At Huffington Post, novelist Matthew Dicks has some good suggestions for making author appearances less boring, including not actually reading from your novel.
How to Be Less Boring
Claire Burgess
Claire Burgess’s short fiction has appeared in Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, and PANK online, among others. Her stories have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prize and Best American anthologies, but haven’t actually made it into one yet. She’s a graduate of the Vanderbilt University MFA program, where she co-founded Nashville Review. She lives in Pittsburgh by way of the deep South and says things on Twitter @Clairabou_.