In 2007, Wired co-founder Chris Anderson and writer/editor Kevin Smokler unveiled BookTour.com, a site designed to help those wanting to host author events and those wishing to attend. But, yesterday Smokler announced that BookTour would be shuttering its virtual doors, blaming shrinking author book tours. From his email:

Fewer author tours and changes in book marketing budgets have made our company financially unviable. And while we would like to continue providing the valuable service that is BookTour, everyone here has families to feed and bills to pay. 

BookTour's announcement pointed to a paradox in the literary scene these days: while traditional book tours —financed by publishers, featuring little more than an author, a pile of books and a podium— are going away, author events are thriving.  As Smokler himself explained in a phone call, the Bay Area is a literary hub —"writing and books are the primary cultural industry in S.F."

What has replaced the author-with-microphone model? "The idea of an author event being multi-disciplinary pageants with the book at the center," said Smokler.

Booksellers like the Booksmith have certainly noted this change, and even when not booking bands to perform alongside authors, have gotten creative with events. For Melissa Mytinger, who manages events for the Booksmith, the book tour phenomenom comes in waves and varies by seasonal changes in publishing cycle. (See The Bay Citizen's lit guide app for examples of regular lit events.)

"I think that probably over course of last five years, you could definitely say yes, most every publisher started being much more judicious in sending authors out on tour," she said, noting that there was a time when she did fear that book events were on the wane. Thankfully, the idea that "no one goes on tour" is "simply not true."

But the funding mechanism for book tours has certainly changed.

Marketing budgets have been falling, as Mytinger noted, for years; Publishing Perspectives reported in 2009 that publishers cut them by 50%-70%. Authors have had to get creative, booking their own publicists and finding unusual venues to host events. Last year, San Francisco author Stephen Elliott published an essay in the New York Times Book Review called the "The DIY Book Tour," detailing his experience holding readings in people's houses. He wrote:

"Originally, my publisher had a standard tour planned for me, bookstores in five large coastal cities.... But the idea depressed me...I didn’t want to travel thousands of miles to read to 10 people, sell four books, then spend the night in a cheap hotel room before flying home. And my publisher didn’t have the money for that many hotel rooms anyway."

Elliott ended up going to 33 cities, staying with friends and strangers instead of hotels, with his publisher only paying for "some of the airfare."