The impossible quest of the fledgling novelist

Martin J. Smith, the editor of Orange Coast Magazine, writes at Medium.com about a four-week, 10-state book promotion odyssey he and fellow author Philip Reed undertook with their kids in two nearly identical mini-vans.

Phil is promoting “Low Rider,” the second novel in a “car noir” series published by Pocket Books. The New York Times called the first “a volatile concoction of speed, sex and sleaze.” More important, we have a box full of my second novel, “Shadow Image,” and a supply of foam-board sales displays featuring its cover, each churned out on an after-school assembly line by 9-year-old Lanie and 6-year-old Parker. We have 3,000 promotional postcards that I designed and paid for, and a schedule of events organized by an independent publicist I hired to help promote the second in my three-book series of psychological thrillers keyed to the vagaries of human memory.

Together, as our wives back home work at the less-risky jobs that sustain our families, we’re barnstorming a circuit that will take us from Southern California in a counterclockwise, 6,500-mile loop around the West. Along the way, we intend to sign books and read selected passages to anyone who’ll listen. We’ll pass out free copies to influential booksellers and exploit the novelty of our self-styled Dads Tour to get air time on radio and feature stories in local newspapers. When things get slow in the larger stores, I’ll play my harmonica as loudly as I can to attract a crowd.

Silence equals death in our line of work, and we’re out to make some noise.

Makes for a good read. Especially if you have been on book tour or have ever wanted to be.

While we're on the subject of books and authors, LA Times critic David Ulin had an interesting interview at Jacket Copy with the creators of The Offing, a new literary magazine that will debut online this week in affiliation with the Los Angeles Review of Books. "A place for new and emerging artists to test their voices, and for established artists to test their limits," the website explains. The editor in chief is Darcy Cosper.

Among these limits are those of diversity, which is a key part of the Offing’s focus, to break down barriers, to blur — or even more, to eclipse — the lines that keep certain writers, certain communities, on the edges of the conversation, to redefine the mainstream by willfully stepping outside the bounds.

The Offing will publish fiction, poetry and nonfiction. It will feature humor, writing about place, annotated lists, visual art — in short, a grab bag of approaches to a world that has increasingly become a landscape of its own.