February 7, 2023
Hey folks!
I’ve received some queries over the last several months from authors asking about the 3-month tour I did last fall to support BOYS IN THE VALLEY. Did the publisher pay for it? Did you pay for it? Did it “work”? Was it a good idea? Should I do it??
To answer some of that and hopefully help out other authors who may be wondering about some of the questions above, here’s a quick breakdown of how I did the tour and what I thought made it, well, make sense for me.
THE SETUP
Let’s start here: A while back I signed a 2-book deal with Tor Nightfire. The first book was BOYS IN THE VALLEY, which was scheduled to be published in July 2023.
Once we had a set date, I made the decision that I wanted to do a big, old-school road tour for the book.
Now, here’s why it made sense for me (in theory) to do this:
It was my first “big 5” trade release and I wanted to get the book on the radar of as many bookstores and readers as I possibly could, and a tour felt like the best way to achieve that.
I’m fortunate enough that I write full-time. Meaning, this is my job. So taking off work, as it were, wasn’t an issue. As it turned out , because of the writer’s strike, my wife (who works in the entertainment biz) was also able to take some time off because, frankly, nothing was happening in Hollywood for a while.
So I figured I’d tour the country, starting on the book’s release date and finishing up at the end of August. Two months seemed like a good amount of time to do a coast-to-coast tour.
The first thing I did, starting in March 2022 (over a year ahead of time!), was reach out to some local stores here in Los Angeles and San Diego and book the opening dates (because you gotta start somewhere).
Then I started organizing a list of stores I wanted to have events with. Names I knew well like The Poisoned Pen, BookPeople, Murder by the Book, Powell’s, etc. You get the idea. I also looked at stores where other horror authors had events, such as certain Barnes & Noble’s that were horror enthusiasts, and local indie stores such as Mysterious Bookshop in NYC , Copper Dog Books in Massachusetts, and Doylestown Books in Pennsylvania. Essentially, I was creating a road map from LA to Boston, with a lot of travel in-between.
Of course, I knew it would be expensive, and there was no way I could afford to go out of pocket. When I approached my publisher about tour dates, they effectively told me I was on my own (not bashing my publisher here, this seems to be the industry standard these days for authors who are not perennial NYT Bestsellers).
When I sat back and looked at the stores I wanted to hit, and the time and expense involved, I came up with a tally of approximately 25 stores and $10,000 of expenses, give or take. And those expenses are pretty much travel (planes and rental cars) and hotel. I wasn’t really including food, but if you wanted to toss on another couple grand for grub and booze, you’d be in the ballpark.
Once I had about a dozen stores confirmed at key points across the country, and a rough timeline and plan of how I was thinking about getting around, I knew I had to figure a way to come up with the dough.
My first (and only) plan was that I’d have to raise the money via a Kickstarter.
Now, being transparent, I’m fortunate enough to have a wonderful, passionate fanbase of readers. Most of whom hang out in a Facebook group called Fracassi Freaks, which was started by three readers of mine who wanted to create a place to chat with other folks who enjoyed my stories. A couple years later, the group grew from a dozen members to over 500 (and is currently just over 600 amazing members). In other words, I had a head start, a core group of people who I thought would dig it if I could create some cool content and some exclusive merchandise to sell through the Kickstarter to fund the tour (or at least most of it).
The Kickstarter launched in April 2023 and, in about 2 months, raised just over $14,000, which blew me away, as you can imagine. I was hoping, at best, for $5-6k.
Now, here’s some facts you need to understand before we go spending all that money:
Kickstarter takes a cut. I believe it’s 8% (a 5% commission plus processing fees). Not insignificant.
I had promised folks a lot of stuff, and we’ll get into that momentarily. But suffice to say that about $5,000 was dog-eared to create the books and special items I’d promised backers. So now we’ve gone from $14k to approximately $8-9k. Still great! But it’s getting crunchy.
