Ideas + Inspo

Reading the Book Tour Revolution Through the XP Lens

Is this a book tour or a rock concert? Or wait, is this a virtual conference? One could be forgiven for not quite knowing the difference. Book tours, a publisher-funded promotional mechanism for new releases, are a bit all over the place these days.  In recent years, the number of authors on tour has been shrunk. However, at the same time, tours for celebrity authors are the scale and excitement of a Britney show in Vegas. And, of course, with the disruption wrought by COVID-19, publishers and booksellers were forced to reimagine author events for the Zoom age. Like we said, a little all over the place.  Naturally, it felt important to try to make some sense of it. Below are experiential insights from the best of today’s book tours, whether super-sized, virtual-only or somewhere in between. A little book tour backstory: People assume that book tours exist to sell books. That they’re financially beneficial for authors, publishers and bookstores. But as literary agent Kate McKean wrote on her Substack last year, this isn’t always the case. She provided one example based on a “successful” book event. A local seller welcomed 100 guests and sold a total of 30 books,...