From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Necessary Etiquette
Bill Clinton will sign your book, but he won't inscribe it.
NEW YORK--Five hundred bookstores--and counting--want former President Bill Clinton to come calling when his "My Life" comes out next month. If all those requests were honored, Mr. Clinton would spend years "doing nothing but going from city to city and signing books from morning until night," says Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of the memoir. Consequently, he adds, "it is incumbent on us to come up with some guidelines." Mr. Clinton "won't have time for personalizations. It will be signature only. And he'll only sign the current book."
As more and more celebrities--Sting, Madonna, Hillary Clinton and her mate--latch onto their inner author (and the attendant hefty advance), then take to the road to publicize their efforts, book signings are requiring far more preparation than the purchase of a large box of Sharpies. There are rules, there are regulations, there are wristbands (more about this in a minute). "Publishers, in concert with their retail partners, have long understood that because of time constraints guidelines are necessary," says Mr. Bogaards.
This past March, for example, a newspaper ad warned fans headed to a Donald Trump signing at an Upper West Side Barnes & Noble that the apprentices' sorcerer "will sign up to four books per person, at least one of which must be 'Trump: How to Get Rich,' " his new book. "No personalization and no memorabilia, please." Two days later, same time, same Barnes & Noble, similar warning: this time about "Tonight" host Jay Leno, who was autographing copies of his new children's book. "Mr. Leno," advised the pre-event ad, "will sign copies of 'If Roast Beef Could Fly' and 'Leading With My Chin' only. No other books or memorabilia, please."
The memorabilia problem is particularly nettlesome when dealing with an author whose fame derives from achievement on the playing fields or pop charts. Inevitably, there coming through the line will be a tsunami of programs, apparel and CDs, items that have absolutely nothing to do with the business at hand. "In the interests of letting all the people who attend have an audience with the celebrity, you have to put a cap on what will and won't be signed," says Mr. Bogaards.
Signature management is similarly problematic for perennial bestseller types like John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Jan Karon, author of the wildly popular "Mitford" series. "Some of them, like Anne Rice, have a backlist of five or 10 or 20 books, and we could have a reader coming through the line wanting her to sign all of them and also wanting her to sign some body parts," adds Mr. Bogaards, declining to get specific about the body parts in question. "So now at her signings we say she'll sign one thing from the backlist plus the new book. Everybody walks away happy."
Well, perhaps not everyone. Collectors--"they're very easy to spot," says Mr. Bogaards--get short shrift from those in charge. So do those folks whose interest in an author has nothing to do with her limpid prose and all to do with how much an autographed copy of a given book will fetch on e-Bay. "When time isn't an issue, I always encourage authors not to just sign a book but to inscribe it to the recipient so that it doesn't end up on an auction site," says one publicist who requested anonymity.
To be sure, there are some authors, among them celeb chef Emeril Lagasse and novelist Dean Koontz, who will sit and sign until the job is done, will sign current titles, will sign backlist titles. "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" author Tom Robbins brings an assortment of colored pens to his signings, often drawing pictures or writing poems to accompany his inscriptions. E. Lynn Harris, according to Doubleday's publicity director, Suzanne Herz, will spend multiple hours in bookstores and sign whatever people want. "He'll take pictures with his fans, and he'll sign the pictures," she says.
Toni Morrison autographs book plates for those who get turned away at overpopulated in-store events (there are similar plans for Mr. Clinton). Maya Angelou, who attracted some 700 fans at a recent Barnes & Noble gathering, offered a P.O. box number to those who never made it to the front of the line.
Then there is Pete Rose, who on his recent publicity tour for "My Prison Without Bars," "signed no pictures, no memorabilia, nothing but his book," says Charles Stillwagon, events coordinator at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. "He made the point that the autograph was free with the book in the store, but that if you went to his Web site for an autographed copy you would have to pay extra for it."
The book signing is a labor-intensive weapon in the publisher's arsenal, involving the disbursement of numbered wristbands to guarantee a place in line and routine patrols to check for contraband items. "I've been the heavy more times than I can count," says Barb Burg, a senior vice president at Bantam Dell, who was with Sting on a recent tour to publicize his memoir, "Broken Music." "We said 'no memorabilia,' but people would hide concert tickets or photographs up their sleeves."
Yet despite all the effort, the monetary payoffs are unlikely to be huge. Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House Inc., notes that you're going to have to do more than signings to make a book with a big advance "a worthwhile financial endeavor to the publisher." But, he adds, "the actual number of books sold at a signing is secondary to the publicity and ambassadorial mileage we can get."
"Fans want the touch," says Knopf's Mr. Bogaards. "The touch means something. A reader has a good experience at a signing, tells a friend and perhaps another book gets sold."
