There is a CHEESE CASTLE IN WISCONSIN and I am going there! But let’s back up a bit—

I’m on tour this week for the release of CANDLE & CROW, the triumphant finish to both the Iron Druid and Ink & Sigil series. All the Druids show up for their final farewells and we also resolve matters for Al, Buck, Nadia, and Roxanne, plus we find out exactly what shite Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite came to see. We also get sirens and blue men and dragon goddesses and a fews heists in the wizard van and warlocks with extensive real estate holdings. It is a tale you won’t want to miss! You can snag it in print, ebook, or audio wherever you like to buy books.

BUT YOU CAN ALSO GET SIGNED ONES.

You can come see me (and my buds) on tour, or call the stores we’ll be visiting and ask them to ship you a signed copy! If you show up in person, there’s no limit to the number of books we’ll sign. BRING THEM ALLLLLLL

Who’s we? Well, it’s me, Chuck Wendig, and Delilah S. Dawson. We’ve each written more than twenty books. We’ve all written Star Wars. We’ve actually written several books together. So yeah. Our events are a good time. AND IN BETWEEN THE EVENTS THERE WILL BE A CHEESE CASTLE
no hold on not yet I’m not there yet

Chuck and Delilah will be with me for the first four dates of my tour. After that I’m flying solo. Before three of the events—in Naperville, Madison, and Scottsdale—you can hang out with us if you’d like at nearby grub spots. Here are the details:

Oct. 1: Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL, at 7 pm.  This event requires a ticket which buys you a copy of the book and assigns you a place in the signing line. Pregame at Giordano’s Pizza around the corner at 5 pm—we all gotta eat, so if you want to chow down and chat with us before the event, you’re welcome to do that, just show up, order a pie!
Oct. 2: Boswell Books in Milwaukee, WI, at 6:30 pm.
Oct. 3: Mystery to Me Books in Madison, WI, at 6 pm. Pregame at Pizza Brutta up the street at 4 pm. We’re just grabbing something to eat and are happy to chat with you if you would like to join us.
Oct. 4: Barnes & Noble in Roseville, MN, at the HarMar Mall, at 6 pm.
Oct. 5: The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ, 6 pm. Pregame at Cornish Pasty a few doors down at 4 pm! LET’S PARTY EH
Oct. 6: Bakka Phoenix in Toronto, ON, 3 pm. If you come to this and then want to go out to dinner as a group afterward, let’s do it!
Oct. 7: Perfect Books in Ottawa, ON, at 7 pm.

If you want a signed copy of anything by any of us to be shipped, call any of the stores and order it!

So yeah, about that cheese castle: IT’S A CASTLE FULL OF CHEESE that someone built in Kenosha and you’d best believe I’m gonna get me some Lactaid and storm that castle.

Know what else is in Wisconsin? Apple orchards! So we are super pumped because we are driving up  from Chicago to Milwaukee and there will be APPLES AND CHEESE and presumably interesting digestive issues afterward, but hopefully not too severe.

If you’ve never read anything by Chuck or Delilah before, I recommend checking out BLACK RIVER ORCHARD by Chuck and GUILLOTINE by Delilah. And I really hope you enjoy CANDLE & CROW. I worked super hard on it.

(Some folks have asked if there will be any more stories and yeah, shorter works for sure—I write an Oberon short story every month for my newsletter subscribers—but no more full novels.)

Thank you always for reading! May harmony (and sausage) find you.

Out now in ebook and audio, a new science fiction novella from me! I’m already hearing from folks how much they dig it and it makes me happy because this story is a bit different from my usual stuff and I had such fun writing it.

