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Spam Nation Book Tour Highlights

lundi 24 novembre 2014 à 21:33

Greetings from sunny Austin, Texas, where I’m getting ready to wrap up a week-long book tour that began in New York City, then blazed through Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. I’ve been trying to tweet links to various media interviews about Spam Nation over the past week, but wanted to offer a more comprehensive account and to share some highlights of the tour.

For three days starting last Sunday, I was in New York City — doing a series of back-to-back television and radio interviews. Prior to leaving for New York, I taped television interviews with Jeffrey Brown at the PBS NewsHour; the first segment delves into some of the points touched on in the book, and the second piece is titled “Why it’s harder than you think to go ‘off the grid’.”

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On Monday, I was fortunate to once again be a guest on Terri Gross‘s show Fresh Air, which you can hear at this link. Tuesday morning began with a five-minute appearance on CBS This Morning, which included a sit-down with Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell. Later in the day, I was interviewed by the MarketPlace Tech ReportMSNBC’s The Cycle, as well as the Tavis Smiley show. Wednesday was a mercifully light day, with just two interviews: KGO-AM and the Jim Bohannon Radio Show.

Thursday’s round of media appearances began at around sunrise in the single-digit temperature Chicago suburbs. My driver from the hotel to all of these events took me aback at first. Roxanna was a petite blonde from Romania who could have just as easily been a supermodel. I thought for a moment someone was playing a practical joke when I first heard her “Gud mornink Meester Krebs” in a Eastern European accent upon stepping into her Town Car, but Roxanna was a knowledgeable driver who got us everywhere on time and didn’t take any crap from anyone on the road.

wcl-ji The first of those interviews was a television segment for WGN News and a taped interview with TouchVision, followed by my first interview in front of a studio audience at Windy City Live.  The guest who went on right before me was none other than the motivational speaker/life coach Tony Robbins, who is a tough act to follow and was also on the show to promote his new book. At six feet seven inches, Robbins is a larger-than-life guy whose mere presence almost took up half the green room. Anyway Mr. Robbins had quite the security detail, so I took this stealthie of Tony as he was confined to the makeup chair prior to his appearance.

On Thursday afternoon, after an obligatory lunch at the infamous Billy Goat burger joint (the inspiration for the “Cheezborger, cheezborger, cheezborger” Saturday Night Live skit) I visited the Sourcebooks office in Naperville, met many of the folks who worked on Spam Nation, signed a metric ton of books and the company’s author wall.

The Spam Nation signing in Naperville, IL.

The Spam Nation signing in Naperville, IL.

After an amazing dinner with my sister and the CEO of Sourcebooks, we headed to my first book signing event just down the street. It was a well-attended event with some passionate readers and fans, including quite a few folks from @BurbsecWest with whom I had beers afterwards.

On Friday, I hopped a plane to San Francisco and sat down for taped interviews with USA Today and Bloomberg News. The book signing that night at Books Inc. drew a nice crowd and also was followed by some after-event celebration.

Departed for Seattle the next morning, and sat down for a studio interview with longtime newsman (and general mensch) Herb Weisbaum at KOMO-AM. The signing in Seattle, at Third Place Books, was the largest turnout of all, and included a very inquisitive crowd that bought up all of the copies of Spam Nation that the store had on hand.

Yours Truly at a book signing in Seattle's Third Place Books.

Book signing at Seattle’s Third Place Books.

If you’re planning to be in Austin tonight — Nov. 24 — consider stopping by B&N Arboretum at 7:00 p.m. and get your copy of Spam Nation signed. I’ll be holding one more signing — 7:00 p.m. in Washington, D.C.’s Politics & Prose on Dec. 4.

For those on the fence about buying Spam Nation, Slate and LinkedIn both ran excerpts of the book. Other reviews and interviews are available at Fortune.com, Yahoo News, and CreditCards.com. Also, I was interviewed at length several times over the past month by CBS’s 60 Minutes, which is doing a segment on retail data breaches. That interview could air as early as Nov. 30. On that note, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a lengthy story on Sunday that followed up on some information I first reported a year ago about a Ukrainian man thought to be tied to the Target breach, among others.