Lastly, there was a ton of work involved creating all the things I’d promised. So I knew I’d be devoting some serious hours to that, as well. Which I’m still doing today - almost a year later. In other words, it ain’t like turning on a faucet and the money pours out, you need to be ready to put in some time and effort.
Now, what did people give their hard-earned money for? Good question.
The big winner of the KS was a unique item. I was going to create a limited edition of my novel, BOYS IN THE VALLEY, that would be so cool, and so exclusive, that I knew a lot of my readers would be excited to have it. I created something called BOYS IN THE VALLEY: HOLY BIBLE EDITION.
Essentially I bought a couple cases of the book from my publisher and hired a binding expert to remove the covers and replace them with blue leather, embossed with the title. Inside the book we’d tip in a unique limitation page that would be Lettered A-ZZ (in the end, I created 52), signed by myself and the binder. Here’s the mockup:
The other things I did that worked out pretty well included:
Signed copies of a bunch of my books.
Tuckerizations (meaning I write your name into a published novel or story).
Some rarities of my early work from my personal collection.
A unique, limited edition book of two of my early screenplays.
Here’s what didn’t really work:
Paying me to edit / offer feedback on your story.
Zooms with me.
A raffle to win a handwritten short story.
I also want to add here that I had a friend - one of the admins of the aforementioned Fracassi Freaks FB group - jump in and help me with the Kickstarter. Mitch set the whole damn thing up, helped with shipping all those signed books, and generally ran that show for me. Yes, I know, I’m fortunate to have help. My point is - if you can get help, get it. You’ll need it.
If you want, head on over and check the Kickstarter out for yourself, and you’ll see what “sold”.
Cover of the Screenplay Book
It’s also important to point out that all the above cost money. It cost money to pay artists, binders, printers, and designers. Publishing books is no easy task, ditto with creating unique editions of your trade books, but like I said, it’s what worked and it got me on the road, and that was the goal.
Now that I was funded, I started calling all the other stores I thought I could drive or fly to without, you know, dying from exhaustion or lack of sleep. Most of the stores I called were totally cool and excited to have me come visit. I did focus on independent stores, which helped, and as I said earlier, I hand-picked certain locations that I knew were “horror-friendly”, as they’d hosted writers with similar books to my own.
The next thing I did was reach out to a lot of authors. Some of whom I’d spoken with before, some of whom I had not. Some were friends, some I’d never even met. But all of them were gracious and I think every author I asked to share an event with me agreed, which blew my mind. I want to underscore that having another author at your event is HUGE. It takes a boatload of pressure off of you to sit there alone and try to be entertaining, and it also brings out a few more people who are fans of said author, thereby filling the room a bit, if you get me.
THE TOUR
So, in July 2023 I finally launched the tour.
You can see my entire schedule of tour dates HERE.
On the road, you’re pretty much either traveling, sleeping, or doing an event. Also, and here’s a thing you probably don’t think of when planning something like this, promoting. Trust me when I say that it’s a HUGE part of making the tour even remotely successful.
You need to be ready to create graphics (a lot of graphics), and constantly feed all your socials with schedule updates. You need to promote the tour dates on your website, and via your newsletter. You’ll likely want to create bookplates to sign if the store runs out of copies (this happened twice), as well as bookmarks and/or postcards to hand out. This means stuff to design, print, and haul around. The publisher will not do this for you, so everything — every single aspect of doing this — is up to you.
In my case, we also created a special beer called, aptly, Beers in the Valley, which was brewed by Rapture Brewing in Tulsa. They handled all of that, but I did haul around giant cans of beer to hand out to folks, which was a blast.
Photo by Chad Grider
At one point, we also decided to help add more funds by creating tour t-shirts. These were a huge hit, and folks really seemed to enjoy getting them! It also got a small part of our UK leg paid off, which helped tremendously. These were sold through an online store we created.
The last thing I’ll say about the actual tour is this: It was hard.
