The Book Tourist: Seven Steps to a Wildly Successful Book Tour

By Liz Coursen

Sell more books. Make more money. Have more fun! Incorporate an effective, efficient book tour into your marketing arsenal.
My first book tour was a disaster. You’re about to hear all about it. My second book tour has been an enormous success. You’re about to hear how I did it. I’m taking what I’ve learned and I’m busy planning my third book tour for my fourth book.
You can do this. I can help.

Hi everyone! My name is Liz Coursen, and I’m here to talk about book tours. Not Linkedin, not Facebook, not Twitter. I’m here to talk about book tours: old-school, boots-on-the-ground, eyeball-to-eyeball, pressing-the-flesh book tours, when you go out in public and, on the strength of your personality and your book’s message, you transform an audience of strangers into a group of friends. Such good friends, in fact, that they’ll spend their hard-earned money for the opportunity to read your written words. A book tour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Coursen
• Release date: Jul 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476231457

Liz Coursen

Liz Coursen grew up bouncing between Brunswick, Maine, and Sarasota, Florida. The Book Tourist: Seven Steps to a Wildly Successful Book Tour, compares and contrasts her efforts to promote her books as both a traditionally published and self-published author, and shares the things Liz has learned, soup-to-nuts, about how to sell books through successful book tour events. The Book Tourist is her fourth book and first ebook. A graduate of Emory University, where she was the only girl on the ice hockey team, Liz put herself through college by starting a lawn care service. She describes herself as a "serial" entrepreneur, and has done such varied things as been a construction contractor, a terra cotta pottery importer, and a buyer and seller of large diamonds. Liz lives in Sarasota, where she is a member of Toastmasters International and is active in local animal rescue efforts. She recently started a library for homeless people and has coordinated the donation of more than 6000 volumes to the homeless and needy people in her community.

Book preview

The Book Tourist:

Seven Steps to a Wildly Successful Book Tour

Elizabeth Huntoon Coursen

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2012 by Elizabeth Huntoon Coursen

This ebook was written for authors and aspiring authors. It is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold or given away. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard-won experience.

Dedication: For authors everywhere with the guts to go out and meet their readers.

Table of Contents.

Introduction.

The Seven Steps to a Wildly Successful Book Tour

Step 1. Public speaking.

Step 2. Embrace the Internet.

Step 3. Start to watch C-Span’s BookTV.

Step 4. Make the calendar your friend.

Step 5. Who is your audience?

Step 6. Where is your audience?

Step 7. Make each event an EVENT.

Conclusion.

About Elizabeth Huntoon Coursen

Introduction.

You may have written a book about war. You may have written a book about peace. You may have written a book about cheese that won’t stay still. You may have written a book about how you made your first fifty million, or a book that contains your prescription for life—or love—everlasting.

Do you secretly imagine that a New York publisher is going to swoop down on you, carry you off to Manhattan, wine you and dine you, and—over dessert—thrust a six-figure check into your trembling palm and plead with you for the opportunity to publish your book? Or—just as secretly—do you imagine that somehow, some way, on the strength of your book’s (obvious) merits, the American public is going to find out about it and beat a path to your door?

If you harbor either one of those illusions, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. It’s not going to happen. Not in this day and age. If you are a first-time author or a relatively new author, traditionally published or self-published, know this: the joys of marketing and publicizing your book will fall squarely on your shoulders.

How can I say this so unequivocally? Because I’ve been traditionally published and I’ve been self-published, and each time I’ve been completely responsible for marketing and publicizing my books. Of course, when I was traditionally published, I never imagined I’d have to lift a finger. In fact, when I inked the publisher’s contract to write my first book, I had a dream…

In my mind’s eye I could see myself on my book tour, wearing a very stylish suit, with heels as high as my skirt was short, and a large hat (between you and me—in my dream I was also wearing white gloves), graciously signing copies of my book to people who were happy to wait in long lines for the opportunity to shake hands with The Author. You know, oh so lady-of-the-manor, very—in P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful phrase—noblesse oblige.

After the signing, a solicitous, eager-beaver young person from the publishing house would grab my bags and usher me on to my next event, where the whole process would repeat itself. Perhaps the young person wouldn’t exactly open the door to the stretch limo for me, but a stretch limo (if you must know, a 1969 Mercedes 600, black, with tinted windows) parked at the curb figured prominently in my dream.

The publisher’s assistance, however, would begin long before the book tour; I clearly pictured the publishing house’s staff hovering in the background, so very supportive, receiving my much-anticipated manuscript with glad cries of It’s here! It’s here! echoing the hallways. Steely-eyed summa cum laude graduates in tweed, twin sets, and pearls would gather around the coffee maker, engaged in rarified debates about whether (or not) I needed a semicolon or a comma at the bottom of page sixty-eight. The fact that I was personally rather hazy about the difference between a semicolon and a comma was not germane—I felt—to the conversation; the prosaic reality of grammar and punctuation, the mysterious orchestration of the book tour…all those details were properly the responsibility of the publisher because, after all, I was The Author. As I said at the outset, this was a dream.

The relationship between me and the publishing house turned out to be just a tad (ahem) different. Not only was my grasp of the intricacies of punctuation shaky, the publisher’s people absolutely declined to play the role of punctuation fairy and wave their magic wands over my manuscript, making it error free. In fact, their punctuation prowess wasn’t much better than my own, and actually seemed to be…worse!

People talk about traditional publishing like it’s some kind of silver bullet, but I was hard-pressed to find a silver lining to my experience. The fact of the matter was that my manuscript came back to me with more errors than it left with. Captions were transposed; illustrations were cropped incorrectly, despite my circles and arrows and conversation. Certain editorial decisions were made that I vehemently disagreed with—I didn’t have the knowledge or the self-confidence to carry my position.

Those decisions, thrust upon me by the publisher, rankle to this day. Trust me: it’s not a good feeling to pour your heart and soul into a book, to toil on it for over a year and, in the end, be dissatisfied with it because of someone else’s decisions. Ouch!

The ignominy of the traditional publishing experience continued. My book was available on Amazon.com before I saw the first copy, and for cheaper than the publisher was selling it to me. (So much for being The Author!) And, not to talk about money—perish the thought that any of us actually make money on our literary endeavors—when I crunched the numbers, it turned out that I was making a whopping $1.12 per copy.

As far as a book tour went, I’d organized (and paid for!) the entire book tour myself: all the contacts, all the calls, all the publicity, all the interviews, all the logistics, all the presentations, all the PowerPoints. The plane ticket. The rental car. The B&B. The meals. The exact timing of my trip (Maine in March—what a disaster!) had been imposed from on high, dictated to me by the publisher’s system, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it except learn from the ensuing debacle.

At some point during the process, a thought began to bubble to the surface of my mind, a thought that pop, pop, popped progressively louder and louder until it woke me up completely and permanently from the gracious author lady dream I’d had, and that thought was this: I can do better. I can do lots better. So what if they’ve published six hundred titles: bah! I already seemed to have just as good a grasp about punctuation and grammar as they did! I could certainly organize a book tour better! So what if I was traditionally published…Big deal!

The whole experience, in fact, was enormously instructive. As difficult