Ian Frazier Quotes

Here's an idea: Spend two or three hours a day at least five days a week in front of a bookstore wearing a sandwich board with your bookcover on it while you chase and chat with anyone you can corral and who is willing to talk to you.

I've never been on a paperback tour before, you know, because usually you go on tour when a hardcover comes out.

I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.

I am an author, and like many in my profession, I am also a traveling salesman, going all over in an attempt to persuade people to spend twenty-five dollars on a hardcover book by me.

There's nothing definite yet. Of course, any time you have a book, there's going to be book signings and stuff. We'll do bookstores that handle both audio and video. And some of the stores want to have the CDs available at the same time. So that part looks real good.

I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.

Mine's going to be the best book tour that ever happened!

I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting.

The book I made it big with in the U.S. was my fourth book, 'Sanctum.' My novels sell really well both there and in Canada, so once a year I do a promotional tour, visiting a different city every two days, doing book readings and signings.

Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.

People think writing is a very distinguished, cerebral thing, where all you do is write. It doesn't work that way. People have to see online promotions, see piles of your book in stores, and you have to make sure the guy recommends it!

Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.

If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

I'm going to book-and-author dinners, and I'm the author!

I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.

Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.

While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

If no one knows your book is out there, no one will think about buying it. It's as simple as that.

Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else's expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch.