Book Signing Tours

We're calling it the Grass Roots Guerilla Marketing Book Signing Tour, and it's a program of in-store marketing visits designed to get the stores to place book orders.  A Book Escort will take you around and introduce you to booksellers in a given area as the two of you travel from store to store. At these meet and greet stops (where the escort knows many, if not all, the store personnel), the escort will present a free autographed book to the bookseller or manager most likely to read that type of book. In most instances, this gesture, along with giving the the booksellers a quick, enthusiastic curriculum vitae of the author and a short synopsis of the book, will generate an order. 

 

Also included in this program is one official in-store event. This involves a larger than normal order of books and utilizes the bookstore's customer network to get the word out. The store (if an independent) will list it on their website and send info into the local newspapers for a listing on the paper's events calendar. If it's a chain store, that store will get the listing to newspapers and, typically, also do in-store awareness ads in the weeks up to the event. Response will be best if you can coordinate your own marketing efforts toward this event.