Pre-Sell Tour Day #2

Sorry for the belated update, but this tour is more of a whirlwind than I expected! The dinner at Fore Street was fantastic, and I enjoyed seeing familiar faces from my days at Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Thank you to everyone who attended. You really did launch my tour auspiciously. In some ways it was like having a bottle of champagne broken over my bow.

On Tuesday I flew from Portland to Charlotte to Minneapolis. Then I spent the afternoon with my publicist visiting bookstores in the Twin Cities in the pouring rain (saw the Mary Tyler Moore statue!). We handed out galleys of The Poacher's Son and tried to leave a positive impression in three minute intervals.

Booksellers are besieged with authors wanting attention (I know this from the day job), so the only way to go about this business is with utter humility. I think busy people are so used to being bullshitted that they appreciate actual candor when they encounter it. I say this as a busy person.

Dinner at Kincaid's in St. Paul was also excellent (I recommend the filet) and I was interested that the conversation was so different from the night before. We really grappled with the character of Mike's dad (the poacher of my title) and with my less obvious literary influences (e.g. Tim O'Brien, who mentored me at Bread Loaf.) I found the discourse frank and engaging. No punches were pulled or dodged. (Again, I never make a point of pretending to know more than I do, because one is always found out in the end.) So I felt like I learned a lot from my dinner companions, and thank you all for humoring me. The Minnesota booksellers very graciously had me sign copies of their galleys. I've never done that before, and I have to say it was the first moment when I actually felt like a book author.

Now I'm off to Dinner #3. Stay tuned.

Pre-Sell Tour Day #1

OK. I'm about to venture out for my first dinner on the "Paul Doiron Poacher's Son Portland-to-Portland" pre-sell book tour. (I need to get T-shirts made.) For those not familiar with this concept—I wasn't familiar with this concept a month ago—I am headed across the country to talk with booksellers about my forthcoming novel, The Poacher's Son. The book won't be published for many moons (or at least six moons, I think). But the goal for the contemporary author is to interest booksellers in your novel well in advance of the actual publication date. So you'd like to meet people and talk with them about how and why you wrote your magnum opus, and if it's any good, hopefully they'll have questions and want to engage in a dialogue. If you can be charming, I suppose, that's a plus. But having been a bookseller myself, I know the bullshit detector is off the scale in the industry, so my goal is simply to be myself and pray that's enough.

Fortunately for me, I'm starting in Portland, Maine, at one of my favorite restaurants, with a friendly group of bookstore owners that includes people I've known for years. It's like the Romper Room of book tour introductions. Or so I hope.

Slow Blogging Alert

I've been gearing up for what's called a "pre-sell tour." Even though The Poacher's Son won't be published until next spring (April 27, 2010 to be exact), I'm headed off across the country to introduce myself and my book to audiences of potential readers. This is terra incognita for me in more ways than one (for instance, I look forward to touring Ann Arbor on Tuesday since I've never visited that city before). I intend to blog about some of my experiences from the road, but in the meantime I've got the January issue to put to bed over at the day job. I'll keep you posted. 

A Maine Woods National Park?

George Neavoll, the former editorial pages editor of the Portland Press Herald, has a persuasive new column arguing for the creation of Maine Woods National Park. The idea isn't a new one. In fact a group called RESTORE: The North Woods has been pushing this idea for well over a decade. The concept acquired some urgency in the early 2000s when vast swatches of Maine's northern forest were sold by their longtime landowners (typically Maine-based paper companies) to outside and sometimes foreign investors and developers. Then the issue died down again as environmentalists worked to protect hundreds of thousands of acres under conservation easements. Now the controversy has begun to rage again with Plum Creek Timber's plan, recently approved by the state of Maine, to develop a thousand house lots and create two large resorts on the shores of Moosehead Lake.

Ironically, the prospect of massive resorts going up outside Greenville might be the push the national park needs to finally get going. Plum Creek has mobilized environmentalists to fight even harder against future development, and my guess is that after all the new homes and resorts are built around Greenville, you might see that community welcoming the park idea since being the gateway to a certified natural treasure could pay additional economic dividends. All those new homeowners might actually like the idea of living just outside the Maine Woods National Park, just as the people of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Bozeman, Montana, enjoy their proximity to Yellowstone.