The logistics would scramble your brains, and I was fortunate enough that my wife was happy to come aboard as tour manager and essentially work with me on coordinating hotels, cars, travel plans, routes, timing, and everything else that goes into a cross-country, two-month long trek.
Here’s just one page of a 36-page tour itinerary, just to give you an idea (yeah, that shit’s color-coded):
I’ll also offer another piece of advice: If you do something like this, give yourself breaks. At one point I think I did six tour dates in six days and by the end of that stretch (remember I’m traveling between each and every event) I was about ready to collapse. The events are fun, of course, but they’re also work, and they can be a bit stressful (will anyone show up? who’s our contact? can we get there in time?). So, you know, give yourself a breather now and then.
In addition to the US tour, I also made the decision (smartly or no, to discuss!) to head to the UK for a few dates to support my UK publisher’s release of the novel. Again, this was entirely on my dime, and honestly there was no money left from the KS, so this all came out of pocket.
I spent almost three weeks in the UK with my wife. We did events in London and Bristol, with a stop in-between at FantasyCon in Birmingham. We tried to make it a pseudo-vacation, seeing Stonehenge and the like, but after spending 2+ months on the road just prior, believe me when I say it was a work trip.
WAS IT WORTH IT
The short answer here is YES, it was worth it.
Again, every author’s situation is unique. For me, it was worth it for the following reasons:
One, I met a TON of readers, got to shake their hands, sign their books, and have beers with some amazing people from all parts of the country.
Two, I met a TON of bookstore folks. The value in meeting bookstore owners, buyers, event planners and workers is immeasurable for an author, and everyone I met was generous and kind, and supportive not only of the event, but in a desire to do future events.
Three, I sold a lot of books. Even if I didn’t have a huge crowd (generally speaking I had anywhere between 5-50 people show up at each stop), the bookstores usually bought a good amount of books, and what they didn’t sell at the event they asked me to sign, then continued selling them long after I was gone.
That all said, I thought this was an important thing to do to support my first wide release. It helped lay some groundwork for future releases, and I created some invaluable friendships by doing this crazy, extensive road tour.
Best of all? I created a trunkful of wonderful memories I won’t ever forget.
And so, the big question: Would I ever do it again?
Probably not. And here’s why:
For one, it was insanely expensive, as I’ve outlined. And even though the Kickstarter funded the US tour, it also created a mountain of work for me to do to fulfill those promises. I’m not complaining, of course, but it would be hard to do it on any sort of regular basis and still get all the writing done. Point is, great to do it once, but not a sustainable model.
Second, it was exhausting. To the point that it took me weeks to recover once I got back home after 3 months on the road. That’s a lot of time to not see your kid, or your house, or your cats.
Third, I think the value of doing it once was not a value that would repeat itself by doing it again. So much of what made the tour worth it, as I said, was meeting bookstores and readers, shaking hands, taking photos. In other words, creating relationships. Selling books took a back seat to those things, in a way, which sounds ridiculous but it’s the truth, and it was something I knew going in, so not a bad thing.
Lastly, it was a lot of work. I spent a year putting the tour together. All the things I just outlined, from contacting stores, to creating graphics, to promoting the dates… all of it took a toll and took considerable time away from creating new fiction. So again, not sustainable.
What I would and will consider doing in the future is hand-picking some stores, maybe 4-6 places, and throwing all my labor and effort into making those stops the biggest and best I can make them. If I’m fortunate, future publishers will support some or all of that plan. If not, I’ll have to decide what I’m willing to put into it, financially and time-wise.
Well, that’s the big explain.
I hope this was somewhat helpful to other writers, and if you have any specific questions please feel free to contact me.
In the meantime, I’d suggest you check out my official tour page, my tour diary (I’ll get the UK uploaded one of these days!), and the Kickstarter.
Wishing all of you the utmost success, and who knows, maybe I’ll see you on the road sometime.
PF