Going on Tour

So you have a green light from your publisher, the book has gone to print, and you have a few months before a release date—the perfect amount of time to kick your marketing & promotion efforts into full gear. Your new goal, after completing edits and meeting deadlines, is to get your book in front of as many readers as possible. If your publisher has a publicist, or will hire one for you, consider yourself lucky. (If you don’t, take solace in the fact that any author would have to do most of the work anyway.)

If you’re considering a Book Tour—going into the wild to interact with your audience and sell you book—you must first decide if you’re really working with a Book Tour book.

Traditional book tours are best suited to “event-ready” books. Can you craft an event around your book that turns it into an evening out? Be creative. If your protagonist lives in wine country, see if a nearby vineyard will let you (and your book) host a tasting. If you wrote a thriller surrounding the World Chess Championships, build a giant chess set for readers to play with. The whole “author at the microphone” event does not get people out of their homes anymore. I recently went to a release party for Grace Bonney’s Design Sponge at Home, where we all sat down and did a craft from the book. I paid almost twice the cover price for the event, and went home with a signed copy and two unevenly monogrammed napkins. It was amazing!

Some books are suited for particular circuits or venues. If you’re writing about the black plague, head to a Renaissance fair. If you’re writing about literary theory, tap into the conference circuit. Your marketing and promotion efforts are all about closing the gap between you and your readers. The idea of such a focused tour is to go where your audience already is, in order to put your beautiful book directly into their hands.

Book Tour

• Start close to home. It will keep your expenses down, and will probably allow you to incorporate the largest parts of your social and professional networks. Reach out to the libraries, indie book stores, and book clubs in a 100 mile radius to inquire about hosting an event for your book.
• Venture out with a plan. If you have a website for your book (I hope you do), set up Google analytics to track where your readers actually are. That way, you can better determine where your audience is most likely to show up. Your website visitors will probably coincide with any friends and family you have around the country—graciously approach these people to see if they have contacts in their cities.

If you don’t have the means to take six months off to travel, or if your book is not particularly “event-ready,” consider a Virtual Book Tour instead.

Virtual Book Tour

• Go global. Virtual Book Tours are brilliant in that they allow you to reach readers in all corners of the globe; with the ease of the Internet, you can reach hundreds of new readers and provide simple links for them to purchase your book online. It also allows you to interact with niche audiences interested in your subject matter—enhancing the likelihood that you will pick up new readers.
• Network with everyone. A substantial VBT will depend on your preexisting online following. If your site gets a few thousand hits every day, write a teaser post that directs readers to that day’s tour stop. That way, the VBT works as a trade-off, between you and the blogger: you bring your regular readers to this new blog, and their readers get to learn about you. It’s a win-win: both you and the host blog get a new audience.
• Be flexible. Many authors report that Virtual Book Tours are most effective when spread out. Do multiple week long mini-tours: five days, five posts, five blogs, one week a month for 3 or 4 months. Varying your questions and answers, respond to comments, and you should be able to pick up new readers at every stop.

You could even do both; stay local for your in-person events, tapping your local haunts to host readings and release parties, and then going online to visit your readers in the Australian Outback, Paris, and Winnipeg. The only limits are the ones you imagine!