More Bang for the Book

John Cleese may be best known for his goose step in Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch and as the zany hotel owner in “Fawlty Towers,” ’70s-era British television comedies that played up the weirdness lurking beneath petit-bourgeois conventions. These days, Cleese has a new gig: teaching businesses how humor can “unleash creativity” and how creativity can lead to “better and more enjoyable customer service.”

Yes, it has come to this.

But Cleese, who wrote the self-help books “Life and How to Survive It” (1993) and “Families and How to Survive Them” (1984) with the psychiatrist Robin Skynner, isn’t the only author to step behind the lectern. In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. And some best-selling authors charge double that.

The venues can range from the upstanding (libraries, churches) to the downright weird. “Once, back in the ’80s, I spoke at a ‘motion upholstery conference’ in North Carolina,” the author Roy Blount Jr. said in an e-mail message. “Motion upholstery,” he explained, means “chairs that tilt back or vibrate or turn into beds.” He learned something at the conference: “Just as fish can’t see anything funny about water, people in the motion upholstery field don’t respond to jokes, however inspired, about motion upholstery.” Blount said speaking fees helped put his children through college. “Then I drifted away from it,” he said. “Now I’m doing it again; the money is a comfort in my golden years.”

Mark Twain went on tour to promote “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essays, including “The American Scholar,” originated as lectures in Boston. But these days, publishers have become booking agents. HarperCollins established an in-house speakers bureau in 2005, and Knopf and Penguin have followed suit. (Random House has teamed up with the American Program Bureau, and Simon & Schuster just went into the speakers-bureau business with Greater Talent Network.) Beyond making money, keeping authors visible long after their publication dates and making sure copies of books are on hand, the in-house bureaus also reflect a market reality: with fewer bookstores and less coverage of books in newspapers, publishers are scrambling for new ways to connect books and readers without spending too much of their own money.

Some author appearances seem one step shy of product placement. HarperCollins sent Michael Tonello, the author of “Bringing Home the Birkin,” about his life as an eBay entrepreneur selling luxury handbags, to appear at a socialite’s birthday party in Palm Beach. And the publisher urged Carolina Buia and Isabel González, the authors of “Latin Chic: Entertaining With Style and Sass,” to become spokeswomen for the National Pork Board and help promote avocados from Mexico, according to Jamie Brickhouse, the director of the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau. James Joyce was forever hard up for cash. Too bad he never thought of touring Europe to promote Plumtree’s potted meat or lemon-scented soap, notable items in “Ulysses.”

The most lucrative public speaking tends to be motivational. Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose presidential histories include “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln’s cabinet, charges as much as $40,000 an appearance and some seasons averages a lecture a week. She said she often uses Lincoln to teach businesses that “there are lessons to be learned from his skills in dealing with people, putting rivals into his cabinet, that have implications for people in managerial terms.” Novelists, take note! Enough with those finely wrought stories in which conflicted characters come to slow realizations about their fates; there’s clearly more money to be made in the advice business.

While publishers’ bureaus may charge lower fees for author appearances, most outside agencies start their authors at $10,000 and take a 20 to 35 percent cut. They’re constantly adding new clients and dropping others

according to a brutal “hot or not” calculus. In the ’80s, the Royce Carlton agency represented Donald Woods, the South African journalist and author of “Biko” — but dropped him after the end of apartheid. “When Nelson Mandela was released, I said: ‘You won. You’re done,’” said Carlton Sedgeley, the agency’s president. Even though “A Beautiful Mind,” Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book on the Princeton mathematician John Nash, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sedgeley said the agency signed Nasar only after it learned there would soon be a movie starring Russell Crowe.

Some authors find talking in front of groups not just lucrative but helpful to their work. Lawrence Wright, whose book “The Looming Tower” traces the rise of Al Qaeda, said a recent lecture tour to Cairo became rich material for his reporting when he used a Q. and A. session to ask questions of his audience. Another time, “one of my best audiences was 3,000 marines at Camp Pendleton,” Wright said. “Of course, they were ordered to attend.” Still, he said, their questions were “much more pointed and urgent than most of the questions I got on the road.”

Yet for some writers, encounters with readers can be awkward. “People want to know personal things,” Richard Russo said in a telephone interview. “Because I write a lot about bad marriages, they’re disappointed to learn I’ve been married to the same woman for 36 years.” After “Empire Falls,” Russo said he started getting a lot of requests from ailing towns asking him to figure out how to fix their problems.

Russo said he’d gone “in two decades from $500 and happy to get it to something closer to $20,000.” But he said he was concerned about the next generation of writers. “Now, in 2008, Rick Russo can draw a crowd, but in 1988, when ‘The Risk Pool’ was published, I couldn’t,” he said. “It worries me there are young writers out there now who should be building audiences and whose publishers are not putting them on the road the way they put me on the road.”

Of course, some writers find book tours exhausting. “What finished me off several years ago was a 19-city tour in 30 days that I did for my novel ‘True North,’” said the novelist Jim Harrison. “It was ruinous to my health and sanity, what with airports being a cross between dog pounds and immense toilets.” These days, “I go out in public as little as possible,” he said. But he does agree to three appearances a year, “to pay for my fishing obsession,” and charges $5,000 to $10,000 a pop, “depending on how difficult it looks to be.”

Then there are the truly ego-destroying experiences. The novelist David Leavitt recounted an event at an arts festival last month in Milan where he and several other writers discovered they had been booked to appear along with Jethro Tull. The paying audience came expecting to hear the rock band, not the writers — and made their opinions clear.

“Opening for Jethro Tull made me realize how ersatz the whole enterprise can be,” Leavitt said. “After all, there’s nothing like a genuine performer ... to make you feel your own inadequacy.”