A (literal) virtual book tour. Image Credit: Flickr - John E. Lester

The DIY book tour has become more and more popular (or should we say, necessary?) as publishers cut funding for traditional book tours and as self-publishing becomes more feasible for emerging writers.
For the author arranging his or her own publicity, the most obvious route is old-fashioned in-person bookstore visits, which we’ve discussed quite a bit here at FWR over the past year—a sign that writers increasingly need to act as their own marketers, perhaps.

But while the internet era makes life harder for writers in some ways—the increased challenges it causes for traditional publishing, for one—it also gives the writer new tools for self-publicizing. Last week, for example, Lee posted about the DIY-book-tour resource BookTour, which helps writers arrange those good old-fashioned in-store visits. And a new route has opened up for authors to promote their books without logging a single frequent-flier mile: the virtual book tour.

Back in 2009, FWR hosted debut novelist Bridget McNulty for a stop on her blog tour. More recently (as in, right now!) FWR contributor and editor of The Practicing Writer Erika Dreifus arranged a virtual book tour for her debut collection, Quiet Americans and offers some tips for planning your own tour. And in our features section, Lee has an interview with Meg Pokrass as part of Pokrass’s virtual book tour for her flash fiction collection, Damn Sure Right.

Given the economic state of publishing, the virtual book tour is an increasingly popular option for emerging writers because of its low cost. But there are huge benefits for readers as well. The book tour “stops”—usually on writing or lit blogs—are archived, meaning that interested readers can still access them months or even years in the future. And a virtual book tour lets writers express themselves in the way that is often most comfortable for them: through writing. Not all authors are performers, and in a bookstore crowded with strange faces—or worse, a bookstore that’s mostly empty—an author may feel awkward or overcome with stage fright. On virtual book tour stops, you can get to know a writer and his or her personality (eloquent, witty, passionate, quirky) a little more closely.

Check out Erika Dreifus’s and Meg Pokrass’s virtual book tour stops, and tell us: how do you think the virtual stop compares to a face-to-face bookstore visit?

But they’d be missing out on something very special.

Sarah/Sara unfolds as the journal of Sarah Frankel, an American-born Jew who, shortly after finishing her undergraduate studies at Columbia, moved to Israel (in proper parlance, this is called “making aliyah”). There, where she took the Hebrew version of her name (”Sara,” pronounced Sah-rah), she continued to become far more ritually observant and schooled in Jewish texts than she was raised to be.

Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem after suicide bombing (9/9/2003)

When her visiting parents were killed in a suicide bombing in the café below her Jerusalem apartment, she became a twenty-three-year-old, sibling-less orphan. The explosion also left Sarah disfigured, although it’s not until more than halfway through the book that we learn some details: “Scars cover most of my face. I don’t have eyebrows. I’m missing half of an ear.” This tragedy was far from the first Frankel family trauma: Sarah’s father, an investment banker who was on the twenty-ninth floor of Tower One on September 11, 2001, survived that day physically, but remained haunted by his experience. The suicide bombing in Israel and the 9/11 attacks are relentless touchstones in this book. The reader can escape their impact no more easily than the characters can. (Oh, and did I mention that Sarah’s mother was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor/orphan?)

As if all of that background weren’t bleak enough, Sarah writes her journal entries throughout what some might consider at best a desolate journey: a six-week, solo kayaking trip through the Arctic. This was the retirement trip her father was planning before he was killed. There’s no denying the scenic beauty (”The tundra amazes me,” Sarah writes in one early entry. “It’s a forest, willow and pine.”).

photo credit: Free Wine

But there’s also no question that this is a dangerous adventure, with everything from polar bears to freezing temperatures threatening Sarah’s survival. These perils are no mere theoretical dangers; they are very real hazards. Further, the trip is shadowed by Sarah’s post-traumatic stress, grief, and guilt. Near the book’s end, when Sarah seems close to succumbing to almost certain death, she is prone to streams of thoughts like this set of “if only”s:

If I’d never become orthodox and moved to Jerusalem, if terrorists had never flown planes into my father’s office building, if my parents had never come to visit me, if that young woman hadn’t decided to kill herself by exploding in the middle of a crowded café, if I hadn’t survived the attack, if I hadn’t decided to finish my father’s boat and complete his retirement dream, if I’d found a more knowledgeable outfitter, if I’d started two weeks earlier or packed an emergency transponder, if I stopped whining so much and instead began searching for that stream. If I didn’t keep worrying that like Job, I was being punished rather than tested.

