30 May All About Author Tours

On Thursday, June 6th, 2019, I am partnering with Publisher’s Weekly and teaching a live, interactive seminar for industry professionals on author tours. We don’t have a lot of time and there is a lot to learn about doing effective tours, so I’m going to start with the necessities and then go as deeply as we can into the strategies and logistics.

The three most important things to consider about a book tour (after you’ve decided that you have enough budget to do one) are author, venues, and time.

Question #1: Is the author willing?

This may seem like a silly question, every author wants to go on a book tour, right? No, actually, not every author wants to go on book tour and some of them reasonably can’t due to a heavy teaching schedule when their book launches, family commitments, job commitments, the Red Sox are in the World Series (no, really, that happened once).

Question #2: Are venues willing?

Again, may seem like a silly question but author events aren’t huge earners for bookstores and they require a huge amount of work. Trust the venue and make sure they have all of the support they need from publicity and marketing, but also from the sales team in the form of coop, if that’s available, to help promote the event.

Question #3: Do you really have the time to invest?

An author tour requires an incredible amount of work. Pitching events to venues is just the beginning. The real heavy lifting comes in the form of getting readers (and hopefully willing buyers) into the venue. That requires an effective PR and marketing campaign, well coordinated social media outreach to communities, effective partnering with the bookstore or venue to activate their customers to attend, and activating the author to do their share of outreach and promotion. We are going to review the five point promotion plan I use to make sure an event is well promoted during the PW session.

There is plenty more to cover, so come join us. You can use discount code SRPR for 20% off the seminar. Hope to see you there: http://bit.ly/PWedu-Tour