This above cover (by Dominic Harman) is for the ebook and print edition. (The print edition is a limited signed and numbered edition from Subterranean Press, and due to a printer delay will be out near the end of July, but definitely snag it if you like print, it’s gonna be gorgeous.) There’s a different cover for the audio edition because they require a square design, but the story’s the same! Here’s the audio cover (photo illustration by me):

Here’s part of the blurb about it: Newly widowed and trying to cope with her grief, Winnie Mae Chisholm moves from Tennessee with her teenage son, Pax, to Oregon, hoping the change will let them both heal and move on. She’s warned when buying their new home that the next door neighbor, Mr. Fisher, is a famous recluse and no one has seen him in years, but that’s fine with her—she’s looking for quiet.

She’s not going to get it, however, because when Pax meets the neighbor, he discovers that the reason Mr. Fisher hides from the world is that he isn’t actually from this world. He’s been stranded for decades and he’s trying to get home, and he could really use some help.

The audiobook is narrated by Annalee Scott, who captures Winnie Mae perfectly. Here’s a excerpt where Winnie Mae is looking for a place to buy in Oregon and asks the realtor about their prospective new neighbor, Mr. Fisher:

It’s only $4.99 in ebook and $7.95 in audio (US) and you can finish it in an afternoon. Since it’s a small press and there isn’t a budget for marketing, I’m basically depending on y’all for word of mouth. If you give it a shot, (thank you so much!) please leave a review and holler about it to your friends, eh? This is the sort of story where you can leave it there if you want because Winnie Mae makes a decision at the end and that’s really the question: Would you make the same one in her shoes? But it’s also the sort of story where there’s room to explore further questions in further adventures, and while I would absolutely love to write more of Winnie Mae and Pax, sequels don’t happen unless there’s a demand. I hope you’ll help create that demand by spreading the word to your friends.

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoy.

There are now four of Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries—cozy mysteries narrated by Oberon the Irish wolfhound—and for the first time they’re all being published in the same place with a consistent size and design, and signed copies are available to snag for super cheap if you buy directly from the publisher.

You’ll note that the first two are standalones but the second two are themselves bundled with novellas by Chuck Wendig and Delilah S. Dawson, which means that you are actually getting eight novellas for $44! (This deal is available to the US and Canada only. If you’re in the US there’s no sales tax. If you’re in Canada you are saving huge because the price is still $44 CAD—in terms of currency conversion you’re saving more than enough to cover HST and part of your shipping too.)

These stories are not only great for you but for any of your friends/family who like dogs and the planet and might enjoy them as a sort of introduction to the Iron Druid Chronicles. Just wanted to let y’all know because getting four signed books for $44 is a smokin’ hot deal. Visit Horned Lark Press and snag yourself a bundle or five!

Lots of folks were waiting for this, so I just wanted to let ye know: the audiobook for CANINES & COCKTAILS is now available!

It has three novellas about dogs and drinks by myself, Delilah S. Dawson, and Chuck Wendig, and they are narrated respectively by Luke Daniels, Shana Pennington-Baird, and Adam Verner.

Mine is called THE CHARTREUSE CHANTEUSE, and it’s Oberon’s Meaty Mystery #4, where someone stole Oberon’s sausage and also committed murder. He will have justice for BOTH. Incidentally, this is also the happy-ever-after for Atticus that many fans of the Iron Druid Chronicles have been waiting for.

Audio cover below (art by Galen Dara), and a sample clip below that, and links follow! Please enjoy!

Links for you to grab CANINES & COCKTAILS:

Apple

Audible

Coming October 1: Candle & Crow, the final novel of both the Ink & Sigil series and the Iron Druid universe! I’ll continue to write short stories and novellas in the universe as the whim takes me, but this is the last big book that wraps up everything for everyone. Not only do we get resolutions for Al, Buck, and Nadia, but we get final farewells from Atticus, Granuaile, and Owen as well, plus a cameo from Leif Helgarson. And the crow…well, she’s had a wild ride, hasn’t she? And it only gets wilder.

Major props to artist Sarah J. Coleman (@Inkymole on social media) for this gorgeous hand-drawn cover. I have THINGS to SHARE, but take yourself a good gander at it, and then check out the blurbity blurb below:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles comes the final book in the “action-packed, enchantingly fun” (Booklist) Ink & Sigil series, as an ink-slinging wizard pursues the answer to a very personal mystery: Who cast a pair of curses on his head?