Jacob Paul

Throughout the trek, Sarah’s thoughts turn not only to her past—memories—but also to an imagined future. Grimness appears even in these fantasies of her post-kayak trip life back in Jerusalem. For instance, she imagines that she will meet a man, Udi, himself grieving a terrible loss (the death of his son), and that the couple will frequent a particular café:

They won’t discuss it, but part of Yechil’s Café’s appeal is the outdoor seating. In a large open area, they will have a much better chance of seeing a bomber before he detonates. Walls amplify blasts, echoing shockwaves with devastating effect. Yechil’s will be a kind of transitory therapy for Sara, a halfway house on the road to full café-recovery. Even the closest bus stop is on the other side of Rechov Ben Gurion and a full half block away. And their meetings will give Udi some structure, a sense of routine, a mandatory, daily perch which will be so important while he wanders Jerusalem’s streets, waiting for the expiration of his mourner’s leave from the army.

As a fiction writer—and as one who has spent considerable time and ink on Jewish characters and families—I was particularly drawn to multiple aspects of this novel. First, there’s the issue of language. The author does a good job explaining most of the less-familiar phrases (one example: “And I’m shomrei n’giah, which means I have no physical contact with men I’m not immediately related to if I can at all help it….”), and I suspect that words such as “Hashem” would be easy enough to comprehend from the context even if one didn’t already know that it serves as a referent for “God.” But at times, I struggled to make sense of sentences such as “Hashem made the yetzer harah to inflict us with taivah.” A prayer called Shemonah Esrai similarly sent me directly to that glossary we know as Google.

Incorporating what an MFA instructor once memorably derided in workshop as “foreign words” in one’s fiction is, I’ve realized, something that some of us simply can’t avoid. It’s something that makes perfect sense in this novel, where the very title suggests the inherent tensions between the protagonist’s secular Jewish-American and orthodox Jewish-Israeli selves. It indicates on small but identifiable levels—such as the Frankels’ expressed discomfort with being called “Eema” and “Abba” instead of “Mom” and “Dad”—a much greater conflict between Sarah and her parents, what Sarah calls “our ideological split.”

at the Western Wall / photo credit: Ram Viswanathan

Here, I move into delicate territory. For the divisions that can arise within what might be called “the Jewish community” or even within individual Jewish families over religious observances and Israel are not easy to talk about. But talk about them (in her journal, at least) Sarah does. She describes herself as having been born into a comfortable Diaspora Jewish identity. Her parents—her mother, especially—do not approve of her embrace of Orthodox Judaism and her move to Israel. It’s not just rituals and language they have difficulty accepting. In one post-9/11 telephone conversation, Sarah listens as her mother rails:

‘That’s why your Sharon’s policies in the occupied territories will never stop terrorism. The more fear he creates; the more fear will seek outlet. People who do not fear, who are not oppressed, hunted, haunted by occupiers, they strive to avoid a situation of fear, strive to preserve a status-quo; those kind of people would never blow up buses or fly planes into buildings.’ I asked her if she wanted me to start with her insistence on calling the land Hashem promised us in the Torah occupied, or would she rather I addressed the massive success of Jewish passivity during the Shoah, or would she simply rather I dropped the subject?

Sarah’s father’s feelings in this respect are somewhat milder. As Sarah recalls, “his primary complaints were that I lived too far away and that I fought with my mother, not that I’d adopted the faith of my forefathers.” Still, even within this small family of three, one manages to obtain a glimpse into some of the varieties of Jewish experience and attitudes. This alone is a significant accomplishment.

Then, since we often find much made of women authors who attempt to write in the first-person point-of-view of male characters, it seems appropriate to address Paul’s work as a male author writing in the voice of a female protagonist. Two observations seem worth making here. First, Paul consistently takes into account the prescribed gender roles of traditional Orthodox Judaism. (He also takes on some of the stereotypes, as when Sarah recalls that her longtime—and non-Jewish—best friend, Marie, had tried to dissuade her “‘from having a shitty life living with some stuck-up pretentious Jew who kept you cloaked like a sheik’s wife.’”) And then, Sarah’s awareness of her body while she is on the kayaking trip is not limited to muscle strength or soreness. Her menstrual cycle receives attention, too. I’m not sure I’ve seen many male authors tackle lines like this:

photo credit: Nick Russill

My trainer suggested going on the pill to suppress everything altogether. She said it would be more convenient…I wish I had gone on the pill; I don’t want this here, now. Even if I wasn’t susceptible to the fearful suggestion that my body has secretly sought to contact predatory bears, I would not want to deal with double-bagged used pads, cleanup, hygiene.

