Why Book Tours Don’t Work (and why I do them)

If you are very lucky, your publisher will organize one for you around the publication date of your book. Or maybe two. But: many publishers won’t. Not even the big ones. Why not? Because book tours don’t sell books. Unless, perhaps, you are very famous. And they are incredibly time consuming to organize.

Why is that?

Well, it’s hard for people to make time to go out for a book event. It’s not just the time they spend at the event—they have to get themselves there (and pay for an Uber or a taxi or the train or for gas). They may have to find someone to watch their kids. And maybe pay for that. They have to sit in a small space with people they don’t know (and maybe mask for that and keep their fingers crossed, if they or someone in their family is immune compromised.) In times when there are plenty of free book events online that one might tune in to while cutting up carrots for dinner (not to mention BookTok), that’s a bar few people are willing to clear to listen to someone they don’t know talk about or read from a book they haven’t heard about.

And hosting an event is an investment for anyone who organizes it. If it’s a book store, the margin on what the store might make on the few books they will sell that evening is extremely slim. And most independent bookstores operate on tiny margins overall. The store has to pay an employee to be there and help with the event: set up chairs, make sure the mic works (if there is a mic), maybe act as host opening and closing the event, clean up afterward, make sure no one in the audience misbehaves. While they do that, they aren’t selling books or stocking shelves, or taking inventory, or whatever else the store really needs them to do. The store also will have to invest someone’s time to send an endless slew of emails to get the event coordinated and to create and curate social media posts. And, in the end, they might sell seven books. Or fewer. Or none. Most often, book stores will therefore ask that you share your event with a locally well-known author, who will bring in an audience. Which means it’s up to you to find that person.

If you are reading at an academic venue, someone has to reserve a room. Someone has to make sure the audio-visual systems work. That the door to the building is unlocked. That announcements go out. That flyers are designed and printed and posted. They’ll field emails complaining about the timing of the event (Someone will complain that it’s not at a time when they can get childcare. Or that it’s conflicting with their class. Or that it’s drawing an audience away from a competing event.) and about the space (It’s not accessible. It’s too cold. Too hot. Too loud. There are too few chairs. The acoustics suck. Or it’s too cavernous to allow for the kind of interactions between reader and audience one might hope for.) And, yes, the organizer must send an endless slew of emails to put everything in place. (And someone will complain that they didn’t get it. Or that they are getting too many emails about things that don’t interest them.) Professors who send their students to the event must work out how they will tie it to their class. How to get their students there. How to assess whether the students actually went and what they learned. How to deal with students who complain about not being able to attend. Those hours add up. And they’re usually unpaid add-ons to someone’s regular duties.

And you, as the author, will hold the other end of all those communication strings. You’ll be emailing back and forth, endlessly, with your publisher’s publicist (if they have one) or with the venue organizer(s). You will rearrange your calendar, over, and over, to try to string together a tour that makes temporal-spatial sense (no, you can’t drive from Boston to Chicago and then back to New York in two days to do back-to-back readings). As soon as you think you’ve got the tour put together, someone will cancel, or move a date. You, too, will spend time traveling, perhaps time in hotel rooms you don’t care to be in (or can’t sleep in). And eating airport food. Or corn chips in your car. Or overpriced restaurant meals. And, most likely, you will be doing much of this on your own dime. While earning maybe a dollar for every book you do manage to sell. Which makes zero financial sense. And takes an enormous time away from the limited hours you may have in your day or week or month to work on your next book.

So then, why do it? For me, book tours are worth it because the people who do show up to book events may be few, but they are my people. And knowing, bodily, that “my people” exist in places far from my home, that they will come out on an icy night in Syracuse, or Chicago, a muggy June or August day in Philadelphia or New York City, or after a long day of classes in a small college, is charging my psyches with a sense of connection and purpose and hope.

And there are the surprises that make a tour worthwhile: understanding that your book, which you saw as a book written by, about, and for women, draws in men. And that these men then want to tell you how much the book meant to them and why. Especially when you then hear how much your book about the wartime experiences of women touches veterans. Or sons of mothers who survived a war. Or daughters of fathers who, returned from wars abroad, acted incomprehensibly. Or when you look at your audience of students, dragged there by their professor, who are scribbling furiously, as they learn that making a home in a foreign language is an experience that can be shared and held.

And then there are the friends you love, who are now taking the opportunity to show you, bodily, how much you mean to them. They put you up in their home, making sure you have extra pillows, extra blankets, extra everything. Or they nudge their relatives to put you up. They drive you to the airport, or they feed you meals. They rustle up a tiny bookshop in their neighborhood for you to read in. They host your reading. They drag their friends to your events. They repost your event announcements. They go along on long road trips to keep you company. They introduce you to new friends. Or find the local writers who might read with you. And they keep telling you that your words matter, to them, and to the world.

For a book that isn’t the kind of book to hit best seller lists (most aren’t), a book tour is a way of sowing seeds. You hope that the few folks who do come out to book events will tell their friends about your book. They’ll buy a copy for their mother, or their sister, or their aunt. Who, in turn will have mothers, sisters, aunts who might like to read. The small publisher who doesn’t have the budget for an advertisement campaign, or the clout to get your book reviewed in bigtime newspapers, or the people power to organize big tours for you, is the same publisher who will keep your book in print for many years. So you keep planting seeds. You keep sticking out feelers for more events. You say thank you to everyone, because you mean it. You agree to live inside this small—but maybe growing—thing, this community that’s made of conversations, faces, words.