Al MacBharrais has a most unusual job: He’s a practitioner of ink-and-sigil magic, tasked with keeping order among the gods and monsters that dwell hidden in the human world. But there’s one supernatural mystery he’s never been able to solve: Years ago, someone cast twin curses on him that killed off his apprentices and drove away loved ones who heard him speak, leaving him bereft and isolated. 

But he’s not quite alone: As Al works to solve this mystery, his friends draw him into their own eccentric dramas. Buck Foi the hobgoblin has been pondering his own legacy—and has a plan for a daring shenanigan that will make him the most celebrated hobgoblin of all. Nadia, goth queen and battle seer, is creating her own cult around a god who loves whisky and cheese. 

And the Morrigan, a former Irish death goddess, has decided she wants not only to live as an ordinary woman but also to face the most perilous challenge of the mortal world: online dating. 

Meanwhile, Al crosses paths with old friends and new—including some beloved Druids and their very good dogs—in his globe-trotting quest to solve the mystery of his curses. But he’s pulled in so many different directions by his colleagues, a suspicious detective, and the whims of destructive gods that Al begins to wonder: Will he ever find time to write his own happy ending?

WOOHOO!

I hope you’ll give a gift to your future October self and preorder here, which is a landing page with handy links to all the vendors for hardcover, ebook, and audio (yes, you can preorder the audio now)!

So in my newsletter, Words & Birds, I have a bunch of extra goodies like a contest to get signed copies for sharing Candle & Crow on social media, and new Oberon bookplates, and news about print editions of Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries. And over on Chuck Wendig’s blog, Terribleminds, I kinda geek out about how the sirens you see on the cover (the bird women) were always supposed to be bird women instead of mermaids with a come-hither look. Here I’d like to geek out about some other stuff that isn’t on the cover: THE BLUE MEN OF THE MINCH.

I don’t want to spoil anything here about what the Blue Men are up to in the novel, okay? I just want to gush about how freakin’ cool they are as magical critters. Because they’re fairly unique in the world’s mythologies: There aren’t parallels for them like there are for many other monsters and gods. For example, there are many thunder gods and goddesses of wisdom, gods of the sea, gods of fire, and so on. There are likewise many water spirits, treefolk, and variations on brownies, kobolds, you name it. But there’s nothing anywhere like the Blue Men of the Minch. They’re uniquely Scottish.

The Minch is the stretch of sea betwixt the Outer Hebrides and the mainland of Scotland. It’s been one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world ever since there was shipping. Vikings came through there and raided. There are regular ferries scurrying back and forth all the time. And just a huuuuge buttload of cargo from around the world passes through there every day.

The Blue Men will drag you down to the ocean floor—they have plenty of parallels in that sense—but where they differ is that they’ll give you a fighting chance first. Or rather, a verbal chance. You want a captain who can think quick on his or her feet, because the Blue Men will speak a couple of lines of poetry at you, and if you reply in kind, they’ll allow you to pass. Reply in prose, however, or be rude, and you’re going to be breathing seawater very shortly. There are plenty of theories about the origins of the Blue Men and attempts to explain what they “really” were, like maybe a tattooed guy in a canoe who might look like he’s rising out of the water, and you can check them out on their Wikipedia page, but come on. They’re cool Scottish members of the Fae.

So you have the Blue Men to look forward to; the continued struggles of the Crow Whom You Know; Al and Buck’s shenanigans; Nadia’s enterprise with Lhurnog the Unhallowed; sirens who aren’t sex fish; and you’ll finally see the shite that Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite came to see, and so much more. It’s a book chock full of stuff and things, and I hope you’ll enjoy and get your friends in on the fun. Thanks so much for reading!

