If you’re like me, I rather enjoy the opportunity to catch a book author in person, especially if they’re willing to read from their work and maybe take a couple of questions. Normally, I keep up with these things every Sunday in the SF Chronicle and I’ve got to tell you, with the recent demise of Bay Area bookstores like Stacey’s and Cody’s, the number of author appearances has diminished considerably. What used to fill a whole page in the Book section is now just a couple of columns.
However, I just stumbled across a new site that has given me some reason to be optimistic and it’s called BookTour. Headed by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief Wired Magazine, BookTour bills itself as “the world’s largest, 100% free directory of author events.”
With BookTour, you can search for author appearance by name, location, or even genre. If you are an author, you can add your own events. Want an author to come to you? Request an author come speak at your event.
Once you find the authors and events you’re interested in, keep track of them with email updates, RSS feeds, or links for online calendars like iCal.
Of course, all the books link back to Amazon, where BookTour will helpfully keep up with the authors you purchase and let you know when they’re coming to your town.
So why am I optimistic? Well, a search for all events in the next week within 50 miles yielded 50 events. BookTour could be a great way for local authors to promote their books and keep bookstores in business.
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