Guide to Building a Book Tour
Part 3: Promoting Yourself 🙈
It’s hard to believe my first-ever book tour is OVER. I spent so much time dreaming about it, then cold emailing, then coordinating logistics, then anticipating each event, it feels like it should still be happening. My tour was like a Thanksgiving dinner. The preparation of buying ingredients, defrosting the bird, strategizing what items need to be cooked when and in which devices, all for it to be over after scarfing down a plate or two in a span of 15 minutes or less. (That’s how I eat, anyway!)
I learned a lot throughout this whole process. My first article outlines what I learned about booking events: what worked for me and what didn’t work for me. As I continue to book events for Survived By and my future projects, I will look for venues that come with “canned audiences” as well as venues close by to my friends who I know would enjoy attending my event (and can possibly put me up for a night).
The last insights I will share are about promotion. I learned promotional efforts don’t always equate to a larger audience, but they certainly don’t equate to smaller ones. I also learned that sometimes promotion is within your control, but sometimes it’s not.
Collaboration is key
The events which had the largest number of attendees were the ones where I collaborated with other writers. In Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, I collaborated with the Northern Idaho Writers Guild. In Denver, Colorado, I collaborated with Beyond the Veil Press and The Tejon Collective. In Boise, I collaborated with the Boise Spoken Word Collective, and local poet, Dena Duke. The results were audiences in the double digits.
I did attempt to coordinate with dozens of other local poets in the different places I was trying to visit, and Dena was the only one who responded to my email request to put on a joint event. It was a smash; the largest event I had with over 30 people attending and 13 books sold (nearly half of what I sold my entire tour).
Addressing promotion with venues
The events with the least amount of attendees were the ones that had near zero promotion. At one library where I facilitated a custom workshop I designed specifically for this library based on what they perceived their community needs to be, I noticed a day or so before the scheduled event that it was not listed on the library’s social media, nor was it listed in the library’s event calendar on their website. I learned while setting up the tables and chairs for the event that the only promotion (aside from my own social media) was a paper flyer that was hung on the library’s community board. Two people attended.
The other event with the worst attendance was a reading I coordinated with a cafe in Colorado. I made a promotional graphic on my social media and tagged them in it, but they did not have any promotional materials themselves—not on their social media pages, not on their website. When I arrived in person, there wasn’t even a flyer anywhere. When it came time for my reading, I made an announcement to the eight people enjoying their lattes and frappuccinos that I was about to read from my book and that I had books for sale. After I read two poems, one table of five got up and left, leaving one table of three people. Two of my friends showed up, and it was great to have their friendly faces in the audience, but I felt so… cringe-y. “Hi, everyone, I know that you had no idea that a poetry reading was happening this morning, but I’m going to go ahead and interrupt your pleasant conversations with some poetry about my dead dad.”
I cut my set short. No one bought any books.
I learned I needed to be much more proactive and straight forward with my expectations. I couldn’t rely on the venues to promote me. Of course, some did create promotional materials that were great, but some did not. In the future, I will always create promotional materials and request the venue share them on their social media and website. If they have their own marketing team who would rather use their own graphic designs, then great! But I will never run the risk of the venue doing zero work on promotion again. It costs too much money for me to travel to these places just to find out that the location couldn’t be bothered to tell their community my event was even happening.
A baffling lesson in influencer marketing
That being said, I also learned that I could spend three months bouncing around the Mountain West, sleeping in my car, busting my ass to promote myself at all of my book tour events — half of which I performed for unpaid — in order to sell books, selling on average three books per event, just to have one TikTokker (who isn’t even a BookTokker, but rather a baker who specializes in cookies) make a post about my book which sparked a skyrocket in my Amazon book sales. Thanks to one TikTok video, I sold more books in three days than I did in three months. I felt both blessed and annoyed. It only took one influencer with two million followers for my book to reach the top ten and top twenty in the niche categories of “Poetry about Family” and “Poetry about Places.”
Before going on tour, I did reach out to several BookTokkers for reviews, and the few that actually responded to me told me they were a business and only wrote reviews for compensation, which I didn’t and still don’t have the means to provide. (But I get it! They need to make a living too!)
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So now, I am back on the East Coast. I am still booking events for Survived By, but I am also working on other projects like my memoir, Happy Iceland (forthcoming with Wild Dog Press), and my first four-week course with The Poetry Lab, The Beginner’s Guide to Poetry. I’m eager to take what I learned from my book tour experience and apply these lessons when promoting my new projects. Hopefully applying these principles in my writing life will lead to a more streamlined, organized, and strategic approach that will save me hours of work.
In summary, my biggest takeaways were:
Book with libraries because they are more apt to have a budget that can pay an honorarium;
Collaborate with other writing groups because they tend to come with a “canned audience,” attendees who are likely to come to your event whether it’s you performing or anyone else;
Create your own promotional materials and request the hosting venue use them. It won’t always mean that people will come, but without it, it’s guaranteed no one will; and
Sometimes it’s just not in your hands what’s going to happen. You can control as many factors as you can to try and be a success, and sometimes your efforts will pay off, and sometimes they won’t. All you can do is try your best.
Thanks for joining me on this three-part journey of planning and executing a book tour!
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This article was published on October 9, 2023. Written by:
