Web Salvation: Running To The Internet Tour

Using the Net and the Web, and thanks to Slashdot and its readers, I skirted around the mass-marketing conventional wisdoms of modern publishing with my new book. So the story continues with "Web Salvation: The Running To The Internet" tour. Since it started here, it's only right that it continue here. If you care to, follow along from the inside of a new-media driven, intensely-interactive kind of rolling book tour. You can follow the sked, even e-mail the publicist. Part One:

Washington - I never love the Web more than when I visit its antithesis: this arrogant, top-down, incestuous city. Something in the drinking water here makes people angry, crazy, self-righteous, combative.

Kicking off the "Web Salvation: Running To The Internet Tour" on C-SPAN this week early Monday morning, the callers were all abuzz about yet another hateful D.C. tell-all book, this one by George Stephanopolous about how The President who employed him for year after year is unfit for office.

The first caller on "Washington Journal," from Omaha, asks me about a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Years of Web writing have prepared me for this. "It's not really my turf," I say, as the host, Brian Lamb, nods impassively. Interactive TV, which Lam has practiced by taking calls from all over the country on his public service network from the day he started, is much like being on the Web: you get flamed but you shrug and move on. We're on the air for more than an hour.

The second caller, Sean, from New York City, signals me that he's a Slashdot regular by saying he's read my work on the Web and that my writing is "slashing." This is confirmed by Sean's subsequent e-mail. "It was cool seeing you on TV," he wrote. "I've flamed you on Slashdot, but seeing you there, well, it was cool....So I called."

It was cool, like being a member of a secret society. And effective - the Random House publicist calls to say we've shot back up onto the Amazon Top 50.

Three weeks ago, I made minor publishing and Web history by launching my new book "Running to The Mountain" on Slashdot, which excerpted a chapter about spirituality and technology. I've been contributing columns to Slashdot for the past six months, drawn by the site and the free software movement, something I've been waiting for much of my life. But I never imagined my book would debut there.

I'm what publishers call a "mid-list" author. They don't really like writers like me. Nor do they quite know what to do with us, because we rarely sell enough copies to justify their time, especially as they consolidate and get bigger and sell to giant chains. I've published seven previous books, and none has earned much for either the publisher or me. I was getting broker, and they were getting stingier. Something had to give, and the odds were it was going to be me.

At a booksellers' convention in Boston last fall, a Random House sales rep took me aside and let me know, sotto voce, that the sales force "didn't get my book." It was a friendly warning, and a chilling one. And I understood it. My book was weird - part spiritual exploration, part adventure, part memoir, part essay. I didn't have a five-word explanation that somebody could read at a sales conference. And even then, months ago, the business was buzzing about Monica.

The translation: Random House wasn't going to print many copies of my book. Maybe they'd print 5000 or so. The chain stories would each order one or two copies, stick them back in Men's Studies or Memoirs (publishers pay for the displays up front), and that would be the end of it. And that is precisely what happened.

You hear a lot about the sales force in publishing these days. Writers call them SFFH - Sales Forces from Hell. Modern-day avengers, its members hunt down mid-list writers, read through their wretched sales histories, and root them out. We are, like welfare recipients, considered a shiftless and dependent bunch no longer worthy of subsidy. Increasingly, we're also like refugees, fleeing from one publishing house to the next, panicked about our contracts and our prospects. This may be just, and nobody's forcing us to pick this line of work, but the idea is that if we don't figure out how to sell more books, we're done.

So I knew I was running out of time. But for me, the Web is almost a religion, an inevitable place to turn. I fell in love with it the moment I went online eight years ago. I've made my closest friends online, done some of my best writing there, exchanted e-mails with a zillion people, and watched in wonder as the modern equivalent of the discovery of fire erupted under my nose. I decided the Web could save me by allowing me to reach my audience directly. It offered a chance to test the validity of all the BS I've been writing about it for years.

