November 2009

Booklife Book Tour Supplement–Links!

If you want even more context on book tours, check out

—My thoughts on the organizational aspects of book tours

—A guest post I wrote that appears today on the Powell’s book blog

On Wednesday, we’ll post James Crossley’s “A Bookseller’s Perspective,” about author interactions with bookstores. Crossley works for Island Books on Mercer Island, near Seattle.

My Endurance Tour–and Book Tours in the Modern Era

As you can see by visiting the events page, I’m embarking on 28-event 35-day Endurance Tour in support of Booklife and my new novel. I’ll be hitting a variety of venues on the West Coast and East Coast, and I hope to see Booklifenow readers at many of these events. The tour also includes guest blogging, interviews in local media, engaging with local writer groups, and much more.

Booklife covers book tours, including how to conduct a virtual book tour through guest blogging and the like. But as my friend Matt Staggs and I put together my Endurance Tour, I think we both realized that the modern book tour is a complex, organic entity, the dimensions of which are even more dynamic and three-dimensional than depicted in Booklife (I can already see I’ll need to revise that section for the second edition).

Here are some thoughts just from planning the Endurance Tour. When I get back in mid-December I’ll report on how much of this I still believe in and what new ideas were sparked by the experience.

(1) Real-world events are still important because a real-world event still triggers certain responses from local media and from the blogosphere, which is especially useful for events in large cities, where local coverage can translate into national attention. (Besides, doing a reading or other gig contributes to the cultural literacy of your country.)

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