Finally, I return to the book’s darker qualities. It’s not altogether inconceivable that after reading Sarah/Sara, someone might be inspired to follow the example of Aryn Kyle’s readers and claim that “this book made me want to die.” But for the more discerning reader, one who identifies with and marvels over what Laura van den Berg has lauded as “stories that make my heart hurt,” Sarah/Sara will be an important—and impressive—read.

Further Resources

- Excerpts from Sarah/Sara are available on Numéro Cinq, author and professor Douglas Glover’s site for his students in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing program (of which Jacob Paul is a graduate; he also holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah), and on Paul’s own website.

- While touring for Sarah/Sara (on bicycle), Jacob Paul wrote a series of blog posts for Mountain Gazette. You’ll find them, in chronological order, here, here, here, here, and here.

- Although not available online, the July/August 2010 “First Fiction” feature in Poets & Writers spotlights Jacob Paul and Sarah/Sara.

- KRCL (Salt Lake City) conducted this interview with Jacob Paul in May 2010 (complete with complementary playlist).

- At Write the Book, listen to a podcast interview with the author (July 2010) and find a writing prompt inspired by Paul’s work.

- Laura Ellen Scott has reviewed Sarah/Sara for Prick of the Spindle.

- Watch and listen to Jacob Paul introduce the novel in this video:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that book tours don’t really sell books. Or at least they don’t sell a lot of books in comparison to the amount of time and expense involved. So then why do authors continue to go on them? Well, book tours have ancillary benefits, otherwise publishers wouldn’t still send authors on them. Meeting booksellers makes them more likely to recommend your work, or to look forward to your next book. It gives local media an excuse to talk about you. It gives you a chance to travel the country, catch up with old friends, and show your exes what they missed when they dumped you.

But what if your publisher is an independent press with little to no budget for touring? What if your big name publisher doesn’t think it’s worth sending you out? Plan your own tour.

When my collection of short stories THINGS THAT PASS FOR LOVE was published by OV/Dzanc Books in 2008, they offered me $1000 toward book promotion. I took it on the road (and ended up spending a bit more than that, but I did visit over 17 cities). Here are some helpful tips as you plan your own DIY book tour:

To see Amend’s suggestions–which range from practical to philosophical to humorous–you can read the rest of her essay here.

In addition to Amend’s work, this issue features essays by Stephanie Soileau and Josh Henkin, as well as announcements about the most recent Glimmer Train Prize Winners and upcoming contests. The Bulletin is a free monthly subscription. No adds, no solicitations–just writers on writing. Sign up here.

Here’s my own reviewlet of the hardcover:

Miles from Nowhere began as a collection of linked stories (two of which I had the pleasure to read in workshop at Michigan). As a novel, the chapter-stories work together beautifully; Miles remains episodic, but breaks between chapters feel hauntingly like lost years…perfect for this particular story. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the book follows a Korean girl named Joon, a teenage runaway who struggles–from homeless shelters to the street, from prostitution and addiction to Avon sales–to find her way back to a sense of home and self. Nami Mun’s flawless prose complements her book’s tone: stark and clean, it gives way to bursts of well-earned, saved-up beauty.

For a more in-depth (and beautifully worded) take on the book, read FWR contributor Greg’s review, via Goodreads.

Book Tour 2.0: Nami is about to hit the road with a series of readings to promote the paperback; catch her act at a bookstore near you:

Nami Mun

New York – Tuesday, September 1, 2009
7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble – Tribeca
97 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
212-587-5389

Chicago – Wednesday, September 9, 2009
7:30 p.m.
Women & Children First
5233 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60640
Tel: 773.769.9299

Bay Area – Thursday, September 10, 2009
7:30pm
Books Inc. in ALAMEDA
1344 Park Street
Alameda, California 94501

Milwaukee – Thursday, September 17, 2009
7:00 PM
Boswell Book Company
2559 N Downer Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53211
(414) 332-1181

(For a complete list of venues and dates, visit Nami’s website.)