Mark Terry

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Marketing Your Novel--A Footnote


March 10, 2007


Yep, I get tired just thinking about this. I dropped on over to Rick Riordan's blog and website and noticed that he has posted his tour schedule here.

Rick, for those of you who don't know, writes two series. One is about a San Antonio P.I. named Tres Navarre. The second is for kids, about a kid who discovers he's a demigod, Percy Jackson, half-son of Neptune. They're both great. Anyway, if you check out his schedule, and page through from March onward, you can see just how much touring he does. I'm sort of staggered by the whole thing, to be honest with you.

Best,

Mark Terry

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Since I don't like to travel that calendar looks staggering to me under any circumstances. Presumably Rick is writing full time, though, and can afford to spend that time traveling, rather than writing books, just as we spend time writing nonfiction instead of writing books.

How staggering would the schedule seem if that was just part of how you made your living?

As for myself, frankly, I'd rather write legal articles than travel. A job requring that much travel, whether it might be novelist of widget salesman, doesn't strike me as very appealing.

If Rick isn't fulltime...well...I don't now how he could do it. I couldn't take that much time off to travel.

Anyway, a small publisher doesn't have the amount or kind of distribution to allow either itself or its authors to recoup the expenditure for that sort of touring, in my opinion, so my concerns are rather moot!

10:59 AM  
Blogger Mark Terry said...

Rick is fulltime.

He kept teaching (middle school) while he was writing the Tres Narvarre novels, although I got the impression that financially he could have afforded to quit the teaching. He wrote the kids' book on a whim for his son, found another agent who handled kids' books, and they sold it to Hyperion (owned by Disney) who went ape over it and he's done tours in England and Malta and the movie rights have sold as well as multiple foreign language rights. I interviewed him shortly after his first kids' book came out and he flat out said he just couldn't continue teaching and write the two books. He was a little ambivalent about it--he loved teaching. On the other hand, I get the impression he's making an even bigger impression on kids now than he was as a teacher.

12:21 PM  
Blogger Spy Scribbler said...

Well, um, he may as well be teaching. I looked through his calendar, and it looks like he's touring 9 months out of the year and writing for three. (I suppose he's writing while touring, too, but ...)

Even if most of that is local ...

That's amazing.

9:16 PM  
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