One author turned his book tour into an endurance test, taking a “zero emissions” bike tour down the West Coast to support his title–securing sponsorship from Flip Video, Cannondale Bikes, and other companies.
Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was novelist James Kaelan, explaining how he built his book tour for his debut novel, We’re Getting On.
Press play below to listen.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview: “I had the naive confidence that if the idea was good enough, we could pitch it to the right people and they would support it. I ended up being at least somewhat correct. Cannondale jumped right on it. [My publicist] Jessi Hector from Goldest Egg pitched them and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a great idea’ and set up a meeting and gave us bikes … You should know InDesign and be able to put together a good pitch deck. More important than the actual aesthetics of the presentation is just have the idea. I talk a lot about adding narrative to narrative–the story that sells your story.”
Kaelan also explained why he decided to film his book tour: “The publicity and marketing for the book should be thematically consistent with the book. From this experience, the book tour was an extension of the book, the film becomes an extension of the tour–they are all inextricably connected. The art and the creating of art didn’t stop with the tour itself. The tour became the performance of the book and the film becomes a document of that performance.”