There has been a lot in the news about an American author who held a book signing and only 2 people came. They tweeted about it and lots of famous authors like Margaret Atwood and Stephen King shared their own stories of book signings gone wrong. One of my favourite books is "Mortification" edited by Robin Robertson, who in 2003 asked lots of authors for this kind of anecdote. There are some great ones, usually involving staying over in a librarian's house in the middle of nowhere, or the drunk man asleep in the front row. But my favourite, which I present in its entirety, is about a poetry reading by poet Simon Armitage, and encapsulates every horror and torment undertaken by an author in the quest for self-publicity. === I am met off the train by an extremely nervous woman in a hire car who is generating a thermo-nuclear amount of heat and cannot locate the de-mist function on the console. In a cloud of condensation we drive to a local café, where she restricts my choic...