Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [259]
The great days of author tours ended with the escalation of airfares. Until then, provided the author was not determined to live like a Saudi prince, it paid to keep him or her traveling for as long as possible—the more cities, within reason, the better. Back in the 1970s and the 1980s, there were still plenty of important regional shows, many of them nationally syndicated. You went to Boston to do Sonya, to Dayton, Ohio (and later Chicago) to do Donahue, to Los Angeles for Carson and Merv Griffin, and so on. In time, the major shows tended to move to New York or Los Angeles (with the exception of Oprah, which remains in Chicago), while travel costs rose until it was no longer feasible to send the author from city to city flogging his or her book. In the meantime, the invention of the “satellite tour,” in which the author sits in New York or Los Angeles and does show after show across the country without leaving the room has changed the author tour considerably. Still, the fact remains that the biggest revolution in the book business has been brought about by the curious symbiosis that established itself between television’s need for free talent and the need of book publishers to reach the public.
Television rescued the book business from the marketing trough into which it was descending. Already by the end of the sixties, the decision about whether to buy certain kinds of books—self-help titles, diet books, exercise books, and so on—was being made on the basis of the author’s appearance, telegenic appeal, and ability to get his or her points across convincingly on-screen, and authors in these categories were soon to find that a videocassette of their performance on television weighed more heavily with the publisher than an outline of their ideas. Charm, smile, appearance, energy, the ability to sell while looking natural and to sum up a whole book in a sentence or two became all-important in publishing certain categories of books, favoring those authors who were natural salespeople.
Those authors already in the public eye—whether actors or politicians—are usually astute at promoting their books, since it’s just an extension of what they normally do every day. Nobody is better at it than Joan Collins, unless it is her sister, the novelist Jackie Collins, both of whom I once edited at the same time—an idea foisted on me by Dick Snyder, who had apparently never heard the phrase sibling rivalry. Among politicians, nobody was better at pitching his book on television than Richard Nixon.
Never a man to let the difficulties of something overwhelm him, Snyder saw no reason why S&S should not become Nixon’s publisher, despite the fact that it had been books about Watergate that had put Snyder’s S&S on the map as a major publishing force. All the President’s Men and The Final Days had not only done much to turn Dick into a celebrity but had begun the enormously fruitful friendship between himself and Alice Mayhew, the editor of both books, that would produce almost two decades of brilliant and hugely successful nonfiction publishing and make S&S a key player in acquiring serious and important journalists and historians. The fact that these books, for the most part, had a certain liberal bias, at least so far as Nixon and the war in Vietnam were concerned, did not prevent Dick from responding enthusiastically when I told him that I had heard Nixon was thinking of changing publishers. What was more surprising, it turned out, was that Nixon himself didn’t have any reservations about being published