The two-stop book "tour"

As writers, we dream about the book tour. It’s a total cliché, even kind of an embarrassing one, but publishing a book and then going on a tour to support it feels like an indisputable mark of success, of having finally Made It. We all want to publish that first book, but for a lot of us, we also want—need, maybe—to be able to tell people that we’re sorry, but we can’t make it to team trivia for the next two weeks because we’ll be out of town for a while on our book tour. It’s the closest thing we’ll experience to being a rock star (back when there were such things, anyway), especially if your tour includes the fabled hometown show. I mean, what’s the point—of literally anything, now that I think of it—if you can’t shove your success in the faces of all those who knew you when you were nothing and assumed you’d stay that way, am I right?

Of course, cross-country, multi-city book tours funded by your publisher are mostly a thing of the past. There are a lot of reasons for this, mostly ones you can guess yourself. Book tours are expensive and don’t tend to generate a lot in the way of direct sales, certainly not enough to justify the expense on a short-term balance sheet. Book events are more about establishing relationships with booksellers, which is obviously a longer-term project that pays off later, if ever. And while it’s not true that people don’t read anymore—they do, but what they read and how they read it have changed a lot, obviously—it is true that there are more avenues for authors to put books out into the world, so of course more of them do it, even while the audience or readers isn’t growing enough to absorb all those books.

But still. The allure of the book tour is difficult to tamp down, even if the vast majority of us authors will never get to experience it at all unless we’re willing to compromise on things like scale, scope, or who pays for it.

This is part of the reason why, as of this writing, my book tour in support of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories has only two stops, this Wednesday (August 7th) at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida (my adopted hometown), and next Wednesday, August 14th, at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco (my current hometown). Other factors: I have both a regular job I must attend to, it’s really hard to book events in places you don’t have a connection to or where you don’t have an in, and my enthusiasm for big new projects can wane quickly. (Coming to know myself well, and to accept what I find, has been a pleasant side effect of getting older.) 

I’m writing this from our rental place in St. Pete, which is literally two blocks from the house I lived in while I was a local here. I lit out for the West Coast a decade ago, and haven’t been back to this particular Bay Area in seven years. St. Pete in that time has experienced the warping effects of too much outside money flowing in too quickly; in that, it’s not much different from a lot of places in America. There’s a lot of new construction—ungainly towers looming over the waterfront, restaurants closed and dive bars razed to the ground in favor of some other thing that has yet to materialize. Everything is more expensive than I remember it being. And holy shit, but was it really always this hot here? How did I ever put up with this?

Despite all that, it also feels like no time at all has passed since I left. That’s something I wasn’t expecting. My favorite local watering hole is exactly the way I left it, all these years later, with the framed photo of Tom Selleck in his Magnum, P.I. days still affixed to the register. I mostly remember which streets are one-ways, and in which direction. It still feels comfortable, this place, though I don’t think I could ever live here again. I was here during the time of my life when I needed to be here, if that makes any sense, and that time ended a while ago.

But it’s nice to be reminded of why I miss it.

Anyway, if you’re in Tampa Bay or in the San Francisco area, please come to one of my upcoming events. I’m a writer—I need the external validation.