How a book tour is actually put together

Every time a tour is announced I get the same message from somebody: why are you not coming here? It is a fair question and the answer is never what people assume, so here is the mechanism as I understand it from five of these.

Who builds it

Not me, and not really the publisher’s marketing department either. It is one person — at Harrowgate, Tomás — who spends about three months on the phone to booksellers and festival programmers, and the shape of the tour is the shape of who said yes.

Why a particular shop is on it

Usually because that shop has already sold the previous book well, or because a bookseller there personally championed it and asked. Bookseller enthusiasm is the single biggest input. If your local shop wants an author, the most effective thing anybody can do is tell the shop, not tell the author.

Why a shop is not on it

• The dates did not work, which is boring and is the reason about half the time.
• Two shops within twenty miles both asked, and putting on both would split an audience neither could then fill.
• It is a long way from the other dates and the maths did not work. Tours run on rail fares and one night in a Premier Inn, and a detour that adds a travel day usually loses the date somewhere else.

Who pays

Festivals pay a fee and their own travel. Bookshops mostly do not pay a fee — the economics are a ticket at roughly the price of a book, redeemable against the book. The publisher covers travel for a launch tour and progressively less after that. Libraries are a different case again: budgets are gone, so most library events are either free or funded by a regional scheme.

I keep a handful of unpaid library dates a year on purpose and give them to places that are not on the festival circuit, because those are the rooms where somebody turns up who was not already going to buy the book.

What an author can change

Less than you would think about the route, and more than you would think about the format. I have asked to stop doing straight readings in favour of being interviewed, because forty minutes of my own voice is a lot to ask of a Tuesday. That request was granted immediately and nobody minded.

If you want an event near you, write to the bookshop. Genuinely — it works, and it works far better than writing to me.