The First-Time Author Experience, Part One

I haven’t posted for a few weeks, so I would like to add to my blog at least once or twice before I leave later this week for an authors’ retreat in California, sponsored by my publisher, Berrett-Koehler. It’s been a little over two months since my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, was published. This post will be the first in a short series of progress reports/impressions of the first-time author experience. I’m focusing mainly on the author events, which have been some of the most crucial activities since publication date. I wrote earlier about the first event (even before the official publication date), the July 11 book signing at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago. I’ve done a mixture of events since then, all of which have been enjoyable and gave me the opportunity to meet and work with a number of interesting new people. Each event requires considerable detail-work ahead of time. The people I’ve worked with have been very good about making sure things work as smoothly as possible. Depending on the setup, I have done a presentation based on the principles in the book, with a brief account of how I came to write it. At some places, I have screened my 21 minute DVD interview with Drucker, which always gets a positive reaction. The audiences have varied in size, but all have had interesting and thought-provoking questions during the Q&A segment. Most of the events have been and will be held in the Washington, D.C. area, where I live, but some will be held in other cities. On October 1, I did my first bookstore presentation, at Reiter’s Books, in downtown Washington. It was an exhilarating experience, with an audience mixture of friends, former students and people I had not met before. We did not screen the video. In the next post, I’ll go into more detail about where I have done the presentations so far, and where I’ll be going in the near future.