Authors travel all over the country in events called book tours, and they will occasionally drop by the bay area. With different factors to take into consideration, book tours are planned carefully.
Katharine McGee, author of the New York Times bestseller The Towering Sky, is currently on tour. With different places to go around the country, McGee and her publisher, HarperCollins, planned the tour months in advance.
National tours are already expensive, but that doesn’t stop some well-known authors from touring internationally. These stops are typically covered by international publishers for famous authors only.
McGee, now on her third tour, doesn’t have a plan for what she would like to do when she visits a particular city. Instead, she gets travel tips from the publisher, and they send her to different book stores and locations in the city. As McGee works on a new project, she doesn’t have as much time to venture around a city. With all the work, and lots of travelling, getting tired is inevitable; however, “I get really excited for the events and I also have a lot of coffee before usually,” said McGee. Once she gets to the event, she is fully prepared to sign books that fans bring.
Events come in a wide variety of sizes, some filling up a small bookstore, others overflowing the maximum occupancy of a performing arts center, and according to McGee, “the most fun part is definitely meeting readers, that’s so much fun.” Book tours give readers all over the country the opportunity to chat with their favorite authors.
Tours can be official or unofficial, meaning the unofficial tour stops are not covered by the publisher. McGee said, “[the publisher] pays for our hotels, and our flights and all our meals on the trip and the car trip from the airport” on official tour stops. Official tour stops can be book conventions; for example, during McGee’s tour, her publisher worked with EpicReads, a company dedicated to recommending books to people. In official tour stops, the authors make money when people go to their events and buy their books from said event.