Hey Spiffy Peeps, I’ve moved my newsletter to a platform called Ghost for several reasons:
1) It allows comments without spam! I love it. I had to turn off comments on my blog years ago because of it, and I still deal with it regularly whenever I post on FB, but this has been great so far.
2) My posts stick around. With my former newsletter it would just disappear after emailed, so there was no real archive for folks to explore. And: no comments unless they replied to my email.
3) There’s some outstanding photography support for galleries; so long as you are viewing in the browser, you can click on a picture and it will embiggen and sharpen, then you can even zoom in for closeups.
4) The primary reason that is relevant to the post title is that Ghost allows me to offer free posts as I always have, but also offer a paid subscription so I can write a new Oberon story for you each month in 2024. They’ll be bathtime stories like Atticus told him throughout the Iron Druid Chronicles, so you might learn a little about a historical figure and then enjoy Oberon’s attempts to fit it into his worldview of morality, where squirrels equal evil and sausage is so very, very good. Think of it like this: you give me money for a taco, and I write you a short story and deliver it to your inbox. The twelve stories will be collected at the end of the year and recorded by audiobook narrator Luke Daniels, and if you subscribe for the year, you’ll get a download code for it (in 2025). Plus I’ll commission new Oberon art from artist Galen Dara. So your subscription will support me, Luke, and Galen. You’ll also get a gallery of spiffy nature photos from me and my Mom each month.

The newsletter/site is called Words & Birds. I just sent out my first free post and you should check that out to see what the free stuff is like—it’s reading recommendations and updates on my own writing shenanigans. The first Oberon story goes out next week, and it’s set in the Netherlands during World War II. So please subscribe at whatever level works for you, eh? Mostly I simply want to connect with y’all so I’m not dependent on some tech bro’s algorithm to keep you up to date.

CANDLE & CROW, the third Ink & Sigil book, has been turned in and the wheels of production are turning. I’ll have a cover reveal for you early next month, and it’ll be out October 1! Woohoo!

Peace & tacos, friends. Can’t wait to see you at Words & Birds.

Grateful for y’all for so many reasons, but thinking back to the beginning of the year, a huge horde of you helped save our friend’s life. Ayesha had chronic leukemia and was getting terrible care in Texas, so you donated tens of thousands and she was able to get top-notch care in Denver. Her bone marrow transplant was successful and she’s still here because of you. Thank you.

On the bookish front, thank you for making A Curse of Krakens a USA Today bestseller and telling folks about the Seven Kennings. Finishing an epic fantasy trilogy—an unusual one folks haven’t seen before—was one of my top personal and professional goals, and I’ll always be proud that I Did the Thing. And of course I’m delighted that folks are digging how it ends, because I’m getting some super kind emails and seeing some nice posts here and there, and I’m told the reviews are positive too (Mom lets me know about reviews since I don’t read them, reviews are for readers). If you’d like signed copies of the trilogy (or any of my books), Worldbuilders Market has a bunch and The Poisoned Pen and Mysterious Galaxy have quite a few too, just give those stores a quick google and a call.

Speaking of bookstores—shoutout to all the folks who came to see me on tour and the wonderful bookstores that hosted me. Cheers to the hundred folks who joined me at Cornish Pasty in Scottsdale—like the family that flew down from Alaska! So much fun to hang out. And the seven readers joined me for dinner in Minneapolis were just luminous beings who made me smile. That was a heck of a dinner. WE HAD GOURMET SAUSAGES and a bananas foster that was an architectural marvel of a dessert.

If you dig podcasts, I talked for an hour (and there’s video too) with Adrian and MJ with the SFF Addicts podcast. We talked urban and epic fantasy, A Curse of Krakens, and more, and they have convenient chapters to skip to if something looks particularly interesting. It was a wide-ranging conversation and entirely pleasant.

