I’m interrupting my multi-part blurbing treatise to bring you this dispatch from Authors Night, which is a great microcosm of the publication process.
The East Hampton Star used the 2019 Authors Night as bait for the 2022 Authors Night, now recycled by me for the 2026 Authors Night
For a few years in the mid-90s, I worked at a publishing house that specialized in books about the outdoors, and in particular fly-fishing. The audience for most of our books was small; the best-case scenario was usually selling a few thousand units. But it was a passionate audience, and they were easy to find: these were people who read Fly Fisherman magazine, who bought books at the same shops where they bought tackle. Reaching this audience was neither complicated nor expensive, and because of our business scale and practices, this was profitable publishing, despite the small numbers.
Finding the audience for books: this is the essence of publishing. It’s easier to do when you repeatedly target one specific audience, which is why publishing houses specialize, why imprints exist, why thousands of small presses can survive (ish) while catering to modest-sized audiences.
The Doorman is a New York City novel, set mostly in a moneyed world, and this is where we expected to find the book’s core audience: on the streets of Manhattan, and reading AirMail and The New Yorker, and riding the Hampton Jitney to summer weekends by the beach. So for publication in May 2025, FSG plastered Manhattan with posters, and co-hosted an event with AirMail, and managed to get a brief review in The New Yorker, and gave away books on the Hampton Jitney. I did events at bookstores, libraries, festivals, and book clubs throughout the area, throughout the year. Not just to sell books in the moment, but to build awareness to create opportunities to sell even more books later.
Posters in Manhattan, books on the bus
All this awareness worked. A half-year after publication, The Doorman was chosen by the librarians of Long Island’s two counties to be the 2026 community read. This year I’ve done a lot of LI events, mostly with libraries, reaching even more of the audience that we were already reaching.
East Hampton’s annual Authors Night is a fundraiser for the library, with a hundred authors signing books under a big tent for hundreds of attendees, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like a gala, but sweatier.
This was my seventh time participating. Last summer I was there with Doorman hardcovers, this summer with paperbacks. Unsurprisingly, the sorts of people who attend a library gala in East Hampton are also the sorts of people who read my books in general, and The Doorman in particular. Both years I was overwhelmed by the number of readers who came up to tell me they loved the book. What a way to spend an evening.
I spoke with Xochitl Gonzalez, with whom I hung out last fall at the Aspen Literary Festival. And with Dan Brown, whom I got to know at Iceland Noir. And Jenna Blum, who was nice enough to interview me on her podcast, A Mighty Blaze. And Steve Israel, ex-congressman, author, and bookstore owner. And Ken Davidoff, who I don’t know from publishing, but because our kids went to school together.
A couple of agents from my book-to-film agency stopped by to say hi. And an ex-colleague from a publishing house, and a half-dozen other publishing people, and people from my apartment house, and a cookbook author I used to see frequently when I inhabited that world. Plus people who work at the local bookstore Bookhampton where I’ve done a few events over the years, and someone with the local festival Hamptons Whodunit that I’ve participated in a couple of times, and of course someone from the library.
It’s a small world, and this is how it goes, festivals and fundraisers, bookstores and libraries, one event begets another and another.
This person came to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson
Attendees enter the tent directly into something like a fair’s midway, and that’s where the most well-known authors are seated. I’ve never been a midway author, don’t ever expect to be. I spent two and a half hours abutting Neil deGrasse Tyson, who at no point for 150-plus minutes didn’t have a long line of people waiting to meet him. I could barely catch a glimpse of Robert Caro across the way.
I don’t begrudge successful authors their success; on the contrary, it makes me tremendously happy that I live in a world in which people want to meet authors. But every summer, there’s at least one author positioned on the midway not because of writing, but because of fame, and usually beauty too. These are always the longest lines. Although celebrity doesn’t guarantee that a book will be successful, it does guarantee that an audience will show up to get autographs and selfies.
An event like this can be humbling. There are 100 authors here, at vastly disparate points in our careers. I’ve sat with people who got practically no visitors during the entire two and a half hours; that’s happened to me too. This is a fact of life as an author, or maybe as an anything: you go out into the world hoping that people will care about this thing you created, and you constantly confront evidence that most people don’t.
An Authors Night dinner with Giada De Laurentiis in 2014, a decade after we worked together on her first cookbook
My house is not on the South Fork, which is the part of Long Island that many people call the Hamptons. I live on the North Fork. As the crow files, 15 miles separate my house from downtown East Hampton, but I am not a crow, and the most direct route involves 2 ferries and a variable amount of time, what with unpredictable ferry lines and predictable summer traffic, the inevitable standoff at Sag Harbor’s four-way stop.
So I left home at 3:00 to ensure I arrived by 4:30 for the photos and the setup and the author-to-author chitchat, then I parked myself at my table until 7:30, most of it spent talking with people, most of whom I’d never before met. Then I took a few minutes to cool myself next to a giant fan—it was hot in the tent—and to gather my wits, then drove to someone’s house for 8:00 dinner with a bunch of other people I’d never met, a continuation of the fundraising occasion. It was an interesting group, and a lot of them had loved The Doorman; that’s why they’d chosen this dinner from among dozens of options. I had a wonderful time.
I was cognizant that I ought to be the last person to leave this party, which didn’t happen until 11:45, by which point I wasn’t going to be able to make the last North Ferry of the night. So I drove home the long way, west on busy 27, then up to Riverhead, and around to the quiet North Fork, no traffic, radio on. This is how nearly all author events end, headed home alone, after spending two or three or seven hours in the company of strangers.
Between songs, I recognized the voice of the deejay. In the midst of the big tent’s festivities, she’d collected me from my signing table, and led me to the radio station’s setup for a live interview, which is something that my publicist had pitched a half-year earlier, pushing the Long Island Reads angle. One thing builds upon another. Some can happen quickly; others take a long time.
I got home at 1:15 a.m.
If Wally ever gets around to writing a book, I’m sure his signing table will be on the midway
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