The Haunting Horrors of a Book Tour

The moment you get on a plane, time stands still. The odds are high that you’ll experience some degree of a time-zone change and if you’re like me, time is already a fairly elusive phenomenon. There’s an effect that happens between walking into that terminal at your next destination and getting to your Airbnb or hotel or spot where you’ll crash for the day or the evening, where you’re losing track of any sense of a routine.

Suddenly it’s 3 am and you can’t sleep. It’s 6:30 pm and the event is at 7 pm and you swear it feels like it’s midnight. Time creates a bubble and it doesn’t stop there. This isn’t just jet lag. It’s a blurry haze that makes you feel distanced from, well, reality. It’s alarming to skim social media and realize you have no idea what your friends have been up to, no idea what might have gone lives—be it a book review or author interview—about your book. You get text messages from friends and family at erratic times and there’s a palpable distance, like you are so far away from them. In some ways, you are.

It’s more elusive than most of the other items on this list, but there’s also this looming threat of anxiety, of something possibly going wrong. Maybe you space a flight or the actual event. You miss an important email or phone call. 

There’s also the money thing—because unless you’re a marquee name you’re likely paying for a lot of your own tour expenses (which is also a reason why you’d be working as much as possible throughout the tour)—which causes its own stress and anxiety. Every single food purchase is, sure, a “write-off” yet there’s still that looming threat of… oh great another charge to the card, another grab at the draining checking account. It’s that looming threat, like an invisible negative thought spiral just daring you to give into it, so that every experience ends up co-opted, your mind preoccupied with the worries and possible financial woes to be faced on the other side, the end of the tour.

You’re about to be in conversation with another writer or a book critic and then something happens: the dreaded "no show". Or maybe you yourself consider no-showing—allowing fear of the unknown to consume you. 

What happens when you roll into the event or the media spot only to realize that those that initially agreed to be part of it decided to pull out? That’s a lot to take in, particularly if it’s a venue that decides that maybe they aren’t getting enough presale tickets or RSVPs—and you worry they'l decide you’re not worth their time. It's scary thing, and it’s yet another tour horror that can haunt you.

Not every city is going to welcome you. Sometimes things just seem off; they go wrong. You get hassled on the street, or maybe you’re in an Uber and the driver fights you over the fact that you’re wearing a KN95 mask because hey, you’re traveling a lot and Covid-19 is still around and you don’t want to catch it—and you definitely don’t want to spread it. Or maybe there’s a strange knock on your Airbnb door at night, one that occurs a few times like it’s some sick joke because, come on, you were the one that wrote that home invasion novel. Whatever it is, there’s definitely something to be said about each stop being truly unique, no matter how quick the stint. Every city has a name and an identity all its own.

What else is there to say? Covid-19 is still out there. There’s talk of monkeypox. That guy sitting right next to you coughs in your direction and you can just feel the virus incubating.

Thankfully you wore a mask. And yet… doing this in 2022 is a very different thing from back when book tours were more common.

What if you find out some stops couldn’t get books? It could be for a technically good reason, the print run already selling out, or it could be that the distributor or bookstore or someone on the back end messed up. Or even worse, and far more likely—supply chain issues, particularly shipping and processing, simply slowed things down and made it impossible to get inventory to people in time. 

Whatever the case, there’s a spark of anxiety that follows a writer into every stop that goes to the tune of—will they have any books? Will they even have it on shelves? Or is it going to be returned immediately, unsold inventory.

Related: 5 Cursed and Haunted Books You Should Read at Your Own Risk

Amid all the highs and lows of the tour, the biggest horror is doubt, it’s exhaustion; it’s waiting for you during those quiet moments in your hotel room when the event is over or just about to happen, when you’ve only got those idle minutes to endure… that’s when any and all doubt and anxiety will come rushing in. 

If you ended on some never-ending tour, stuck between a variety of these horrors? Like a fucked up rendition of In the Mouth of Madness? Oh god, that would horrifying… a true invasion of your sanctuary or safe space. To have no home to go back to… well that’s perhaps the most horrifying thing of all.