The Not-Quite End of the Book Tour

For publishers, sending authors on tour is expensive—they have to cover transport, meals, and nice hotels. And perhaps more importantly, touring doesn’t necessarily translate into better book sales. It’s hard to tell, in fact, what effect they have at all, as sales records don’t show what prompted someone to buy the book, only where the book was purchased. With the publication of my two books, most recently The Art of Forgery in June, I’ve found myself part of a lucky group that still gets to partake in this somewhat fading institution. I’ve witnessed firsthand how publishers have adapted to a changing industry—by becoming more selective about which authors to send on tour, which promotional appearances to secure, and how to make the dollars stretch.

The editors and publicists I spoke to for this article explained that, back in the day, publishers would send authors out on tour fairly regularly—the more events and cities covered, the better. But in this new, more austere era, publishers only regularly pay to send authors who are compelling public speakers, authors with large established audiences who are guaranteed to sell well and therefore cover expenses (the James Pattersons, Gary Shteyngarts, J.K. Rowlings, and so on), or authors with a high profile that extends beyond books (such as actors, athletes, comedians). Publishers might send the odd debut writer, in hopes of more media coverage, but it’s no longer a given.

In order to swing sending authors out on tour, publishers today have to make compromises. Previously, authors would get a company credit card and sort out their own travel arrangements, accommodations, and meals without supervision—often a wasteful approach. Then publishers began to experiment with sending publicists out with authors to serve two functions: as a fixer (with a theoretically more measured use of the company credit card) and chaperone. But this meant double the expense: twice the plane and train tickets, twice the meals, twice the hotels. Then arrived another solution that I only learned about on my first tour, back in 2007 for my novel The Art Thief. It peeled back the veil over this quasi-legendary concept of authors on tour (I imagined groupies, whiskey, cigarette smoke, typewriters), and exposed me to a new, and completely fascinating, role that I never knew existed: that of the awkwardly named “escort.”

Escorts, for their part, make hectic book tours exponentially easier. On my first tour in 2007, I ping-ponged around 12 cities, and not in any order that made geographic sense (for some reason San Francisco was scheduled for the day between events in Austin and Houston). I’d get up each morning around 6, groggily pack up my bag at another hotel, and be driven to the airport for an early flight to the next city. There I’d be picked up by the next escort, who’d be smiling and brandishing my book. My escort would bring me to interviews, radio stations, TV studios, press junkets in hotel rooms, to meals (they always know the best places to eat), and then to the book event.

Escorts are often the most interesting person an author will meet on a book tour. In Chicago for The Art Thief, my escort was an aspiring writer planning to pen a memoir called Super Jew, while my San Francisco escort was a novelist who had a hit about Beat vampires back in the ’70s. Authors can go a bit stir crazy, repeating roughly the same presentation night after night, and answering the same questions interview after interview, so a bit of spontaneity and company can be refreshing.

By and large, book tours mostly entail maneuvering to get on radio shows or TV programs, and less glamorous elements, like attending bookstore readings where hardly anyone shows up. At one reading, I had only three people in the audience—including my escort for that city … and my dad. At the time, I didn’t understand why my publisher had flown me all the way out to play, essentially, to an empty house. But then the store manager wheeled out hundreds of books to sign for the first-edition mail club, and I understood: Book events are not just about selling to the people who attend them, which even for prominent authors can mean only a few dozen copies sold. They’re about getting authors local media attention, getting bookstore staffers face time with authors so they can promote the books, and signing copies. While signed books do sell better, they also can’t be returned to the publisher if they don’t sell—a win-win for publishers.

So many interviews these days are by phone or Skype or email that it’s not strictly necessary to have Author A in Location B in order to get media coverage, but Fresh Air is an exception, preferring guests who can appear in the flesh. And while I did major live events in Washington, D.C. and in New York, each event only reached a few hundred people, at most. My NPR appearance alone justified the considerable cost of paying my way to, and around the U.S. on this tour, because it was bound to offer a boost in sales. While touring alone may be expensive and rarely leads directly to better book sales, Fresh Air alone can launch a bestseller.

Programs like Fresh Air can take on an outsize influence given the tenuous state of book reviewing—the practice has been purportedly dying since at least 1959. On the TV end of things, this year marked the departure of two major promotional platforms for the book industry: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, where renowned public intellectuals and authors from small presses alike could get national attention. As Alex Shephard of the independent publisher Melville House noted, “an appearance [on those shows] couldn’t guarantee a book would become a bestseller, but it was about as close to a sure thing as you could get in an incredibly uncertain marketplace.” He added that the loss of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should serve as a reminder that the book industry has long relied on third parties such as critics for promotion and that it should think of new, better ways to market itself. It’s unclear whether publishers will see tours as part of the future of book-selling—but for the sake of readers and writers alike, they should.