 |
| No time for changes |
 |
| by Holger Reichard,
August 2009 |
| |
On 1st August 2009 www.tcboyle.de was celebrating it's 6th Birthday. We waited a little while to announce this, because of another anniversary had priority: www.tcboyle.com was getting 10 years old. Congratulations to T. C. Boyle and his webmaster Milo. But they better watch out. We'll try anything to catch up in the anniversary-race.
What happened in the 6th year of www.tcboyle.de?
Not very much. Last fall we even had to suspend our newsletter for a while, because a new publication required all our attention. The non-fiction book »111 reasons to love yourself« came out on August 2009 and contains apart from two Boyle quotations two anecdotes about www.tcboyle.de.
Apart from this we did a little survey last fall. Each participant was able to win a copy of Boyle's last novel The Women. The results: Boyle's most popular novel is by a wide margin Water Music, followed by World's End and Drop City.
In addition we wanted to know how our visitors evaluate Boyle's short stories - in particular in relation to his novels. For this one must know, that short stories were never not as popular in Germany as they were in the United States or Great Britain. So there is no surprise, that most participants prefered the novels. But the short stories are gaining momentum. More than a few readers stated to prefer Boyle's short story collections.
We also wanted to get some opinions about our web pages. It turned out our visitors are quite happy with it (or they didn't say otherwise, because they wanted to win a novel). Most of them praised our topicality, the constant actualization, the information content and the sheer scope of our website (more than 500 pages, not included are our forum Drop City East and the Boylevard). When we asked what we could do to improve our current site about half of our patrticipants answered: Nothing!
We are especially happy because our visitors seem to like our monthly newsletter. A reader from Düren wrote us it's so informative she rarely feels the need to look at our website. Thus we started our newsletter again in the late summer of 2009. We had to. At least because we wanted to celebrate T.C. Boyles 60th Birthday and to announce his new novel The Women.
And then there was a documentary about our favourite novelist titled The Beauty of Addiction. The airing of this documentary on the French/German culture channel »arte« and on Swiss Television (SF1) brought us many new visitors and newsletter-subscriptions.
 Then the big event: T.C. Boyle came once again to Germany. We had to wait four eternally long years for it. For two days we followed him on the spring book fair in Leipzig. Our personal meeting was unfortunately very short. But because of an extreme hectic schedule and the many interviews Boyle had to do - he seemed sometimes more like a triathlete than an author - there was simply no time for more.
 Boyle apologized for it, when we said goodbye. He didn't have to. We understood, because after several days at the book fair we could barely walk and talk ourself. All the running from exhibition booth to exhibition booth, the gallons of coffee, the long nights in Leipzig - with two of the biggest Boyle fans (they had traveled from Greece and Luxembourg for this occasion) in the world in tow - all this was almost more than we could handle. It was exhausting. But it was great. And it was fun! And it will be continued.
 Hopefully Boyles daughter Kerrie will be back too. I had the chance to meet her and torture her with my less than good command of the English language. Later in Berlin she is alleged to have said that she would have gladly spoken a few words in German ... gaffes like this didn't diminish all the fun we had in Leipzig. Boyle's visit got www.tcboyle.de considerable media attention. The respected newspapers Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, art - Das Kunstmagazin, Radio 1 Live, Swiss Television and many more mentioned us.
The German TV Channel SWR gave us even the title »Official German Homepage of T.C. Boyle«. Are we? This is a question we gladly forward to T.C.Boyle himself. Until we get an answer we will probably be only »unofficial«.
What does the future hold for www.tcboyle.de?
 This fall we will be on the book fair in Frankfurt. The ticket is ordered already. It will surely be another great experience, although we will miss the presence of a certain American author there. We hope we will have another meeting with Armin Abmeier (Die Tollen Hefte) and get new information about the publishing schedule of Boyles new books (Wild Child, When the Killing’s Done) in our country. And we hope it won't be another four years until Boyle returns to Germany.
And ... I almost forgot: Now you can find www.tcboyle.de on Twitter. Follow us if you can! |
| |
 |
| © 2009 www.tcboyle.de |
| |
| |
|
|
