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?)
@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....
@cstross I can only assume that the books complained more about being shipped to Edinburgh to be signed than you did about being shipped to the arse end of Dublin…
@pndc RPG rule books on paper aren't light and the pile I have to sign probably weighs more than I do. It's cheaper to ship me around—and besides, they've got a warehouse and mail order fulfillment facilities there. Whereas I do not (and I'm up four flights of steps from ground level on a no-stopping main road.)
