From Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds:
Hey! You asked if I was going out into the world on book tour for Wayward? Why yes, I am, to these places right here:
11/12, 3pm: Doylestown Bookshop, Doylestown, PA
11/15, 7pm: Eagle Eye Bookshop, Atlanta, GA, with Delilah S. Dawson
11/16, 6pm: Malaprops, Asheville, NC
11/17, 7pm, Queens University, Charlotte, NC (link to come)
11/19, 2pm, Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA (link to come)
11/20, 2pm, B&N, Potomac, VA (Alexandria)
And then there are two additional dates in December —
12/4, 3pm, Let’s Play Books, Emmaus, PA talking to Bo Koltnow of WFMZ, takes place at Nowhere Coffee Co – South Mountain.
12/10, 1pm, B&N Bethlehem (which is actually in Easton, PA?)
. . . .
Where can you get signed, personalized copies?
Well, any of these should be able to furnish that if you’re coming to the event. As for if they’ll ship to you, I suspect you can through Eagle Eye, Malaprops, Fountain, Let’s Play. I can also guarantee that Doylestown Bookshop will, because they’re my local store and I’m going there on 11/10 to sign the books that they’re sending out!
. . . .
Why aren’t you coming to my town specifically?!
BECAUSE I HATE YOU okay wait no that’s not it.
So! I don’t set this tour up. My publisher does. And in that setup they contact bookstores, find out what stores are interested, what stores think they can run the event and run it well, where I have readers and where I can make new readers and so on and so forth. Then they do calculus based on how I can get to each of these easily. The tour is in November, where weather might start getting hinky in parts of the country. And air travel is janky as fuck right now. Here, the goal was to manage a tour that was predominantly driving. And doing a Southern tour in this case made sense — the weather should be better, I haven’t done a tour down there before, and there are a number of stores I’ve wanted to get to (Fountain and Malaprops in particular!). And it’s configured in a way to maximize that first week of visits.
All of this is predicated too on the worry that book events aren’t all the way “back,” so to speak, in the not-quite-post-pandemic-but-we’re-pretending-it’s-post-pandemic era. It’s not that they’re not happening, but they do seem erratic. (Which is why it’s important if you can show up, if possible! Support stores! Support events! Bring me candy and whiskey I mean what!)
If your town isn’t listed, I apologize, I might get there in the future. Unless you’re a jerk. Then I will never come to your town ever! Ha ha ha! Jerk!
Link to the rest at Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds
As PG has opined before, he thinks book tours are somewhat (massively?) outdated. Looking at the schedule, PG wonders how much additional time will be occupied by preparation and how long it will be before Chuck feels much like writing anything new.
PG doesn’t recall if he has used TPV to observe that a great many authors (likely the majority) are introverts. That’s one reason they can spend a lot of time at a keyboard by themselves.
Extraverts tend to be energized by lots of interaction with people. Introverts tend to feel drained by the same experience. More than one author has returned from a book tour feeling exhausted and drained of any creative energy. Not much gets written while the creative juices regenerate.
PG wonders if all the out-of-pocket expenses involved in planning and executing an author tour were used to buy more ads on Amazon if the results, measured in book sales, might not be greater. Out-of-pocket costs don’t include the time value of flunkies at the publisher who have to set up and coordinate each of the bookstore visits, including shipping a bunch of dead-tree books to and fro.
But PG could be wrong about all of this.