A note from Will:

I'm not sure why, but this was one of the most popular pieces I have ever written for the Globe. Book publicists in particular loved it - though some took exception with my description of 'cheap gin.' "Hey," they said. "We're on expense account. We only drink the expensive stuff!"

Soon after this article ran a FedEx delivery van appeared at my door with a package from my publisher. Inside was a dozen blueberry muffins and a pair of tweezers, with a note that read: "Knock yourself out, Will!"

Stranger still, the story about the blueberry muffin has become something of an urban legend within the publishing biz. I was on book tour recently with a publicist I hadn't worked with before and I asked her if she ever had any trouble with authors. "No, not really," she said. And then her voice lowered. "But I heard that there was this one author who made his publicist pick blueberries out of a muffin. Can you imagine!"

Bookmarked

You learn fast on a promotional tour that the lowest form of life in the greenroom is the writer.

Will Ferguson

It seemed like a reasonable enough request.

"The blueberries," I said. "Can you pick them out of the muffin for me?"

The publicist, a focused and relentlessly well-organized young woman, blinked. We were in a van on our way to Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, for a TV interview, and she had just driven through a Tim Horton's to pick up coffee and muffins for the road.

"Oh," she said. "I misunderstood. I thought you asked for blueberry. I can get you a plain muffin instead."

"No, no," I said. "I like blueberry muffins. I just don't like blueberries. Can you pick them out?" I was on a book tour, you see. Five cities. Nine days. It was my fourth tour in as many years, and I knew that the unwritten role of a publicist is to Indulge the Author, just as surely as the unwritten role of the author is to Torment the Publicist.

There are many ways to torment a publicist: You can show up late, you can refuse to do interviews, you can throw a hissy fit, you can make increasingly bizarre and petty demands. You can, in short, act like a prima donna. You can even demand that they pick blueberries out of a muffin for you.

At first, book tours seem like a wonderful, all-expense-paid break from the solitary hunt-and-peck existence of writing. You jet into a different city every night. You get to raid the minibar, you can have wine with every meal and you can order up room service for breakfast every single day--all on someone else's tab. But the $8 packets of minibar cashews get awfully tiresome after a while, and the novelty of free room service soon wears off. Damp toast and cold eggs. Long dull taxi rides from one airport to another. If it's Monday, this must be Ottawa . . .

I'm not complaining. Most books don't get toured at all, and certainly in the precarious world of publishing, any author that gets sent on a cross-Canada media whirl has no right to complain about anything. It's exhausting, but it's also deeply flattering. It never ceases to amaze me that an entire fleet of people, from publisher to publicist to marketing teams, are hard at work trying to sell your ideas--your words--to the public. The only acceptable emotion any writer lucky enough to get toured should be allowed to demonstrate is, well, gratitude.

Ah, but writers are a notoriously prickly and insecure group, and there is something about running the gauntlet of interviews--two-minute wham-bam on-air hits followed by interminable call-in shows and ear-numbing phoners--that tends to bring out the very worst in people. And of course, when I say "people," I mean "me."

Long stretches of monotony punctuated by sudden self-conscious bursts of shameless self-promotion: It's not the most dignified way to reach an audience. Even then, you are jostling for position with other writers and snake charmers, musicians, mountebanks and medical quacks, all hungry for a piece of the promo pie, all sparring with tight-lipped smiles in greenrooms across this great land of ours. The media is the master, and greenrooms are strange places, indeed.

After a while, the greenrooms begin to blend into one another. The same guests seem to circulate, reappearing again and again with deja-vu predictability. There is always a chef, oozing charm. There is always a singer, shellacked with bullet-proof hairspray. (Or a band: either Cape Breton fiddlers or faux-attitude urban hip-hop.) And there is always --always--a B-grade American actor who has some sort of role in some sort of upcoming made-for-TV movie.

Everyone fawns over the B-grade American actor, and the B-grade American actor always has a sour expression. Amid this odd microcosm, this one-room sociological experiment, sits a writer. He is in the corner, holding his book on his lap, as welcome as an insurance salesman at a cocktail soiree.

Some hosts, such as Vicki Gabereau, have actually read your book--or at the very least have skimmed through it. Vicki can banter. Valerie Pringle can banter. These hosts come prepared to cross wits with you. Others, mainly men, mainly radio talk-show hosts, are cheerfully--and completely -- uninformed about who you are. They don't know and they don't care. When it comes time to interview you, they just flip over your book and read your bio directly from the back cover.

