An early lesson for writers is that your book’s publication day is only lodged as important in your own mind. Your publishers, job done, are already onto their next books. Chances of reviews are hot for a while then grow cooler as days pass. You want a party? Hold your own.
I was teaching at a language school in London for my first novel’s launch: it was a good marketing opportunity for the school, which needed events for its overseas students, so that book did have a good party.
Most dramatic was the New York launch for In Search of the Divine Mother. The reading was in Lenox Hill Bookstore, and a grand launch party was given in a home in Gracie Square. That morning had seen a meeting at the top of Harper Collins HQ, their external legal counsel in attendance. The book was a biography of an Indian holywoman, and one of her devotees was an attorney who had taken on the Scientology movement and won. The holywoman wanted the book stopped and Harper Collins decided they could not afford a legal challenge. They withdrew the title from publication and I gave the bookstore reading from a manuscript, the copies still in their cartons and locked in a back room. Enough of a protest built up that the publisher decided to publish ‘on moral grounds’. Reviews has been spiked, and when the book came out later no legal challenge ensued.
For my biography of J.S.Haldane, Suffer & Survive, I went multidisciplinary. I was lecturing at Plymouth, and folk in the university joined in so there was not only my own launch lecture, but dive expeditions, photo exhibitions, museum showings, a host of other lectures, and a musical evening where the orchestra players faced a vast aquarium that had staves drawn across it, each player fixed on the eye of a fish and playing the notes of its movements across the staves.
Music came in for the launches of my novel on music and the Holocaust too (JSS Bach, now rewritten as The Cellist of Dachau). First at the University of Hull, and then at the National Trust’s Sutton House in Hackney, I linked up with a cellist, giving an illustrated talk and reading between movements of J.S. Bach’s First Cello Suite. They were great events, lots of books were sold, though it took years and many emails before any of the money made its way back to me.
Books by big names with big advances get publishing house launches as part of a PR push, and I know some indie presses cover costs with authors who can bring in a big and loyal local crowd. I enjoyed the tale of a writer launching in his pub, a couple of heavies in attendance to easily persuade the drinkers each to invest in a copy.
My novel Slippery When Wet had a launch reading in the gardens of the British Consulate in Harare – where no copies were available for anybody to buy.
And on August 6th I was in the Austrian Alps, at a splendid musical soirée, where I completely forgot this was also the day when my Lessons from Cruising was being launched into the world.
No books got a mention or were even thought about and I enjoyed the evening a lot.
The depth of experience in the piece is equalled only by the deftness of the self deprecating humour.