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How to find book clubs, author events and reading retreats
Whether you prefer to read in silence or want to dive into deep discussion with the author, there’s an event for you.
My first-ever book signing was in 1988, for a collection of my columns that the Free Press had published. It was a paperback called “The Live Albom.” I got a call from a small local bookstore asking if I would come on a weekday afternoon to sign copies.
For two hours.
“Absolutely!” I responded. In my mind I thought, Two hours! They must be expecting 500 people!
I was off by … 500 people.
Nobody came. I sat there all alone. I fidgeted at a table, checking my watch, trying not to look like the loser I felt I was.
Finally, about an hour into this torture, a middle-aged woman entered the store and approached me. I flushed with excitement. Finally, a sale! We made eye contact. We smiled at each other. And then …
“Where are the cookbooks?” she asked.
“I don’t work here,” I answered.
“Oh.”
And off she went.
An evolving tradition
Thirty-seven years later, it’s déjà vu. I’ve been out promoting my latest book, “Twice,” a novel about a man who has the power to do anything in his life over again. And in many ways, I feel that I am playing the lead character, since I am repeating the old pattern, traveling from place to place, chatting with readers, signing my name on the title page.
True, certain elements have changed. People actually show up these days. And I am going across the country instead of across the city — 33 stops on this tour alone. In the old days, they had nice folks called “literary escorts,” who picked you up at the airport and drove you to various radio and TV programs interested in speaking with authors. Today, nearly all those shows are gone. You take Ubers. You do podcasts from a hotel room.
Still, many things remain the same. You travel from town to town. You shake countless hands and exchange pleasantries with people you don’t know, but who feel they know you, because they’re read something you wrote. Some even bring you things — cookies, cards, handwritten notes, books they’ve written, photos from the last time you visited.
It’s a fabulous way to explore America, a window into small towns and big cities, community groups, book clubs, local libraries, churches and synagogues.
It’s also a healthy way to harness your ego. I remember the early days of “Tuesdays with Morrie,” when an FM disc jockey referred to the book as “Tuesdays with Maurice” and opened by saying, “Mitch, the obvious first question is … why Tuesdays?”
I remember a bookstore so small I had to sit with a cat in my lap. And a radio station so small it was in the back of a woman’s house. She broadcast with the window open, and in the middle of our interview, someone outside started mowing the lawn. You couldn’t hear anything but “RRrrrrrRRRRRRR.”
I remember signing books at a Starbucks counter, on a church lawn, in a student union basement, and next to a stack of snow tires in a Costco. There was a shopping mall in the Philippines where thousands of teenagers assembled, and a tiny store in Coldwater, Michigan, where it seemed like the entire population of the town was stuffed inside, because my book “The First Phone Call From Heaven” was set there.
Sadly, a theme of doing book tours for over three decades is disappearance. I signed in so many stores that have long since vanished: Borders, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Crown Books, Media Play.
The number of independent bookstores has also shrunk dramatically, victims of impossible competition from large chain stores, box stores like Sam’s Club and Costco, and Amazon.com.
And yet …
The last bastions
There are still places that elicit the old bookstore feel, touch and smell, and the tactile excitement of shelves full of stories.
On this recent “Twice” tour, I visited a lovely shop in Franklin, Indiana, called the Wild Geese Bookshop, which looks like a house on a residential street, complete with a front porch and a bench to sit on.
In Nashville, there was a shop that offered “blind date with a book,” where they wrapped books for sale in plain paper and only hinted what they were about.
And in Cape Cod, in a town deliciously named East Sandwich, there’s a bookstore called Titcomb’s Bookshop that goes back four generations. The woman who now runs it, Rae, has photos of her great-grandmother working in the same shop. That’s tradition. Sturdy, important tradition.
But the best part of these book tours is the people. They sound different in different places. But our personal dynamic remains the same: They read a story; they come to meet the person who created it. I write a story, and I come to meet the people kind enough to have read it.
It’s a beautiful exchange, one that, sadly, is dying out. Few authors do book tours anymore. Publishers can’t afford them. The economics don’t justify it.
Which only makes me appreciate them even more. I am grateful for every handshake, every boisterous collector, every nervous teenager, every shy customer with an old, tattered book they’d like personalized.
Bookstores remain wonderful places, bazaars of life-changing information, soaring fantasies, personal histories, romances, thrillers and delightful photos. I don’t mind returning there “Twice’’ — or even more. After all these years, I remain honored by the invitation.
But I still don’t know where the cookbooks are.
Contact Mitch Albom: [email protected]. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom on x.com.
