Lessons Learned from a DIY Book Tour

As I write the first draft of this post, I’m on a plane heading home from North Carolina, where I did readings from my debut book, One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture. Now that I’m somewhere in the middle of my self-imposed tour, I’m glad Mary Sheffield-Gentry asked me to pause and reflect on what is a brand new experience for me.

Here are some things this amateur-hoping-to-become-a-pro has learned:

Make a plan and start early. Unless you are a proven best-selling author, your press will not send you on a tour (bummer). That means you’re in charge, which can be daunting or liberating. I’m choosing to see it as liberating because I can set my own schedule and embrace my tendency to want to control/plan everything book-related anyway.

Think about how much traveling you can afford, how often you can handle appearing in public, and how much time you will be able to devote not only to the readings, but also to the much heavier workload of securing, planning, promoting, and preparing for those readings. I did not anticipate how much time I would need to spend just on sending and answering emails involved with my book tour, for example.

Contact bookstores three to six months before you want to read there. Universities require more lead time; if you want to read sometime in the fall 2019/spring 2020 school year, for example, start reaching out in early 2019, preferably before. Applications for literary festivals and book festivals are due anywhere from a year to six months before the actual festival.

Another thing: a book tour doesn’t have to be a line-up of back-to-back readings that takes you away from home for weeks at a time. I scheduled two to four events per month for the first four months after my book appeared, and I am working to arrange a few more for the rest of the year. A book tour also doesn’t have to be travel-oriented. You can do a blog tour (asking prominent book bloggers to review the book) or a radio tour, and arrange for author interviews on important book-related sites, like I did here.

Partner with someone local. Bookstores want to know your reading will bring a crowd, and inviting someone from the community to participate will help make that happen. For my Asheville event, I asked Dr. Mary Saunders Bulan, professor of environmental studies at Warren Wilson College (an institution just outside the city), to join me “in conversation.” She interviewed me about the book in front of a live audience, and I also did a quick reading. Look to local writers, professionals, and other people whose work coincides with yours somehow. Ask bookstores about their book clubs, too; you might be able to get a club to read your book and host you for a discussion, as I’m doing at The Book Cellar in Lake Worth in April.

Another option for partnerships is community organizations. When I wanted to put something together in Tampa, for example, I reached out to The Sustany Foundation, a local group working to advance sustainable agriculture initiatives. They agreed to make my reading an official Sustany Foundation event, invited their members, and did much-needed promotion. In Greensboro, I put dual strategies to the test by being in conversation with local environmental writer Lee Zacharias and asking Green Drinks Greensboro, a group of environmentally minded people, to have the event serve as one of their monthly gatherings—and I ended up with an engaged group of 15-20 people, which I’ve learned is a decent turnout for a relatively unknown new writer.

Whether or not you partner with a person or organization, always reach out to local groups, institutions, universities, and the like to inform them about your event. Do some research to find out who is likely to be interested in your book.

Think outside the bookstore box. Yes, bookstores are great places to read—but they aren’t the only venues. People love the option of enjoying a drink or some food while you talk, so consider places that offer one or both. I held my book launch party at a brewery with a history of supporting the arts, and it was amazing! Think, too, about places that tie in with your writing somehow—a store, a public place, anywhere that makes sense. In Tampa, I read at an independently-owned wine shop specializing in organic and natural wines, which connected with my book’s argument for regenerative agriculture. Don’t forget about libraries, too.

University readings are a bit more difficult to land, but definitely try because they help you establish and maintain important connections with writers who also teach. Approach your alma mater first, but also write to other universities with a reading series or programs that complement your work. In the coming weeks, I plan to identify and then reach out to university English departments that focus on research writing, environmental writing, and literary journalism and see if they would be interested in bringing me to their campus. Wish me luck!

Be prepared for rejection. For every “yes” I get, I have received at least ten “no’s.” Most people you query about a reading either won’t answer or will decline. That is normal, so do not get discouraged. Another thing: be prepared for readings that go horribly. By that I mean no one shows up. This, too, is normal, even for writers who are well known.

That said, do your best not to set yourself up to fail. Do readings in places where you have connections and people you know, and promote the heck out of events in places where you lack these advantages. If you have a few spare bucks, consider doing some advertising on social media. Share everything you schedule with your publicist so he/she can alert local media.

In closing and in the spirit of continued promotion, I humbly invite you, dear reader, to come out to one of my events in the coming months—and let me know about yours!

