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Grith alert!
Sep. 27th, 2003 12:45 pmMet a friend last night for dinner, chattage, and the Neal Stephenson signing. It all went very well - this is a friend that I don't see much of, due to living distance and life fu.
Neal Stephenson is an introvert and doesn't enjoy doing signings (on his web page he refers to himself as "Umberto Eco without the charm") so it was a bit surprising that he devoted a couple weeks to doing a tour. Then again, his publisher may have told him that it sells books, so if he wants to be a financially successful full-time writer...
( Read more... )
The other other good part of the signing: Keplers ran it intelligently. You took a ticket and they called numbers up in groups of 10. That way, if you knew you weren't going to be called for a while, you could browse through the bookstore (hopefully buying more), grab a cup of coffee across the way, whatever. You didn't have to mindlessly stand in a line for 6 hours. (Neal joked about signing until 2 AM. It may have been that long, though.)
That was so much better than the last signing I went to, at a chain big-box store whose name shall go unmentioned. But it rhymes with Sparns & Floble.
Neal Stephenson is an introvert and doesn't enjoy doing signings (on his web page he refers to himself as "Umberto Eco without the charm") so it was a bit surprising that he devoted a couple weeks to doing a tour. Then again, his publisher may have told him that it sells books, so if he wants to be a financially successful full-time writer...
( Read more... )
The other other good part of the signing: Keplers ran it intelligently. You took a ticket and they called numbers up in groups of 10. That way, if you knew you weren't going to be called for a while, you could browse through the bookstore (hopefully buying more), grab a cup of coffee across the way, whatever. You didn't have to mindlessly stand in a line for 6 hours. (Neal joked about signing until 2 AM. It may have been that long, though.)
That was so much better than the last signing I went to, at a chain big-box store whose name shall go unmentioned. But it rhymes with Sparns & Floble.
