Pre-Tour Day #5

I'd been planning on updating this blog every day of the tour, but the pace has been such that I need to catch up to give you a retrospective sense of the experience.

This concept of promoting a new author months ahead of the pub date isn't exactly new in the book biz, but I gather that these pre-tours have worked well for Minotaur recently; with the marketplace already crowded it's smart to get out ahead whenever you can. I've come away really awestruck by my publishers' faith in this novel, needless to say.

Day #5 involved a drive from Portland to Seattle and then a visit to Amazon.com. It struck me as fitting that there's actually a Starbucks on one of the higher floors, doubling as an informal gathering place for meetings like this. Amazon is really keen on multimedia promotions so it was intriguing tossing around ideas about how I might leverage my "platform" (today it seems all writers are required to have a platform" an odd concept that embraces the idea of life expertise, general media savvy, and a willingness to do some of your own heavy lifting in the marketing department. No longer is it enough to write a fine book). We also visited a great indie store, Elliot Bay Books before heading to dinner at the top-notch Dahlia Lounge. We had a larger group (and fortunately a private room) for this one.

As was the case in Portland the night before, I was implored to perform my rude version of a moose call to demonstrate my Maine bona fides as we were leaving the restaurant. Seattle must be quite a worldly (or jaded city when you can stand on a street corner and wail like a moose and very few passers-by give you a second look.

Pre-Tour Day #4

After a brief return to Maine, I'm on the road again to do advance promotion for The Poacher's Son. This morning I'm flying from Portland (ME) to Portland (OR). Once I'm on the ground I'm making a pilgrimmage to Powell's, one of the world's great independent bookstores. Then it's off to dinner with booksellers and librarians at Wildwood. I'll let you know how it goes. But yes, this is a wild ride.

Red Deer Invasion

Most Americans don't realize that a lot of birds they see every day — starlings, house sparrows, and most swans — are not native to North America, but were brought here by well-meaning dunces a century ago. Scientific American tells the story:

The Acclimatization Society released some hundred starlings in New York City’s Central Park in 1890 and 1891. By 1950 starlings could be found coast to coast, north past Hudson Bay and south into Mexico. Their North American numbers today top 200 million. As bird-watcher Jeffrey Rosen put it in a 2007 New York Times article, “It isn’t their fault that they treated an open continent much as we ourselves did.”

In Maine, we might now be facing a red deer invasion thanks (or no thanks) to a careless venison farmer. The red deer are unlikely to do to white-tails what starlings did to bluebirds, but the clueless Levant farmer who unwittingly let them loose should be held financially responsible for the renegade round-up.

As an aside: It tells you something about my home state that this story is currently the most read article in the weekend edition of the Bangor Daily News.

Desperate Times Call for Hopeful Measures

I met Robin Agnew who owns Aunt Agatha's, a small mystery bookshop in Ann Arbor, on my recent pre-tour, and she gave me some great recommendations about crime writers I need to read, as well as lots of wise advice about building a career as an author. She also has some interesting insights on the innovative steps everyone in the book business — publishers and booksellers alike — are taking to sustain the industry now. For instance, Minotaur is sending me out on the road to build buzz for the The Poacher's Son even before the novel drops—instead of after it hits the shelves, as was traditionally the case. Meanwhile, Aunt Agatha's is refocusing its efforts around author events and used-book sales.

Robin's description of me at our dinner as "very nice, very excited, and somewhat overwhelmed" is accurate, I'd have to say. At least the "excited and overwhelmed" parts. I'm in no position to pronounce on my own niceness, but I'm glad she thought me so.

Coyotes Kill Canadian Singer

There have been several truly horrific stories in the news the past few days, and I haven't been watching enough television to know whether this story has received much coverage in the U.S., but I wanted to blog about it because my second novel, currently in progress, deals a bit with coyotes and how the Maine Warden Service deals with them.

Like nearby Nova Scotia, Maine is home to the larger eastern subspecies of Canis latrans. These animals have been much vilified by deer hunters who have seen them, rightfully, as efficient competitors. So over the years I've heard lots of horror stories — many far-fetched — about the viciousness of coyotes. But the truly terrible experience of 19-year-old Taylor Josephine Stephanie Luciow, who was attacked and killed by two coyotes last week while hiking on Cape Breton Island, has certainly made me question some of my assumptions. I'll be a bit more cautious the next time I encounter a coyote in the woods, for instance.

But I'm thinking also of the politics here. Isolated incidents shouldn't drive shifts in wildlife management policy (and it's still unclear, as best I know, whether one of the animals was rabid), but I wouldn't be surprised at all if sportsmen and their lobbyists use the tragedy in Nova Scotia for reinstituting Maine's coyote-snaring program, for example.

In any case, you can't help but feel for Luciow's family as they grapple with the sad and surreal experience of losing a daughter this way.