Stephanie Anderson is a writer living in Boca Raton, Florida. She holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, where she currently serves as an Instructor of English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Flyway, The Pinch, Hotel Amerika, Midwestern Gothic, Grist Journal, The Chronicle Review, Sweet, and others. Stephanie is proud to have grown up in South Dakota, and her work often centers on the prairie and rural life. Her debut book titled One Size Fits None, a work of literary journalism focused on regenerative agriculture, appeared with University of Nebraska Press in January 2019.

The Power of Observation

In his foreword to The Best American Essays 2012, editor Robert Atwan has some interesting commentary about today’s creative nonfiction students. He writes, “They apparently believe that when they write an essay—whether it’s required or inspired—they should write about themselves. An essay for many of them is wholly autobiographical, pure and simple.”

He goes on to ask why: “Could it be that many students don’t know enough, don’t have favorite artists, composers, books? Or have no passion for anything outside themselves and their own microculture? Or could it be that today’s young writers are afraid to tackle subjects that are presumably for experts? In other words, that they believe that an explication of [an artist’s] artistic genius could only be set forth by someone with a PhD in American art history? Are students so intimidated by expertise that they’ve lost confidence in their own powers of observation?”

Wow. A bit harsh, perhaps, but given his position as editor of The Best American Essays, and the fact that he actually founded that publication in 1986, and he has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Boston Review, and the Atlantic Monthly AND has done many other things there isn’t time to mention here, I’m inclined to believe him. Atwan is talking about MFA students specifically, but one can assume his comments that show favor for the topic-oriented essay would apply to writers in general. It’s not hard to imagine him issuing the same admonition to any writer of nonfiction.

Of course, Atwan is not the only one who would like to see less focus on the personal and more focus on topics or subjects other than the writer’s life. In an essay on this very subject, poet Nancy Kuhl sees the current popularity of personal writing as a result of a common assumption that “writing is primarily a means of self-expression, as opposed to a craft or a creative discipline.” She argues that many students—she draws on her own as examples—see writing as therapeutic, and as such they think it matters more how the writer grows through the process of writing than how the reader is affected by the work or how it is evaluated according to literary standards.

I think some writers might be tempted to believe the same thing: that writing is about expressing the inner self, it’s healing. Kuhl herself points out that yes, writing can be healing and surely is therapeutic, but she quickly follows that by saying healing and therapy are not the point and certainly not the main goal of writing. And yet, still, the notion of finding one’s self with words persists. Perhaps this accepted notion of writing as self-expression is what drives nonfiction students toward the personal essay. Perhaps it is what increasingly drives professional writers toward it as well, including myself.

Let me be clear: I do not have anything against the personal essay. I’ve written a lot of them, and I’ve read a lot them, and I really like a lot them. But I agree with Atwan and Kuhl that students—and by extension all writers of nonfiction—should not see nonfiction as limited to the personal essay alone. If writers have strayed away from the art of essaying that, as Atwan defines it, is “the trying out of, or fooling around with, ideas and observations,” and if those essays are largely without the kind of substance readers need, then yes, we have a problem here. If people are writing primarily for self-expression or therapy, as Kuhl suggests, and not to offer others a new way of viewing the world or a new understanding or insight into something, then yes, we might be misunderstanding the purpose of writing.

I think that, overall, a return to ideas and observations will bolster nonfiction’s reputation and quality. I would like to see more topic essays and more narrative journalism in the realm of nonfiction, as would Kuhl and Atwan. I want to see nonfiction writers exploring the lives of others or topics that aren’t their own lives more often, because I think writers are allowed to exercise their powers of research, observation, and truth-sifting in more fruitful ways when they are evaluating others, not themselves.

Atwan questions whether today’s MFA students are brave or skilled enough to essay. Are we confident in our own powers of observation? Can we tackle the big topics? Can we find a more universal truth than the truth as we’ve lived it individually? Those are the questions I’ll leave you with, and I hope you find that yes, you do discover and relish the power in your own observations.



Stephanie Anderson is a first-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from Augustana College in Sioux Falls. Stephanie has worked as a journalist for a farm newspaper, and then as a writer and photographer for an international humanitarian aid organization, a job that took her to developing countries around the world. Her work has been published in The Chronicle Review, SCOPE Magazine, and Farm and Ranch Living. She lives in Boca Raton with her husband, Ryan.