Author Pre-Publication Tours

There's nothing new in author tours - they go back at least to Charles Dickens, and probably before. (In fact, I wrote a piece for Pages on this topic - I'll post it some time in the near future.) But here's a new twist: the pre-publication tour. I tip my hat to the New York Times, which I usually don't see as breaking new ground in business coverage; among journalists I know, when an idea hits the Times, people have been writing about it in lesser-known publications for at least a couple of years. But I must credit them in this case; the story of publishers selling authors to book sellers is fascinating. The pivotal point is getting book sellers and authors together in a social setting - that is, an excuse to put a human face and create something of a personal connection, no matter how tenuous. It's a classic tool of sales and ironic, or as the article puts it:

“It’s a bit of an odd system,” he said. “You take a writer, the kind of person who wants to sit on his own for three years at a time, and then make them go to a bunch of dinner parties.”

That leaves a question: You can take them somewhere, but can you dress them up?