Writer's Grove

The economics of tours

I thought I would share a wee bit of math here since it’s not something I figured out myself until after I was published. It simply never occurred to me to think of it this way, so in the interest of being helpful to people who may be in the same boat now: There is no economic reason for most authors to tour. In fact, bookstores often lose money on author appearances too, but for now we’ll focus solely on the author’s side of things. Apologies in advance for the length. Here we go…

I’m in Arizona. Let’s say I want to visit people in Boston because I have yet to visit Massachusetts and there might be a few people out there willing to come see me. Cool! First, I have to plan my visit months ahead. The bookstore needs time to get the appearance on their calendar and send out emails to their newsletter subscribers and so on, doing what they can to publicize the event locally, and they also need to order copies of my books. But once the date and time is set, I have to pull out my credit card.

Round-trip flight to Boston from Phoenix: $365 according to Orbitz
Hotel in Boston: $100-$200 depending on where you stay
Rental Car or Taxi: That will cost a nice fat stack
Food: Should probably eat some
Transportation to the airport: Necessary and not free

So let’s say we’re super-duper cheap and manage to do this whole thing in one day & night for $500 just to keep the math simple. Can I write all this off on my taxes? Heck yes. And I will. But it’s still $500 out of my pocket right now, and of course that write-off is a deduction on taxable income, not a credit. I won’t get it all back by any means. So what’s in it for me?

In financial terms it’s pretty small taters. It’s standard throughout the industry for authors to get about sixty-four cents per mass market paperback, and quite honestly, not a lot of people attend book signings. There are authors out there who will draw a couple or few hundred people, of course, but I’m not one of them. Most of the time authors will sell 30-60 copies at an event, depending on the city and the day of the week and the weather. Let’s say for easy math purposes, however, that Boston rocks hard and I sell 100 copies. That means I make $64.00. (I’d need to sell 800 copies to break even!)

My hypothetical visit to Boston, therefore, with a cheap estimate of costs and a generous estimate of sales, would put me in the hole $436. Clearly, the math tells me I cannot visit every place I’d like to go. It’s simply not possible if I would like to continue to do things like pay my mortgage and feed my kid and avoid calls from bill collection services. And the same holds true for the vast majority of authors.

“But wait!” a random straw man interjects. “Doesn’t your publisher pay for all that stuff anyway?” Nope. Publishers have budgets and bills to pay too. And airlines don’t give them discounts on author flights. The economics don’t work out in their favor either. Tours are simply not good for the bottom line—unless you’re one of the very, very few superstars who can sell hundreds of hardcovers at each event. That’s not me and that’s not most authors. That’s dudes like Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin. Publishers do pay for some tours, of course, but that’s for mondo huge bestsellers, and people might erroneously assume that it’s like that for all authors. It’s definitely not.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently announced on Facebook that I’d managed to get an appearance arranged in Cleveland. The comments immediately began to fill up with very sweet people urging me to come to their city in Florida or Wisconsin or California or wherever. And that’s when I realized they probably didn’t know what they were asking. They probably didn’t realize that I can’t afford to go wherever I want. Most of my appearances—and most author appearances, honestly—happen only if someone subsidizes them, either a convention or a conference or a publisher.

Here’s how the Cleveland thing happened: Nicole Peeler (who is a ridiculously smart professor in addition to being one of my favorite authors) invited me to come teach for a wee bit at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, which is about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. The university is flying me out there for the gig, but of course while I’m there on their dime I’m not going to be doing anything else but what they want. Still, I thought, maybe I can get something arranged out there for readers since I’ve never visited that part of the country. So I asked Seton Hill to schedule my return flight out of Pittsburgh a day later, and they were cool with that. Awesome! I got a hotel room in Pitt for my extra night and then set about trying to find a place in Pittsburgh to have an event. That turned out to be far more difficult than I anticipated. For various reasons that are no one’s fault, I couldn’t get a store to host me in Pittsburgh. My publicist in NY stepped in to help by finding a spot in Cleveland—Rocky River, actually, which is just to the west of Cleveland.

So now I’ll be driving a rental two and a half hours to Cleveland (probably uphill in the snow both ways!), and it’s definitely not for the money. I mean, if Cleveland rocks like the hypothetical Boston scenario above, I might break even on my rental car since the flight was taken care of. But I’m not worried about that because I’m not doing it for the economics anyway. Instead, authors who aren’t mega best sellers tour for these reasons:

1) Writers are full of neuroses and foremost among them is a desperate need to be loved.
2) People who read books are really cool and who wouldn’t want to meet cool people?
3) We cling to a hope that maybe the appearance will pay dividends down the road, as in spiffy people might spread the word about our books to their friends. Maybe we’ll break even on the trip in some distant future and there will be chocolate.
4) We like to get off our asses and away from the computer for a while.
5) Some readers would actually like to meet me and chat and I want to make them happy.

There are probably more reasons than that. I simply can’t think of them right now because I haven’t had my coffee.

Anyway, the point: I’d love to visit your town because I love to travel and see the country and meet people, but I can’t afford to do very much and neither can my publisher. And I hope this doesn’t come across as a woe-is-me sort of thing or a complaint; it’s merely an explanation of How Things Are for darn near everyone and maybe a wee plea: If I don’t come to your neck of the woods, please do not take it as a personal insult. I basically go where I’m invited or someplace near me because math says that’s all I can do. If you would like to see me (or any other author) in Florida or Wisconsin or wherever, the easiest thing to do is to convince either a geek convention or a writer’s conference to invite me as a guest. In a sense, you might have more power to make it happen than I do.

Bookstores, by the way, lose money on author appearances more often than you would think—or make such a slim profit that it’s barely worth their time. The reasons why are for another post. But like authors, they do it anyway because they like readers and they want people to enjoy reading.

I’m not touring at all for TRAPPED; I’m having a single signing locally at The Poisoned Pen on December 2. I will tour, however, in support of HUNTED next summer. It will be the west coast, basically, with stops in Montana and Colorado on the way back. I’m driving the whole way and Del Rey is being super nice and helping out. If you’re on the west coast and would like to see when I’ll be in your neighborhood, the dates are on my Events and Appearances page. Store locations and times will get cemented later, but those dates and cities are pretty solid.

If you made it all the way down here, thanks so much for reading it all! Hope it helped you understand the touring biz.