The "signing tour" is a one-stop trip to a rainy industrial estate outside Dublin to sign the RPG rule books people paid for as part of a kickstarter! (They'll be mailed out in due course.)
It's a trip away from home organized by a publisher and I'm signing books for customers, so in my headcanon it's a signing tour.
(Why are you looking at me funny?)
I'm not sure if it's still happening, but McDaid's Bar in South St. Anne street, just off Grafton Street, used to have a really nice jazz jam in the upstairs bar on a Thursday night. :D
@BillySmith I'm already home and still exhausted after a good night's sleep. And I'm not into jazz.
@cstross How much of those books did you write?
@NohatCoder One page … but it's a game set in the world of a Hugo award winning SF/horror series 14 books long, and I wrote *ALL* of it. (Took me 26 years, too.)
@cstross I think that is the kicker. Your signing tour has one stop, there are no fans AND you are signing a book that you only wrote a token part of.
@NohatCoder This assumes that the game devs aren't fans, that there's nothing for me to sign at the other stop (their office), and "only a token part" doesn't count: it's still a signing tour if the book is an anthology.
But this is definitely a "George Washington's Axe" question!
@cstross Galaxy Brain meme needs a Boltzmann Brain panel added
@cstross Did you ever do an actual signing tour? I thought it's a trope from fiction or 80s, not a real thing authors do anymore.
@freiksenet I got a few of them circa 2008-2014, but nothing recently. (Laundry Files and Merchant Princes didn't need them by that point; also publisher marketing spend per author dropped significantly.) They still happen but they're expensive so they're only really a thing for guaranteed bestsellers.
Also, I'm not visiting the USA under MAGA rule. And nowhere else has the potential sales to justify one.
@cstross one of those is for me, so it'll be posted to Scotland afterwards.
@cstross ah the glamorous life of the writer!
@cstross
What if the copies you're to sign are all props in an elaborate larp?
@cstross
Surely a "tour" requires more than one port of call, by definition!
@cstross You could make it a multistop tour if you can find books at the airport (if you fly) or in the city center and sign those....
