ego and a year’s work piled in front of you and no one paying a lot of attention. Some authors have no trouble selling themselves, but I’m not a born book hustler.

I sit there like an abandoned dog, waiting for someone to buy the book, at which time I sign it. But unlike most authors, who just write their names and let it go at that, I feel compelled to write something more, like, “To Sally Jones, this is a book about a final journey we took with our dog and it’s sure swell having you here and I hope that you, and perhaps other members of your family, a brother maybe or an uncle, enjoy the book as much as ...” ad infinitum, ad nauseam. By the time I finish composing, the buyer is tired of the whole thing and has snapped up the book and stalked off, while others who had been waiting to have their books signed have similarly abandoned the premises.

“Next time,” my wife says, “maybe you should write shorter.”

They’re just lucky I don’t lose control and go into a rant about the war in Iraq, immigration, the price of gasoline or a White House occupied by Alfred E. Neuman. I’m a trained writer. Show me a blank page or a blank screen and I am overtaken with an almost ecumenical compulsion to fill it.

Despite the fact that the numbers of those who appear might occasionally be small, I always sit there the full hour, amusing myself by humming and scratching and sometimes reading what I wrote and trying to figure out why I wrote it.

My sense of commitment is equaled only by a scene in that Laurel and Hardy movie in which they are still on sentry duty in their trenches years after World War I has ended because no one had told them the war was over.

I hope when this book tour is over someone will tell me. Dying at a table before rows of empty chairs is not my idea of the way to go. I need an audience.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.