Come visit me Gail! I have tea and custard! You like custard? Please please please?
First of all, Gentle Reader, it's so very kind of you to think of me and to want to see me in person. I would, I promise, genuinely love to meet all of you. I adore my readers and have been charmed any time I had the opportunity to meet any of you face-to-face. I'm a particular fan of tweet-ups and kaffeklutches, as I feel I really get a chance to know you best at small impromptu gatherings.
Tweet-up at Comic Con 2012
That said, these days, whether I visit a convention, city, country, or bookstore rides on many factors.
1. Have I been to that area within the last few years?
Since my books are published all over the world and I only do one event a month, I try to be as fair as possible and visit as many different places as I can. Events take a lot out of me so I need to be judicious in my choices. I'm not one of those authors who can write on the road and I usually need a few days either end to prep and recover. Thus I can lose a week or more writing time every time I travel, even if only for the weekend.
Gail in Stockholm on her 2012 European Tour
2. Have I done a similar event within the last year?
I try to spread the 12 events I do a year evenly: book tours, overseas tours, steampunk cons/gatherings, comic cons, large conventions, small conventions, book fairs, writing workshops, industry expos, library appearances.
Books tour, steampunk event, and panel at an SF/F convention
3. Have they invited me?
I hope you understand that as a professional, events that are willing to cover my expenses always take priority. Most events run on a tight budget and can only fly Guests of Honor, for which I'm not always popular enough to qualify. Here's a blog on the subject of conventions. Sometimes, I've never been to your area because no event/bookstore/etc has asked me to come.
With the organizers of Passion & Prose 2012
4. Are they local?
I prefer to drive rather than fly, so if I can do events around my home without saturating the fan base, I do. That home is the greater San Francisco Bay Area, Northern California.
Home away from home, Borderlands 2009
5. Do I have enough sales and readers?
When on book tour, I'm most often sent by my publisher to bookstores where I'm well known and well liked. That's why you see me turning up regularly at the usual suspects: Mysterious Galaxy, Murder By the Book, Borderlands, Powell’s, and Books Inc. These stores make an effort to ask my publisher to sent me to them, they know a lot of people want to see me in their city. And yes, it is always a city.
The Home Town Throng
I really hope this makes sense and that you do not take offense. I know 12 seems like I ought to have a lot of options but the spots fill up fast! These days I'm often booking events 3 years in advance! And much as I love to see you all and travel, in the end what's most important is that I write.
You don't have to take my word for it... Kevin Hearne: The Book Tour FAQ
GAIL'S DAILY DOSE
Your Moment of Parasol . . .
At World Steam Expo 2012
Your Infusion of Cute . . .
Tea with macaroons.
Your Tisane of Smart . . .
Ancient Shipwreck Reveals 2,000-Year-Old Eye Medicine.
Your Writerly Tinctures . . .
Writing and Learning styles
Book News:
E&E Floor Display
Quote of the Day:
"Well-trained servants appeared by magic to remove all the breakable furniture...replacing it with a special set of chairs and tables made to smash. Senior officers bolted away to play bridge; the rest of us, who were young in years or at heart, began to enjoy ourselves according to the ancient customs.
Somebody found an enormous roll of webbing and swaddled up the fat gunner subaltern in it. A lamp fell with a crash. Wrestling matches began. A boy in the Punjab Frontier Force brought in a little bazaar pony and made it jumps sofas...
Hours afterwards, I left dust and din and walked back under the stars to the bungalow in which I had been allotted a room. I was extraordinarily pleased with myself and my surroundings. Everyone in my regiment was the best fellow in the world – and that first impression of mine has not been altered by twenty years of intimacy."
~ Francis Yeats-Brown, 1870s (via Richard Holmes's Sahib: The British Soldier in India.)
And here I thought the Drones club was purely fictional.