“I’ve just come back from a book tour in America,” says Hillel Halkin in a Jerusalem Post commentary. “It’s called a ‘book tour,’ it turns out, because of all the airplane flights and hotel rooms that have to be booked for it.” But as he recounts, this tour was a disaster, and “Before I returned to Israel we held a post-mortem at the publisher’s. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘this was pointless. We wasted my time and your money. What did we do this for?’ My publicist looked at my editor. My editor looked at my publicist. I had the impression that no author had ever asked them such a question before. ‘We didn’t want to disappoint you,’ my editor said. So now I knew: Book tours are designed for authors who love flying from city to city to entertain small groups of people who have been unable to obtain theater tickets or bridge club invitations for the evening. It would be cruel to disappoint them.”