BOOK PROMOTION NIGHTMARE
The Australian - May 2005

When a writer has a new book published there a lot of things he or she desperately wants to hear: ‘Hello, this is Oprah.’; ‘The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is [insert your name here].’; ‘The tragic deaths this week of Dan Brown and JK Rowling…’ Less cheering than these daydreams, however, is the announcement, a few weeks before publication, that the only media outlet with any apparent interest in your project is ABC radio Adelaide.

For a lot of writers, publicity is a necessary evil. You’re supposed to affect that attitude even if you enjoy publicity; it makes all the writers nobody wants to talk to feel a bit better. With the release of my first published book late last year, however, I discovered what a million authors before me had already: you can be Proust, Dickens and Tolstoy rolled into one but you might as well be feeding pages into a furnace if you don’t have a good publicist.

In retrospect I realise that my book was a hard sell. A non-fiction account of the four months I lived on the Gold Coast; a black comedy of poverty, drugs, sexual deviancy and child abuse set against the backdrop of the deadening capitalist wasteland that is Surfers Paradise. Oddly, it never occurred to me that such a work might have certain commercial handicaps.

Some people were kind: I’ll not soon forget the giddy maelstrom that was regional Queensland radio; or the guy in Adelaide who, as it happened, loved my book. These modest triumphs aside, the publicity trail remains in my memory a series of bewildering failures.

I’ll never forget, for instance, the sting of humiliation that came when I discovered my much-anticipated half-hour, prime-time interview in Perth was in fact a pre-record for the coveted 4am spot (‘Don’t underestimate how many people are listening!’ said the announcer, a man whose lies to his guests were merely an extension of the lies he had been telling himself for years). Or the look on Radio National host Julie McCrossin’s face after the following exchange, concerning a scene in my book in which a teenage girl describes her cousin’s gruesome death and farcical funeral:

Julie: ‘And then there was terrible story about an aboriginal man who was set on fire and they [his teenage cousin and her friends] just laughed about it.’
Me: ‘Well, that was pretty funny.’

Julie: [Silence]
(Tip for new authors: it pays to remember that where the ABC is concerned a story should not merely be true but morally edifying.)

Yet without doubt my greatest mortification on the publicity trail was my ill-conceived adventure with Channel Nine’s breakfast program Today.

After flying to the Gold Coast I met the Today journalist, “Mitzy” (I have chosen Mitzy because I think it suits her and because "Eve Harrington" was already taken). Twenty-two, wearing a sharp black suit and ferocious shoes, Mitzy was full of big ideas. Firstly, she wanted to incorporate into the story the public payphone outside my old apartment. It was from this phone that the schizophrenic bodybuilder who made my life hell on the Gold Coast (and, bless him, gave my book narrative thrust) would call and threaten to kill me. ‘Okay,’ said Mitzy, ‘what I want you to do is walk up to the phone, pick up the receiver and say, “This wasn’t in the tourist brochure,” or something like that.’

‘Um, alright… but do you want me to say, “This wasn’t in the tourist brochure,” or can I say something a bit different?’ Mitzy thought for a moment. ‘No, I want you to say, “This wasn’t in the tourist brochure.”’

Repressing all seditious instincts and with the pugnacious determination of a Ziegfeld Follies girl suffering a twisted ankle, I soldiered on. Afraid that unless I co-operated the story would never make it to air I parroted Mitzy’s fed lines (‘Can you walk up to the gate and say something like, “Paradise? I don’t think so!”’), congratulated her on her limited grasp of my book’s themes and walked, repeatedly, through throngs of tourists, doing my best, as per Mitzy’s instruction, to ‘look like an outsider’.

Mitzy’s greatest creative flourish, however, was also her most touching: an attempt to create a silent affinity between myself and a child singing Christmas carols in downtown Surfers Paradise. ‘Your book is all about re-invention,’ she explained, pointing to the apprehensive youngster. ‘And that kid is sort of re-inventing himself.’

The next fifteen minutes were among the most deeply humiliating of my life. Imagine the scene: the author, 6’3”, sallow, hollow-eyed, a little shabby, standing in a packed pedestrian mall, staring obsessively at a little boy and looking every inch the deranged pederast of popular imagination while a Channel 9 cameraman filmed him from all conceivable angles. As I watched the expressions of the onlookers from the corner of my eye (curiosity, bordering disgust) my face began to glow with shame.

After what seemed an eternity, filming ended and I hitched a lift to Brisbane with the Today crew. As I watched Mitzy brush her golden hair and talk of the pearls her boyfriend was to buy her for Christmas, I wondered whether I might not be overreacting. Perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps Mitzy knew something about the medium of television I did not.

She didn’t. After several months of stalling, the producer confessed to my agent that ‘It didn’t turn out quite as we’d expected’, and the report never aired.
Maybe it is unconnected to my experience with Today but the other week, pretending to be an interested customer, I asked after my book at Borders. ‘Oh that,’ replied the assistant, airily. ‘We have piles of that. Under true crime. Right up the back.’ I affected a few hopeful shuffles, but she only raised her voice and waved me on. ‘No, no. Right up the back… that’s right, keep going…’

© Brendan Shanahan 2008