How about I share a few books that I enjoyed this year? Shoutout to all the brilliant authors out there telling great stories that teach us how to be better humans. I obviously can’t keep up with all the awesome stuff being published, but here’s a selection of what I fed to my eyeballs:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
The Bone Shard War by Andrea Stewart
Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig
Midnight at the Houdini and Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson
Zero Days by Ruth Ware
Cult Classic by Stephen Blackmoore
Spring’s Arcana and The Salt-Black Tree by Lilith Saintcrow
The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey
The Valkyrie by Kate Heartfield
System Collapse by Martha Wells

Regarding that last title—the latest in the absolutely fabulous Murderbot Diaries series—I am so happy to hear that Apple TV is going to develop that series starring Alexander Skårsgaard! For reasons!
1) It’s a fantastic series and if you haven’t read it yet then you need to begin
2) Original SF instead of yet another reboot of old tired stuff? YES PLEASE
3) I am just dang happy for Martha

News from me: I am almost finished with Candle & Crow, the third and final Ink & Sigil book, which will be out next October. I will also have a new Oberon’s Meaty Mystery for you to read in the new year that takes place right before Candle & Crow. It’s called The Chartreuse Chanteuse, and will be one of three novellas you can enjoy in Canines & Cocktails, a themed collection of novellas featuring dogs & drinks that I am publishing with Chuck Wendig and Delilah S. Dawson. Here, you wanna see the cover? It features Oberon and Starbuck, of course, and the golden retriever up top is Gumball from Chuck’s story, and the pit bull is Peach Pit from Delilah’s story.

The Chartreuse Chanteuse is the long-awaited happy-ever-after for Atticus, Oberon, and Starbuck. You won’t want to miss it. Luke Daniels has already narrated the audiobook and I can’t wait to share it with y’all. Stay tuned for more details on the release date!

I will also have a science fiction novella coming out next year, probably the summer, called The Hermit Next Door. That will be my second foray into science fiction. (Did you miss my first? It’s called A Question of Navigation, and while the print edition has sold out, it’s still available in ebook and audio narrated by Luke Daniels.)

Levi is home for the holidays and right this second is sitting next to me reading The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. I’m typing this blog and they are reading and we are both snuggled up in blankets and it’s just the best. I wish you and your loved ones a warm and fuzzy season full of hugs and contentment, with that food you dig and that drink that makes you happy, and that 2024 brings you every good thing as we walk this wide and winsome world together.

You may have noticed that authors really, really like it when you preorder. I’m no exception: If you offered me either a preorder or a taco, I’d have to apologize to the taco, tell it that it did nothing wrong because it’s perfect, and still take the preorder. Why are they so spiffy? An attempt to explain, perhaps not exhaustive but hopefully not exhausting:

Preorders are the ultimate indicator of buzz, because if folks are willing to put money down in advance, well, that talks much louder than someone saying in a social media post that they’re looking forward to reading it (though that’s great too). And if bookstores and the publisher see buzz surrounding a certain title, then things start happening that might not have happened otherwise. What things? Well…

•An indie bookstore with limited shelf space might decide to stock copies of a book they weren’t going to stock before. Let’s say our fictional bookstore, Taco Bout Books, can bring in ten new titles on a release week—they probably have to get rid of ten titles too—but dang, there are probably seventy, eighty, even five hundred new titles to choose from. Which ones are they going to pick? Well, if they have preorders for your book, it’s more likely they’ll pick yours. They might even make a stack on a front table and face it out so people can find it easily. And if they have copies available in store, then the chances of people discovering your book increase dramatically. Because they can’t discover you if the store isn’t stocking your book. So preorders can ultimately increase visibility and distribution, which can lead to more sales.

•A preorder is a guaranteed first-week sale, which is the most important week in a book’s life cycle. It’s the week you’re most likely to hit a list, for one thing, and hitting those lists help authors write more books later. But even if they don’t hit a list, that first week’s sales get a hard look by publishers when it’s time to decide on future contracts. So every first-week sale is important downstream. To be clear, I’m grateful and happy whenever folks buy a book! But first-week sales are the most helpful career-wise, so writers understandably dig preorders for that reason.

