A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory
and hopes other people don’t.

–Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

Let me share with you what I’ve learned about what to do and not to do on a book tour by sharing my experiences. I’m sure you can do better with a little advance warning and preparation.

Having heard that authors go on book tours when their books are published, I naturally planned to have the granddaddy of all book tours for a “breakthrough” book. At the suggestion of the publisher, I hired a publicist to schedule interviews for us over a period of eight months.

I that his approach featured tying the book back to the availability of consulting services to help people create breakthrough solutions, even though the intent had been to create a book and an approach that people could easily execute on their own.

The tour was scheduled to begin right after the publication date in January 1999. I would visit more than 30 cities during a period of four months. The locations were clustered to allow for efficiency in travel but did require me to cross the country several times. Since it was winter, I would also have to deal with storms, delays, and other weather-related challenges.

In addition, I had been in contact with local CEO organizations across the country and arranged to speak at many events sponsored by such groups. Dozens of groups invited me to speak when I was in their areas. I also scheduled appointments with clients in each area so I could tell them about the book.

The publicist advised me that I would need to have a local slant on the book to create media interest. To meet that need, I did a lot of calculations to identify who the high- and low-performing local companies had been in each locale that I would be visiting.

I soon found that reporters had virtually no interest in our book, but they usually needed help with stories they were already working on about local companies. Give them some good information and quotes about those companies, and our book would at least get a mention.

This approach led to some unusual interviews such as discussing the weaknesses of the ambulance services in Denver and whether the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas had been a good investment. I had to be prepared for anything and everything. Reporters expected me to know everything about their area.

A second thing I learned is that many reporters lacked basic knowledge of business, economics, and financial markets. I met a lot of English majors who were working day jobs in business reporting hoping to pay the bills while writing the great American novel at night. Typically, they wouldn’t have met with me at all except that my publicist was persuasive in promising that I would deliver whatever they were looking for.

Those promises kept my staff and me quite busy for the next four months. We had to become free consultants to reporters in order to tell our story.

Another lesson came when I visited book stores in the cities where I was touring: In many cases, there was not a copy of our book to be found! I began to wonder what point there was in visiting so many places when the book wasn’t available locally.

To add injury to insult, one day a BMW rear-ended my rental car at high speed on an otherwise empty road as the driver turned his head this way and that to speak to his passengers. I was in pain from whiplash for the next six months. My doctor told me to stop traveling and it would get better. Right.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that while a large book tour sounded good, it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. A low point came when Steve Wynn, the future casino billionaire, tracked me down by telephone to have a long discussion about his business practices based on an article that I was quoted in that morning.

As we spoke, Mr. Wynn worked out on a treadmill; I could hear his footfalls and puffing as he tried to persuade me that I was wrong. Meanwhile, I had the first of two interviews for that morning to reach in a few minutes. It was frustrating, to say the least.

Meeting the CEOs in person, however, proved to be a pleasant surprise. I was typically allowed two to four hours to provide a workshop based on the book, which gave me time to teach them the main concepts in the book (after correctly assuming they hadn’t yet read the book).

While some of the sessions had as few as ten CEOs, others featured over a hundred. Giving so many of these workshops allowed me to find out what material they liked best and understood the most easily, and how much they could accomplish in such a short workshop. With that experience, the workshops kept getting better and better.

Those results made me wish that I had organized the whole trip to only do workshops and had skipped the media part of the journey.

An unexpected benefit for me, although Peter Drucker had told us it would occur, was that I began to understand the content of the book in a new way. In that new understanding, I realized that the book’s basic point was that we each know how to organize things to perfection in some areas for individuals and groups, but we don’t think of those previously observed models when trying to work on a particular task.

Open up the mental pathways to those perfect experiences, and great things quickly follow. I was particularly impressed by the advantage of carrying that message in a larger group: As the CEOs shared with one another their problems and solutions, their observations sparked more understanding among the other CEOs.

There seemed to be a cumulative learning process that such a group could provide that could not be duplicated in individual tutorials or solitary learning.

So what’s my advice for you?

1. Plan to visit those who will use what you wrote about on your book tour.

2. Don’t talk to the media unless they show up to hear your talk. Expect them to be confused by what you have to say.

3. Don’t give talks in book stores (but do offer to come by to autograph books) because few will come unless you are Jack Welch.

4. Don’t travel in the winter.

5. Allow double the time you think you need between talks.

6. Have fun and find out what your book is all about!

About the author of this article:

donald mitchell is an author of seven books including adventures of an optimist, the 2,000 percent squared solution, the 2,000 percent solution, the 2,000 percent solution workbook, the irresistible growth enterprise, and the ultimate competitive advantage. read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at

http://www.2000percentsolution.com