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It takes me two to four weeks to recover enough from such a tour to pick up my thread of thought and begin writing again. About the same for an international trip. So they are very expensive in terms of lost writing time. But then, book tours can feed the writer part of my brain just through being intense experiences—getting out and glimpsing new places and meeting folks and listening to the stories they tell me, not to mention sometimes staying in fascinating hotels that would normally be quite beyond my budget.

After I'd been on a few book tours, I really began to wonder about their economic utility for my publishers, not just their huge time and energy costs for me. It's exhilarating when a mob of readers turn out for a stop, and booksellers are always cool folks to chat with, but surely anyone who'd come to an author's signing would have bought the book anyway . . . ? Book tours alone can't increase sales that much, though they may cluster them in early weeks in an effort to game the system of best-seller lists. It all harks back, I finally realized, to those middlemen again. I theorize that having a tour signals a book as receiving a major push from its publisher, just as raised gold foil lettering once did, and so the wholesalers presumably order more copies nationwide. Either that, or it's pure cargo-cult thinking, or a trap like the returns system; a few people tried tours, sales went up, everyone got into the act, and now no one dares be the first to stop. As they said in Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite films about writing: "No one knows. It's a mystery."

I've been asked whether I think high-profile author blurbs are important to the sales of books. In my experience, readers are largely indifferent to blurbs. The place they seem to be important is, again, during the pre-selling phase, just like the gold lettering and book tours. Like sausages and the law, it is perhaps unsettling to know too much about how books are made—or at least, sold.

One less baffling perk of being an "author" is the authorial meal with an editor. These have various subtle social functions that took me a while to figure out. They are not, as I had somehow expected in dithering anticipation of my first official editorial meal—a breakfast at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon with my then-new publisher Jim Baen—to work out the details of book contracts. Those are done by telephone, with lots of long, thoughtful pauses between calls. What these meals are for is to make the next phone call easier. When you've never met face-to-face, the lack of visual cues over the phone, and the presence of unrestrained writerly imagination, can create confusion and misunderstanding. When you can picture the real person, with their actual tics and tones and grimaces and grins, those phone calls somehow go more smoothly ever after. Still, it's a bit startling in the convention green room to witness the fannish cry of "We're hungry—let's go find a restaurant" transmute into the authorial version of, "We're hungry—let's go find an editor!"

The other charm of editorial dining, of course, is the chance to venture into upscale restaurants that neither writer nor editor, in our scruffy at-home personas and income levels, would ever get within whiffing distance of. An editorial dinner was the first time I ever had a waiter come around between courses and rake the tablecloth free of detritus (the area around my plate always seems to have lots) with one of those cute little brass scrapers. At such a dinner with my friend Lillian's editor at a convention hotel restaurant in Dallas, we were all charmed and boggled when we were each brought, between courses to clear our palates between courses, a small scoop of sorbet—sitting on half a lime—sitting in an individual sculptured ice swan about a foot high with a tiny white Christmas light in the base. I swear we hadn't even ordered lighted swans; they just swanned in, as if naturally.

That wasn't quite as surreal, however, as the editorial dinner at Chicon V in Chicago, when Jim and editor Toni Weisskopf