•Sometimes a publisher might look at preorder numbers, see they’re kinda strong, and throw some extra marketing resources at a title to see if they can juice it up a bit more. Those resources can manifest in different ways, but the key is that this extra juice happens solely because of preorders. Authors love extra juice. Sometimes they like it in a box or pouch with a straw, sometimes mixed with gin, and sometimes in marketing dollars.

•Digital platforms have to decide which books to put on their front page, and front-page visibility helps a lot, as you might imagine. And they’re going to pick the buzzy books. Strong preorders mean buzz. Even if a digital retailer is being paid by a publisher for front-page visibility, what’s the publisher pushing? Buzzy books. This is true in ebook and audio too. So your preorders in those formats help as well!

All of which is to say, preorders are the One Weird Trick to make sure you get to write more books. That’s why you hear writers talk about them a lot, offer special deals for swag, and so on. For example, if you preorder A Curse of Krakens from any store in any format and upload your confirmation or receipt to the form at this link, you’ll get a free short story in the Seven Kennings universe called “A Whisper of Snakes.” I’ve done fun little pins in the past, bookmarks, doohickeys, cursed garden gnomes—you have to try stuff. People are digging the story, though—it features Abhi, Murr, and Eep.

If you’d like to preorder a signed copy, please order from any of the following indie stores and specify you want it signed either in special instructions online or by saying so over the phone. I’ll sign it the day I visit the store and they’ll ship to you wherever you are.

Old Firehouse Books, Ft Collins, CO (970) 484-7898
Tattered Cover, CO Springs (719) 602-5300
The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ (480) 947-2974
Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, CA (619) 539-7137
Schuler Books, Okemos, MI (517) 349-8840
Bakka Phoenix, Toronto, ON (416) 963-9993
Perfect Books, Ottawa, ON (613) 231 6468

And of course I hope you’ll come see me on tour if you can! Thanks for reading whenever you read. You deserve a taco.

Hey buds,

A whole honkin’ buttload of you helped us out with the medical costs of our friend, Ayesha, who had chronic leukemia and needed treatment in Denver. The bone marrow transplant was successful—hooray!—and holy cow, you helped save her life. Thank you. Can’t thank you enough, really (and those doctors in Denver who know what they’re doing).

However, Ayesha still has three to four appointments a week for various therapies, tests, and treatments, and needs to stay in the Denver area another year. I’ve been taking care of Ayesha’s housing this year but cannot afford to continue that. Downtown Denver’s rent, as they say, is nucking futs, so we are looking to move her someplace more affordable now that she doesn’t need to be so close to the hospital. So: If you wish to help out by donating to Ayesha’s gofundme, we would of course be turbo grateful, but we would also hook you up with a signed book or two. What we’ve done thus far is get you a book for every $50. After you donate to Ayesha, screenshot the confirmation and email my assistant/amazing spouse, Kimberly, and let her know two things: 1) what you’d like from the list below (while supplies last) and 2) your complete shipping address. The email to use is treats [at thingie] kevinhearne dot com. (I spelled it out in an attempt to foil internet scrapers, but what the heck, let’s be real, they are probably watching me type this right now.)

Here’s the list:
Iron Druid Trade Paperbacks, the revised and expanded 10th Anniversary Edition with bonus goodies:
Hounded: 0 (sorry)
Hexed: 4
Hammered: 7
Tricked: 6
Trapped: 5
Hunted: 5
Shattered: 23
Staked: 22
Besieged: 19
Scourged: 23

Subterranean Press signed special edition hardcovers:
Hounded: 0
Hexed: 0
Hammered: 10
Tricked: 12
Trapped: 16
Hunted: 22
Shattered: 22

Thank you again. I appreciate you all so much and am grateful to you for reading. I hope to see you on my tour for A Curse of Krakens in November if you’re able to make any of these dates. Super excited to see you!

