We’ve written several posts over the years about the emergence of DIY book tours, marketing and self-publicity (read them here, and here, and here). Not only do self-published authors need to get their hustle on, but writers who publish with small presses, or find themselves mid-level (or lower) on a big house’s list can find [...]

On the NYTimes‘ Opinionator blog this weekend, Dick Cavett reflects on the role of author as salesman in “I Wrote It, Must I Also Hustle It?” Cavett writes:
I just did 12 — or was it 14? — back-to-back radio interviews from New York to Seattle and, so it seemed after five of them, all points [...]

“I don’t mind that when I’m interviewed I am speaking as a representative of biracial women. I’m heartened that people are interested. I do wonder, though, when the book is critiqued as being not enough about the biracial experience. To that criticism I say, Well, okay, but it’s not a position paper. It’s a story. [...] I have had a number of people “come out” to me, for lack of a better word, about their blended families, or about their grief, or about simply being a young person struggling against the labels, like geek or nerd, that they’d been assigned by peers. [...] They’ve connected their own stories to the stories I’ve told and suddenly feel empowered to talk about it.”

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like:
A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking [...]

To promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood will be touring five countries and thirty-five cities, performing staged readings with trios of local actors who will also sing some of the book’s original hymns (set to music). A number of these events will also serve as fundraisers for BirdLife International. Here’s [...]

A writer friend and I were talking the other day about our book-tour fantasies; we’re both guilty–against our better judgment–of romanticizing the potential of this grueling marketing tradition as some kind of literary road trip, a 50-state (hey – why not 5-country?) bookstore-to-bookstore campaign. There might be a parade float with a literary salon atop [...]