On the Road: The Do-It-Yourself Book Tour

Talking to a group of fifty sixth-graders at a prep school in Mobile, Alabama, during homecoming week was not my idea of big-time book promotion. I was three weeks into a nine-week book tour for my collection of linked stories, Last Call, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2004. My wife and I, along with our four kids, were staying at my wife’s uncle’s house, and I had agreed to give a short reading and talk for my young cousin’s class. When I heard it was homecoming week—floats were being constructed in the courtyard below—I winced. And yet, when I read a short passage about a girl falling off a horse (one of the few G-rated passages in my book), the crowded room of eleven-year-olds was absolutely rapt. They were not yet old enough to have forgotten the great pleasure of listening to a story. I asked for questions, fully expecting to carry the Q&A session myself. To my surprise, thirty hands shot up.

“Can you tell us about the publishing process?” asked a serious young girl, her notebook in hand. “And then I have a follow-up question.”

“Do you and your kids fight? Because me and my mom fight all the time,” a boy confessed. I later learned from the teachers that he was the headmaster’s son.

When I asked the kids if they wanted me to read another short passage, they cheered. And I thought, “Every writer deserves this kind of audience.”

That event in Mobile was just one of many surprises of the ten-thousand-mile, sixteen-state, sixty-event tour that I had cobbled together. Reading at a barbecue dinner at the small Tennessee university where my father-in-law teaches, addressing an audience in Amarillo that included the high school English teacher who inspired me to write, visiting Flannery O’Connor’s peacock farm during a gig in Georgia, speaking to inmates at a medium-security prison in West Texas, as well as watching my four kids strong-arm bookstore patrons into buying my book—these were among the most memorable events of what I called, depending on my level of whimsy, “The Great Last Call Book Tour” or “The Great Futon Tour.”

It will come as no surprise to any creative writer that trade publishers no longer routinely send their authors on extensive book tours. That privilege is usually reserved for best-selling celebrity authors; the rest of us are lucky to have a marketing department splurge for print ads or postcard, e-mail, and media campaigns. University and independent presses have even fewer resources to offer their authors, and many writers are left to their own devices or encouraged to spend their small advances to hire private publicists.

Of course, even writers who are sent on reading tours sometimes complain about them, and for good reason. The embarrassing turnouts at bookstores, the hectic traveling schedule, the unexpected expenses, the time away from family and normal writing routines—it’s enough to make you wonder whether it’s all worth it. Yet a book tour is still one of the great mythical perks of literary success, and it remains the best way to build an audience, develop promotional skills, and more importantly, share work directly with readers—no small matter, given how long most of us write in silence.

When I received the news that Last Call had won the Prairie Schooner Prize, I was in residence at the Blue Mountain Center, an artist colony in the Adirondacks. A fellow resident, Hannah Tinti, a fiction writer and the editor of One Story, offered sage advice. She encouraged me to be aggressive with publicity and to remember that the opportunity to promote a book is a privilege, not a burden. I was determined to make the most of the situation. I negotiated an early sabbatical from Prescott College in Arizona, where I teach creative writing and literature, spent several months planning a tour, got in touch with my inner salesman, and then hit the road with my entire family and several boxes of books. My goals were clear: sell books, build an audience, develop contacts, and pave the way for my next book. But I also wanted this tour to be fun—not a lonely, terrifying experience but something I could share with family, friends, students, mentors, and colleagues.

Because I knew I would be on sabbatical from my faculty position—the one that allows me to provide for my four children—I had to begin saving far in advance, and then I had to count pennies throughout the tour. I determined that the cost of lodging could potentially derail the entire endeavor, so I plotted my course not through major literary hubs but to places where we could visit family, friends, and colleagues. I planned an extended stay in Nashville in late October, to coincide with the due date for my sister-in-law’s baby. I arranged trips to off-the-beaten-literary-track cities like Las Cruces, Mobile, Milledgeville, and Childress because we wanted to see friends and relatives—and let them rustle up audiences for me. We researched opportunities and diversions for the kids as well—the Alamo, Helen Keller’s birthplace, Sea World, and space and science centers in various cities. (The Grossology exhibition at the Witte Museum in San Antonio was a favorite.) And I planned a two-week stay in the Texas Panhandle. Not only is that area one of the major settings in my book, I also have family there who would happily feed and house us.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life than I did during the nine weeks I was on the road. A typical day for me would include loading up my minivan (not an easy thing to do with a cargo of six travelers), driving for several hours, visiting two or three classes, shaping a reading for a particular event, eating lunch or having dinner with students, teachers, and event coordinators, driving to a Kinko’s at midnight to check e-mail and set up events two weeks down the road, and then sleeping for a few hours before starting all over again. There was, in fact, a nearly sleepless seventy-two hours when I had gigs in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Before I embarked on the tour, I naïvely believed that I would have time to write new fiction while I was on the road, but I soon gave up that romantic notion and realized that, for these two months, I was a salesman, hawking my wares out of the back of my Honda Odyssey.

Before every event, I thought of Bret Lott’s great essay, “Toward Humility.” In it, Lott describes being flown on a Learjet to what everyone expected would be a huge, standing-room-only signing for his novel, Jewel, the latest Oprah pick. He arrived, however, to find only a few of his former students and a woman with a dog in a baby stroller. The woman bought a book and asked him to inscribe it to the dog.

I kept my expectations low. I never expected to sell a book, and so I was always delighted, whether I sold five books or fifty.

Perhaps the single most important thing I did to prepare for my book tour was develop a Web site. I consulted Prescott College’s technology director and hired a work-study student who had his own side business building Web sites as my designer. I purchased my domain name (klcook.net) for a mere fifteen dollars a year from namerocket.com and spent about a hundred dollars on an annual fee for Web hosting services provided by hostingdirect.com—both recommended by Prescott College’s Web site director as cheap and reliable. I researched a wide variety of author Web sites, and then I worked closely with my designer to create the overall look of the site as well as the text and graphics on each page. The whole process took a couple months and cost about five hundred dollars.

While the initial work of designing and writing the Web site copy was exhausting, it paid off later, when I began scheduling events. The Press Kit section—with downloadable author and book-jacket photos, catalogue copy, bio, and blurbs—became particularly useful when I was on the road. I was also able to post the most recent reviews of Last Call, as well as dates for upcoming readings, media interviews, and workshops.