Piggybacking here on an excellent post by Chuck Wendig about why we gotta have bookstore events. It’s a great dive into the whys and wherefores and you should definitely give it a read—I nodded and said “Yep, yep, yep” though the whole thing.

Chuck’s main argument is that publishers might not be supporting bookstore events because they’re not mega profitable in the immediate spreadsheet sense, but they are actually profitable in many ways that aren’t obvious to a bean counter looking at one night’s event sales.

To be fair to the bean counters—they are correct in that events are often not immediately profitable. You have to sell a fairly large buttload to make events profitable on one night’s balance sheet. So let’s MATH a bit, then circle back to why we have to look beyond that.

A Curse of Krakens, when it comes out November 7, will be going for $32 in hardcover. It’s a big chonker of a book with a spiffy map on the endsheet. Retailers like your local indie plus bigass megacorporations buy the books from the publishers at a discount, of course, and then they sell them for cover price and have to make their payroll and such and hope there’s profit when that’s all done. This can vary a bit depending on the retailer—discounts from the publisher start at 40% but can go higher depending on volume and other stuff. But let’s imagine a new indie store that hasn’t really earned big discounts yet called Taco Bout Books. If Taco Bout Books wants to stock A Curse of Krakens, a 40% discount means it’s paying $19.20 to the publisher. So if it sells a copy to you at cover price, Taco Bout Books makes $12.80 per copy. A large amount of that is going to pay for labor and insurance and rent and utilities and shipping and such and then, if there’s any profit left over, maybe they have taco money. If you are getting any discount from the store, that’s all on them—they’re reducing their profit margin.

(Let me say right now I’m not discussing ebooks or audiobooks—they’re not usually part of bookstore event math because while some indie stores offer both, it’s not, to my knowledge, a huge slice of any pie. We’re dealing with paper copies here.)

Margins are of course slimmer on mass market and trade paperbacks because the price point is smaller to begin with. An $8.99 mass market paperback costs the store $5.39 to stock. They therefore make $3.60 per copy sold, and after you pay for overhead, there’s not even taco money left unless you are selling a huge buttload of them. There’s one indie store I know of that’s very transparent about their costs: They have to sell 3200 books a month to break even. And they often don’t make it for most of the year; they wind up depending on the holiday season to have a ridiculous couple of months that make up for all the shortfalls. Most indie stores are in this boat. Months of panic and fervent prayers that the holiday season will allow them to stay open.

But one thing—a huge thing—that helps smooth out those troughs and meet payroll is store events. Because a good event brings in a bunch of readers who might not normally walk in, and they often buy more than just one book while they’re there. That part is like, TURBO CRUCIAL. Virtual events, from all I’ve heard, don’t cut the mustard; people might buy the book that’s being promoted but they don’t buy a lot of other stuff. At in-person events, folks might buy other goodies with higher profit margins than books, too—which is why you see so many weird tchotchkes in bookstores. And then those new customers might come back again for more events and become regulars. Events are, in many ways, key to an indie bookstore’s survival. Which is why bookstores are really worried that authors aren’t having as many events, that publishers aren’t sending them, and some events are sparsely attended—events are not only what make a bookstore profitable, but financially possible. And COVID wrecked a lot of that.

More math, but from my side: Publishers pay authors a 10% royalty on the cover price for hardcovers. (Yes, there are variations in this rate, but I’m using a very common one.) So, if you buy a hardcover copy of A Curse of Krakens while I’m on tour, I’ll get $3.20 regardless of any discount you get when you buy it (because the discount is coming from the retailer’s profit margin, not my royalty.) You will, in effect, have bought me a street taco. Thank you. (Usually—again, there are variations—authors get 8% for mass market and 12% for trade paperbacks, which doesn’t quite equal a taco, but if you buy a couple of those then we will unlock the achievement: Taco.)

