The Palm Springs Festival of Books is coming this Saturday and features a bevy of bestselling authors (and me). Authors include Dale Brown, Gregg Hurwitz, Thom Racina, Steve Alten, Loraine Despres, Senator Barbara Boxer, Taffy Cannon, Tab Hunter, Cloris Leachman, DP Lyle, Phyllis Diller, Susan McDougal, Theresa Schwegal, Barbara Seranella, Bill Fitzhugh, Nichelle Tramble, and John Morgan Wilson, to name a few. But the big event is novelist Christopher Rice in conversation with his mother, international bestselling author Anne Rice.
I’ll be there talking about medical mysteries with my buddy Doug Lyle, author of FORENSICS FOR DUMMIES, and discussing humor in mysteries with Thom Racina, Taffy Cannon, and JJ & Bette Lamb. The funniest thing about the humor panel is that it’s opposite Chris and his Mom, so I guess the joke is on us. (One year at the Las Vegas Valley Book Fest, I had a panel opposite John Irving in conversation with Roger Simon…guess which of the two events was attended only by me and three homeless people).
A common enough occurrence–my signing at my first Magna cum Murder was at the same time as Alexander McCall Smith’s. I waved at all the people in line. “Hello, hope you’re having a nice day.”
Sandra Tully, sitting next to me sighed and said, “I had a signing at the same time as Mary Higgins Clark at Bouchercon one year.”
At Bouchercon in Las Vegas, I was on a panel (with Steve Hamilton, Oline Codgill, Robert Randisi, and an editor from Putnam) at the same time as Michael Connolly’s interview with James Lee Burke. To my surprise, we had about a dozen people in the audience.
I had a signing once at the flagship Hastings bookstore in Amarillo. They went all out, with massive publicity, posters, ads, etc. They had ordered all my backlist, and had several bouquets on the signing table. There was a side table laden with treats. And not one soul showed up. The Olympics Games were being held that day, and a local athlete was in the process of winning a gold medal.