In the face of growing competition, saturation of not only primary but secondary and even tertiary markets, and tours that in some cases go on for months, many authors are reworking the concept of the book tour to make it more personally fulfilling and more effective.
Whitney Otto developed a slide show in place of a regular reading to promote the paperback of her title, The Passion Dream Book (HarperCollins); Arthur Golden taught a class during his third tour in one year for Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage); and mystery writers Martin Smith and Philip Reed joined forces, piled their kids into a minivan and turned their book tour into a family summer odyssey. Amy Tan brought along a pair of Yorkshire Terriers as traveling companions in an effort to handle the shift between the huge bookstore crowds and the subsequent lonely silence of her hotel room.
The question confronting virtually every author out on the road today is, `How can I make the tour really worth it?' Even for the very famous, competition for space and media coverage is stiff. "It's an assembly line," said Otto, who conceived of her slide show as way to add originality to her presentation, and to more personally engage her audiences. It also enabled her to do a slightly different sort of tour, broadening her reach to include libraries and art schools. "Besides, Dream Book as a whole is artistically more like a painting," she explained, "and the slide show allowed me to present an overview, to look at it thematically. Also, as a fiction writer, every time you go out, you are asked `Where do you get your ideas from?' The slide show answered that question, too."
Otto is typical of authors with name recognition who have done several tours and are seeking to add new flair to what is often a repetitive and yet physically grueling itinerary. Anne Rice, who in 1995 did a three-month Servant of the Bones (Ballantine) tour by bus while writing an online tour diary carried by Salon magazine, last October decided to add a public-service component to her tour for Vampire Armand (Knopf). In New York, Las Vegas and New Orleans, she combined her bookstore appearances with a blood drive. Booksellers were encouraged to partner with hospitals, and attendees who donated blood were able to go to the front of the signing line, and were given a button that read, "I gave blood to the Vampire Armand."
For authors with less name recognition, who usually have to pay for some or all of the tour out of their own pockets, the challenge is to get the most out of their investment. Steve Oliver, author of the mystery Moody Forever (St. Martin's) remembers, "I realized it would take at least three weeks to do a West Coast tour, so I decided to go in my RV, and brought along my two cats and my two dogs, since I didn't want to leave them behind." Oliver hired an independent publicist to set up his itinerary, traveled 5000 miles and hit about three dozen stores. "I see the effort of a promotional tour as more cumulative over a series of books," he told PW. His first mystery, Moody Gets the Blues, was self-published, but thanks in part to support from Michael Connelly, it was subsequently picked up by St. Martin's, which published both the hardcover and the paperback.
Martin Smith agrees that touring is part of a larger process. "I'm gradually building an audience," he says. "For me, it's not really about getting media attention. It's making relationships with thriving independent bookstores -- usually mystery bookstores -- and then the chains tend to follow." Smith and Reed each spent more than $5000 for their four-week, 10-state tour. "We went in with no illusions," he laughed. "The worst-case scenario was that we'd spend a fun month with our kids."
The "Dad's Tour" as Smith calls it, however, brought many dividends. His first book, Time Release (Jove) just went into a third printing, bringing the total copies to 100,000. "Which," he said, "I can't help but think came partially from introducing ourselves to booksellers who hadn't heard of us." Both Smith and Reed presented their second books, Shadow Image (Jove), and Low Rider (Pocket), respectively, in person to more than 50 bookstores. "Getting to know the booksellers, getting on a first-name basis with them is, in my opinion, even more important than meeting the local audience," said Smith, who plans next time around to send out a lot more reading copies to the booksellers he met on the tour.
Of course, the kids had a great time, too, which helped keep the dads' spirits up even when hot weather thinned audiences, and Reed discovered that many of the chain outlets did not have his title in stock, though no one quite knew why. "When we got to the end of the road," Smith said, "our only real disappointment was that we didn't have books coming out the next summer so we could do it all over again."
