Author of the week: Stephen Elliott

last updated 8 January 2015

Stephen Elliott has invented a new kind of book tour, said Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times. The standard tour, Elliott knows from experience, consists of a handful of appearances at bookstores in select cities, each to a modest audience, often filled with people who are aspiring writers themselves. With his eighth book, an experimental memoir titled The Adderall Diaries, “I decided to try something I hoped would be less lonely,” Elliott says. Instead of sending copies of the book to reviewers, he sent them to readers of his website, who promised to pass their copies on to other readers within a week. From that network, he found dozens of people across the country who each agreed to host him for a book party and overnight stay.

Not every event panned out. Though each host was asked to guarantee at least 20 party guests, only seven showed up at the Boston reading, and six of those were cash-poor graduate students. “One of the more obvious things I realized is that people with money buy a lot more books,” Elliott says. Mostly, the events took him to small towns he’d never been to before and introduced him to readers of a breed that was new to him as well. Almost none asked about his writing “process,” he says, or how to get an agent. Instead, they frequently kept him up past 1 a.m. talking about the book itself. Often, the guests described themselves as “big readers—at least a book a week,” Elliott says. “What was most interesting to me is that none of them had ever attended a literary event.”