So here’s what’s happening: Travel is ridiculously expensive and daaaang does that eat into everyone’s taco money. You have to plane, train, or automobile to the city the event is in. You have to rent a room to sleep in. You have to eat a food or three, and it all adds up. So let’s look at what it’s gonna take to get me to my first event in Ft Collins, CO, on Nov. 7:
Flight from Montreal to Denver: $390
Rental car to get my butt to Ft Collins: ~$100
Hotel: ~$130
Three Foods for the day, keeping it cheap at an average $20 each, so call it $60
Total: $680

Who’s paying for all of that? The publisher, the author, or some combo of the two? Let’s say it’s all me (it isn’t) just to do the math on my side because I can’t even begin to do the math on the publisher’s side (I have no idea what their overhead is. Out of the $19.20 they get for a copy of A Curse of Krakens, they pay me $3.20, so they are really working with $16 to pay for their overhead, which is in New York and involves numerous editors and an art department and accounting and shipping and warehousing and printing and marketing and so on). If I am paying all costs for the trip and make $3.20 per copy, I’d have to sell 213 books in Ft. Collins to break even on my travel costs. I would be delighted, of course, if that happened, but it’s unlikely, y’all. I’m simply not that big a deal. But that math right there is why bean counters are looking at events and going, you know what? Events aren’t profitable. You have to be a pretty big deal to move 200+ books at an event. (Bookstores on the other hand are delighted with an extra 50-100 books sold on any given day.)

Lowering travel costs obviously helps—I’m keeping the rental car to get to my subsequent dates and avoiding the expense of airfare until I leave San Diego—but still. I’m not going to be swimming in tacos at any point. I’m giving away my tacos by touring. So why do it?
1. Because of all the stuff Chuck said in his blog, and it was a lot
2. Because I like people who read and want to meet them. They’re the best people
3. I love bookstores. The way they look and smell, the sheer monument to human achievement and creativity they represent, and some of them have shop dogs and I get to pet them. (Shoutout to Fern in Capital Books on K in Sacramento, CA! She is a very good dog and has her own account on Instagram, @bookstorefern)
4. I’m still amazed that people want to read my books and have me sign them. It gives me warm fuzzy feelings that counterbalance the months of existential dread and self-doubt one feels while working alone. Plus it’s good to get out of the house. Events are necessary for my well being.

I’ve been touring since 2011. Last year I did four tours—three in the US and one in Europe—and not a single one of the tours was profitable to me personally or my publisher if you look at just the event sales in isolation. Travel costs always eat up the sales. But every tour was worth it to me and definitely to the bookstores—and therefore to the publishers, if they’d like to continue to have bookstores in which to sell their products. (Every indie shop that shuts its doors is one step closer to a giant anti-union megacorp running everything.) Hopefully these tours were a good experience for readers, too—happy readers keep reading and buying books on other days than the event days, and they spread the word and more sales are generated down the road because of the events, but just because that’s impossible to track, we shouldn’t conclude that it’s not happening or that events aren’t worth it.

All of which is to say: I hope you’ll go to events. Because they’re fun, and bookstores are rad, and money isn’t the only thing we should be considering here. COVID still exists, so wear a good mask for safety. And if you can’t go to events, you can support the stores (and the authors) by preordering signed copies to be shipped to you. That helps everyone because you get a signed book without moving from your reading chair and the stores who host authors can keep the lights on and maybe buy a taco.

My tour schedule is below, and I’m super excited to see everyone. I’ll point out one event in particular—Nov. 10 in Scottsdale. A couple doors down from The Poisoned Pen is a pub called Cornish Pasty with a large outdoor seating space. I’ll be there at 5 pm before the event and there might be Irish wolfhounds there too. So please drop on by and say hi, let’s have a drink and a pasty and chat if you feel like it before we go get bookish at 7.

And go see Chuck on tour if you can! And any other authors coming to your local indie or your local B&N. Stores often have event calendars and email newsletters telling you who’s coming in the next month. Become a member of the literati illuminati! It’s fun for the whole family.

Regardless: Thank you for reading (or listening if you dig audiobooks). People who read are the bestest peeps.