"Welcome back. We are here today with . . . where's the name? Let's see . . . Wilf Erguson, author of --whoa!-- Bastards and Boneheads. Where'd you get a title like that?"

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, the hosts who haven't read your book are always the ones who praise it the most highly. ("Our guest today is the author of --what was it?--Canadian Dummies for History. No? Ah, close enough. Anyway, it's a great book! Very funny! Terrific! Fantastic! I recommend it 110 per cent!") Whenever you hear a radio host pouring effusive praise on a book, you can bet a week's wages that he hasn't even cracked its spine, let alone read the first page.

But no, it's not the interviews that grind you down when you are on a book tour. It's the waiting. The interviews are fun. The waiting is excruciating.

Here then, is my confession. Although I am always surprised--and genuinely appreciative--of any exposure that the media gives a touring author, I hate being the writer in the greenroom. I really do. I hate being the guy with the book. When you are the writer in the greenroom, you are always the least cool and most unhip person in the room.

The chef is loud and gregarious and speaking in a staged Italian accent. The singer is flirty and radiant. The band is noisily scarfing down bagels with both hands. (I once watched in awe and admiration as the Barra MacNeils polished off an entire buffet just before going on stage on The Dini Petty Show. Some of them were still chewing as they went out.) The B-grade American actor really is a prima donna--at least by Canadian media standards. But the writer?

It has been scientifically proven that the single most boring sentence in the English language is: "Mr. Jones will now speak about his book." When you're the writer in the greenroom, not even the singer will flirt with you. When you are the writer in the greenroom, the other guests' eyes glaze over when you tell them what you do. In fact, it got so bad that I took to lying whenever anyone asked.

"Why am I on the show? I invented a lethal dart-gun that can kill a cheetah from 140 paces."

"Really?" they say, eyes lighting up.

"Yes. And then I wrote a book about it."

"I see." Their eyes immediately begin glazing over.

This is where the publicist comes in. Among the many and varied responsibilities that fall upon him or her--co-ordinator, chauffeur, troubleshooter--the publicist also acts as a sort of triage therapist, leaping in once the shooting stops to assuage wounds and stroke frail authorial egos. Which is to say, they lie an awful lot.

"You were wonderful," the publicist says, as she whisks you from one disastrous TV interview to the next. "Don't worry about the nosebleed, you were fine. No one noticed."

Once, during a live interview at a campus radio station in Halifax, the host said, after a long, agonizing pause, "Well, I'm all out of questions." I ended up interviewing myself while the host flipped through a magazine. True story.

"You were fine," said the publicist afterwards. "You were fine."

Publicists collect author anecdotes the way Sicilians collect vendettas, and some writers clearly stand out. Everybody loved Timothy Findley, and everybody hates--well, never mind. My libel insurance has lapsed, so I won't pass on the juicier gossip.

Some authors--and one novelist in particular--are so nasty that the mere mention of their names causes teeth-grinding Pavlovian reactions among publicists. Some authors are infamous for being lewd, some for being petulant, some for being pouty. One is even renowned for his flatulence.

Some authors treat publicists like personal servants, some treat them like confidants. One well-known female author, who wrote a children's book, no less, took the publicist on a drunken pub crawl at the end of the day. "She was great," said the publicist. "But man, what a hangover."

I have no idea where I fit in. For all I know, publicists right now are sitting around a smoky bar drinking cheap gin and muttering, "I had Will Ferguson last week. God, what a nightmare."

You see, I was just kidding about the blueberries. I was fooling around, pulling her leg. I was poking fun at the type of authors that publicists hate, but--incredibly--she took me seriously. Her face was set in diplomatic stone, but her eyes betrayed feelings of barely concealed contempt as she looked first at the muffin and then back at me.

"You want me to pick out the blueberries," she said. It was a statement, not a question.

"No, no," I said frantically. "I was only joking!"

"Oh," she said, her voice even and her gaze steady. "Very funny."

Later, once we were out on the highway and heading for the TV station, I asked the publicist what she would have done if I hadn't been kidding, if I had in fact been dead serious in my request.

"Well," she said, with a weary sigh. "I suppose I would have started picking."

The Globe and Mail
January 16, 2001