On Saturday 7 I participated in the second presentation of my new book La verdad sin fin: Expediente X, a volume about which I have already written here, at the Festival de Cinema de Catalunya at Sitges. I had offered the first presentation, which you can see online, a couple of weeks ago at Llibreria Gigamesh. And I still have a third presentation in two more weeks at FNAC Triangle of Barcelona (October 19, 18:30).
This is the fifth book of mine I present in public. The first time was back in 2006, when I presented the previous version of the book on The X-Files; in 2018 I presented with some of the authors the collective volume Explorant Mecanoscrit del segon origen: noves lectures and in 2019 I presented my collection Ocho cuentos góticos: del papel a la pantalla. A few months ago, I organized an online presentation (via Teams) of the volume I have co-edited with Isabel Santaulària, Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture: In Search of Good Men, this time for the members of the English Studies AEDEAN association.
Although we announce our new books on the AEDEAN list (the association has more than 1000 members), and members may present their works at the yearly conference, there had never been an online book launch, as far as I recall. Mostly the authors of Detoxing Masculinity attended its launch, and a handful of friends, and my topic today is, precisely, why we are so shy to publicize our academic books. My other book presentations were all live (not online), and attended by a modest number of persons, but there is something immensely satisfactory in celebrating a book launch with family and friends, and to meet strangers who care about what one has written. I have found myself signing copies of my X-Files book, which is for me awfully embarrassing, but also gratifying since everyone enjoys a nice pat on the back. With the academic books, we never get that, do we?
Usually, publishers are in charge of organizing book presentations, which are indeed still popular events despite social media; readers want to meet authors in the flesh and enjoy the fetishistic act of asking for an autograph (as I do myself). The apotheosis of that fetishism takes place every 23rd April here in Barcelona with St. Jordi’s book day, when readers may queue patiently for hours to get their books signed, and authors learn about the physical pain of signing non-stop for hours (others learn the pain of not being that popular…). Any respectable bookshop has a book presentation calendar and let’s not forget about festivals and fan conventions.
All this is organized on the basis of well-established circuits that are not that easy to access. For instance, my X-Files book has been welcome by Gigamesh, which specializes in fantasy, SF and Gothic, and by FNAC, which is open to all kinds of proposals, but other bookshops I have addressed have not even replied to my queries (my publisher got me the presentations while I tried to get others). My book is possibly too fannish for the less welcoming bookshops.
I have not been more successful, however, in my attempts to present De Hitler a Voldemort: retrato del villano (Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2023), because, as I say, academic books are not usually presented in public, unless they have been written by some big name. As an academic working in a second-language Department I don’t have, besides, the contacts that someone in the Catalan or Spanish Departments might have. Or in other specialities of the university. Add to this that we have reached a point of saturation in all fronts. One might spend all late afternoons attending book presentations in Barcelona, and still miss many.
Book presentations have a specific dynamic, as they need to consist of a conversation between the author and the presenter, followed by questions from the audience. I do not know whether publishers pay presenters in the case of the book presentations of bigger impact, but one thing you can notice is that they prefer to invite journalists rather than scholars. In fact, publishers totally ignore academics because we are not a source of publicity.
When I was head of Department I emailed lots of publishers for them to send us their presentation calendars (once Anagrama stopped doing their wonderful presentations at the British Council) and nobody replied to my request. The presentations seem to be either for the press or for readers, plainly to sell books, not to help the authors get academic attention. Recently, I found out quite by accident that Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah would be visiting Barcelona for a book presentation. As happens, two of my colleagues have been doing plenty of academic work on Gurnah but nobody contacted them. My colleagues contacted the author, which was delighted to meet his admirers for a drink. As for the presentation, it was good but lacked the depth my colleagues could have given it.
Since a rule of book presentations is that one cannot do them alone, the author who works at a modest level, like myself, needs to find a suitable companion. In the case of a collective book, the other contributors are the best possible companions and one need not look further, but in the case of single authorship, one needs to ask for favours. This is not easy. The presenters needs to have read the book and prepared a set of questions, and know have to keep the conversation flowing. Nothing more embarrassing than a book presentation full of uncomfortable silences.
For La verdad sin fin I asked my colleague at the Universitat Ramon Llull, Iván Gómez, and accomplished fan activist and author Javier Valencia (of the fan page El pájaro burlón) to be my presenters. I did prepare a list of topics, but each dealt as they wished with my suggestions, which has resulted in two very lively but quite different conversations. With Iván there was more room to discuss patterns of TV consumption and how the disappearance of so many series from the streaming platforms might affect research (series which are not on DVD and that fall off streaming catalogues may simply vanish for ever). With Javier there was more room to discuss the content of The X-Files, though, interestingly, the matter of the series availability came up in the subsequent presentation on the same day and place of his exciting edited book Weird TV.
For me, then, a book presentation is a chance to have an interesting conversation about a project that has taken a great deal of time in my life. As a member of the audience in a presentation I particularly enjoy learning about how the author managed to overcome difficulties and challenges, as writing is a very lonely process. In the case of collective books, which are very common in academic writing, I miss more contact among the contributors as we write. This is why I saw the presentation of Detoxing Masculinities as a chance to finally meet, apart from publicising what we had done. Since we don’t do presentations for academic books, I have been writing posts here trying to elicit interest in each publication but also to answer the questions I might receive in an imaginary presentation. This comes close to reviewing my own books, which we are not supposed to do, though I think of this type of post as a sort of ‘making-of’ short documentary.
As I have noted, our national English Studies email list is a good place to announce new books, though articles and book chapters are not announced. I invited my Department colleagues to communicate to the rest of us all their publications, if only because we need to produce an official list at the end of each year, but that didn’t work at all. I simply do not understand why it is such an effort to write an email and share the joy of having had research published. After all academic careers are built on the basis of boasting about one’s achievements in our CVs, our applications for grants or tenure. I believe there is at heart a resistance to provoke envy by sharing too much. One thing I have noticed in this crazy year when I have been publishing so many books, is that the number of congratulatory messages has been trickling down (oh, no, that woman and her books again….). I have two more to announced, you have been warned!
I find that, on the whole, we don’t give each other enough support, hence my call to have more presentations of academic books, if not in person then at least online. I understand that there might be just 10 people interested enough in a particular academic book to attend a presentation, but that’s already a lot to enjoy a good conversation. I want to resist the idea that academic books deserve less attention than other types of book, that they need not be celebrated. Presenting a book is a little bit about boasting of one’s achievements but it is mainly an event to share the results of a personal or a collective project, so why not do it? Perhaps post-Covid 19 times are not the best to suggest more online events, but I no longer want to have this feeling that our academic books are dropped with no noise into our huge market rather than launched as they deserve, with much happiness and a little bit of fanfare.