Bankrate: One obligation that tends to follow literary success is the whirlwind book tour. Did you enjoy being whisked about the country like a celebrity?

Fielding: It's fun the first time you do it. You go somewhere and you're staying at a nice hotel, you order room service, you talk about yourself all day, it's not so horrible. There are worse things. But it gets exhausting and it gets frustrating because you really see that it's not being done particularly well. They spend all this money to fly you all over the place and then they send you to some little bookstore in the suburbs and eight people show up. I thought, how economically feasible is this? I go to Europe on book tours and when I do, those tours are amazing. There is nowhere I go that at least a couple hundred people don't show up. You get huge numbers, you get tremendous participation, the press and television cameras are out there in full force, and you feel that you are accomplishing something. But here in North America, I think that books are best sold by just making sure that they're somewhere in the store where they're visible.

Bankrate: What was your worst book tour experience?

Fielding: I remember going on a three-week book tour right after 9/11 and I was terrified every day, terrified and depressed. I was on a plane every day and all people wanted to talk about was 9/11. After three weeks of being in a different airport every day with the National Guard with their rifles and the pilots coming on with baseball bats, I thought, my God, what am I doing?

Bankrate: Hailing from Toronto, were you there during the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) scare?

Fielding: Yes, and it was absolute lunacy because, first of all, there was nothing going on. We would see these reports on the news and just laugh. There was nothing happening in the city itself; nobody was worried, and people were not walking around in masks. But when we would travel somewhere, we'd land at an airport and we'd be sprayed. Everybody would greet us wearing masks and we thought, what is the matter with these people? I mean, you can't tell me that there weren't places in the U.S. that didn't have it. It is just ridiculous that only Toronto would be hit with this. It was just crazy. You just stayed away from the hospitals and basically you were fine. Isn't that awful? Don't go near a hospital!

Bankrate: Have you invested your book earnings?

Fielding: It was a long time before we were able to save any money; we could only afford our lifestyle, basically. Then as we got older, we did start to invest.