Congratulations! After four years spent alone in a room going clinically insane as you added words to a Google Doc, you have managed to write and publish an entire book. As a reward, you get to enjoy the pinnacle of literary glamour: a book tour.
As someone who just returned from her own chic, iconic book tour, let me share some wisdom about the luxurious experiences you can expect.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Performing Onstage
For the next month, you will be traveling around the country trying to prove to potential readers that you are both hot and capable of reading your own book out loud. In a way, it’s a public service to explain how your convoluted sentences are supposed to sound.
Meeting Your Fans
Your book tour is founded on the question “Wouldn’t it be sick if there were a handful of cities where 20 people cared about my book?” Despite our technology, there’s no real way of knowing if there are those people until you get to the cities. It turns out that the number of women who DM you compliments about your writing and the number of old men who email you asking what’s so wrong with Annie Hall is not equivalent to the number of people who will leave their house and find parking on a nice spring evening.
This tour is the culmination of four years of hard work, and you want to remember it forever. When people actually show up, you’re so overwhelmed that anyone could actually read and care about this thing you wrote that you fully dissociate.
Signing Books
You arrive at your first event two hours early like you’re boarding an international flight immediately after the shoe bomber was apprehended. You are here to pre-sign books. It goes without saying that you have no idea how to sign your name in cursive.
In the signing line after the reading, you try to think of something witty or personal to write in the books of the lovely people you’re meeting, but you mostly end up drawing mountain scenes with little lowercase m’s floating around: these are birds.
Being Notoriously Charming
You decide to be like David Sedaris and ask every person in the signing line one question. After deliberation, the question you settle on is “If all your exes started a business together, what would it be?” You immediately forget to ask people this question. (Your exes—a glassblower, a ceramicist, a guy who works in marketing—would start a home goods store. Unfortunately, it would be really successful.)
Wearing Haute Couture
You are trying to dress well on this book tour, to show respect to your audience. There are older people who came to your event just because they heard you on NPR, and by wearing a cute little blazer, it’s possible you will keep them on your side for one millisecond longer while you make jokes about having sex in the back of a Honda CR-V.
The dress you wear for your first event is more revealing than you thought it was going to be, and you spend some time thinking about whether it would be good or bad for sales if your boob popped out at your book launch. You decide good and proceed.
Being a Gorgeous Woman
In Idaho, between book events in Seattle and Iowa City, you hike two miles into the forest and soak in a hot spring, all alone, as dusk falls over the mountains. It is so special, so unlikely that you are here, that you feel affirmed in all of your life choices. You post a bathing suit picture to Instagram, and your boobs get more likes than almost anything you have ever posted about your writing.
Traveling in Style
Because no one really buys books anymore, and because your book is about trees (a niche interest) rather than hating men (a universal interest), the publisher is giving you no money. So instead of flying from city to city in first class, eating pork rib airplane meals and sleeping in a seat that reclines all the way, you are driving your stepdad’s beat-up Prius. This actually makes a lot of sense, you think, because the premise of your road trip book is that you know how to drive a car.
Talking to Industry Insiders
There’s a Gen Z bookseller at the store that hosts you in Dallas, and you and the rest of the millennials present try to get them to tell you what’s wrong with your generation.
Having Groupies
At one event, a handsome guy waits until the end of the book signing to talk to you, then gives you his Instagram handle. This will sustain you for the rest of the tour.
Finding a Dead Turtle
At one point, you find a dead turtle. The elegance of a life devoted to art!
Having Your Photo Next to a Photo of John Waters
At one of the bookstores that host you, a poster informs you that the next author event is for John Waters. You realize you are the least famous person currently doing a book tour in the United States of America.
Seeing the World
You explore a slot canyon in California, you hike three hours in the West Texas desert and see no humans and a bunch of javelinas, you take a ferry to Washington’s San Juan Islands and climb directly up a mountain at dawn, and you are so happy and grateful that you put yourself in these places. That you spent a full month celebrating this thing you worked so, so hard on. And then you head home, back to your glamorous tenement apartment in New York City, where you sit down, start to become crazy, and do it all over again.•
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of the books How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?
