The working life of a writer is solitary. You sit alone in a room, hour after hour, day after day, and you create pages. It takes years to write a book (five years, for me, is about the minimum on a complex nonfiction project), and once that book is finished, 
edited, revised, fact-checked, printed, and published, the extrovert part of the job begins. If you’re lucky, people invite you to talk about what you’ve written. And you do that, because, extrovert or introvert, you want folks to buy the book and read it. Social media and public radio and podcasts are nowadays hugely significant dimensions of book promotion; among the nice things about them is that they don’t require you to leave home. But the book tour in its classic form—get on a plane, go to a series of cities, do interviews in person, speak at a bookstore, sign copies—is still an important element too.
October 2, 2018
My new book, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, has recently been published (August 14, 2018) by Simon & Schuster, and since that date I've been traveling—off and on, but mainly on—to talk about it before a variety of genial and welcoming audiences and interviewers. Meanwhile the reviews have been abundant and extremely good (generally), the few controversies stirred up have been substantive and worth discussing, and the book has been longlisted (a group of ten candidates) for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. The Tangled Tree apeared at #12 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller for one week, and after that cup of coffee, it has had two months on the Times list of Science bestsellers. Simon & Schuster and I are gratified.
This week I'll head to Telluride, Colorado, to participate in an exciting new festival of ideas called Original Thinkers, created by the estimable David Holbrooke and his team. After two lectures and a panel discussion there, I'll fly home to Bozeman for a day, do some laundry, get a haircut, change the water for