So I gave first serial rights to my book to Slashdot - for free. My publisher chuckled. A site about a computer operating system called Linux inhabited by computer geeks? With a Penguin for a symbol? Cute. Futile. So up it went on Slashdot, home mostly to young programmers, coders, Webheads, Web designers, and OSS and Linux users -- a book about a middle-aged man heading off to a mountaintop with his dogs and a pile of Thomas Merton books, to ponder life after 50.

And guess what? Hundreds of Linux geeks bought it. The book rocketed up Amazon's bestseller list in hours, making it all the way to number 22. My publisher went into shock. A site called what? How many books? The Sales Force was in disarray.

Interestingly, among the book-buyers were many who had been roasting me alive in public forums for being a Linux klutz, a wuss and a Microsoft Word user. (Don't worry, I'll never out you). Some actually read it, some gave it to their parents, and - one or two scanned it, compressed it into e-mail files and gave it away for free. The book went into a second printing and then, this week, a third.

So my faith in the Web is repaid. More importantly, there may be a new way for writers to survive the Sales Forces. Before the publication date, I'd spent weeks e-mailing websites that might conceivably be interested - dog sites (my two yellow Labradors are featured prominently in the book), Thomas Merton sites (the Trappist Monk who inspired my journey) and any other site that might reviewthe book or link to a review or to Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.

Luck helped: I got a great review on USA Today on the very day the excerpt appeared, as well as praise from the LA Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Men's Journal, Elle and New Age Journal. (For a negative review, go to Salon.com, where a critic accused me of being an upper middle-class, non-spiritual wuss).

Now I'm heading off on a two-week inter-active book tour. The Barnes and Noble website will link to the tour, and Slashdot will link to Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. And thanks to the World Wide Web, I'm just where I want to be: on the barricades, a guerrilla writer loose in the wilds of the Net. There's going to be an auction for the paperback rights. The book is selling, so the Sales Force can't make me go away. And the Web has endless possibilities, so maybe I never have to.

Using the Web (Slashdot made it possible), I sold the book around them. My publisher has no clear idea of what's happened, other than to declare it profound. Other writers are calling daily to ask how to do this. Get on the Web, I tell them, and the force will be with you.

But probably not the Sales Force. Bewildered and unsettled, it's making all the right noises, but I can't help getting the sense that it is impatient to get on with the big celebrity books, the kind they do get and print tens of thousands of copies of. If not for the Web, and especially if not for Slashdot, I would have already been long gone.

Instead, I'll be filing book-tour I'm going to filing book- tour reports over the next couple of weeks as I visit Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, New York and other cities to flog "Running to The Mountain." Slashdot readers sure don't need to buy the book - you've already done your much-appreciated part. But if you want a peek at the insides of a modern book tour, then come along. The book's publicist, a champion both of the Web and of "Running to The Mountain" and, now a good friend as well, has graciously agreed to include his e-mail in case anybody has any questions about publishing, how media and books work, or anything else (sure, you can pitch book ideas to him, too, heh-heh). His name is Brian McClendon, and his e-mail is bmclendon@randomhouse.com.

Below is my tour schedule, including print as well as electronic media publicity. This scheduled is only accurate to date, and subject to plenty of change, and probably additional places. If you're in town, please come by, and ID yourself by making a "slash" gesture across your throat. Otherwise, you can catch me on TV and radio, critique my questions and answers, and follow along. jonkatz@slashdot.org

The Running To The Internet Tour:

Author: Jon Katz Title: RUNNING TO THE MOUNTAIN: A JOURNEY OF FAITH AND CHANGE

Pub Date:03/01/99 Price:$20.00 ISBN:0-679-45678-3

03/15/99 Run American Way Magazine National/NATIONAL - Review

03/16/99 Live 10:00AM WBUR-FM/"The Connection" Boston/NEW ENGLAND - Radio

Syndication

>03/22/99 Capitola Book Cafe Capitola/SAN FRANCISCO/NORTHERN

CALIFORNIA - Talk & Signing

03/22/99 Tape 05:00PM ZDTV/"News" National/NATIONAL - TV

03/22/99 04:00PM ZDTV/"Silicon Spin" National/NATIONAL - TV

03/23/99 12:00PM Stacey's