CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
40ish alternatives to the "traditional" book event that are NOT a reading & conversation
THIS IS A LIST OF 40ISH IDEAS FOR BOOK EVENTS THAT GO BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL BOOK EVENT FORMAT, WHICH IS: READING + CONVERSATION + Q&A. Some of these might feel like ice breakers initially, which some of you will hate, and which I’m telling you that you need to still do so the event is static and sitting. I’m also having too much fun with the highlight tool and I started with rhyme & reason and then I just highlighted with my own free will.
No errors have been checked, it’s a full send. You’ll see why as you read! Apologies for the wrong yours and theres!
I’d like to thank my years as a high school teacher and Melisse at Memoiring Book Club for making this post possible. Like our alternative to blurbs list, which you can find below.
YES, FREE US FROM THE BLURB INDUSTRY COMPLEX
Do y’all know how many things you could put on a book if you took the blurb space and word count and simply … did other stuff? Used it for unique marketing space. This is in reference to the piece about Sean Manning in Publishers Weekly who was promoted to publisher at Simon & Schuster in September, and is no longer requiring blurbs for the flagship imp…
Single sentence story. Everyone gets a notebook sheet of paper with a line from the book at the top (make 20). Then you give everyone 30-60 seconds to write a next line from their imagination, and pass to the left. Continue for ten minutes. Everyone will have a developing something. (We love a kitchen timer around here. Youtube also has eclectic timers that you can watch). Read a few aloud. For each one read aloud, the author talks about how that line moved the story / poem / memoir [book] forward, what it caused in the [book], what it put in motion, what questions it caused. It becomes an interactive craft conversation and involves everyone who came out for the event. You could set the chairs up in a circle to make this one easier with the passing.
Book Fortune Cookie. Everyone gets a number (from a page in the book) when they walk into the event. That page becomes their fortune. I used to do this all the time when I was in high school—it was like my personal tarot / fortune game. I’d pick a book off my shelf (vibes!) and then I would say okay whatever pg. 17 says is the advice for x problem. To setup: Tell everyone to think about something their going through that remains unsolved. OR Tell everyone to make a wish. OR Tell everyone to imagine their upcoming week. Their “fortune answer” is on that page. No one is going to share this likely, BUT the writer can have a prepared answer with something from their book AND/OR they can talk about books that inspired the “fortunes” of their book. What books helped them work out a problem in the writing process? What books made them feel like writing a book was possible? What books helped them see themselves as children? Solve problems in their life? There are so many questions you could ask yourself and discuss here. Plus it’s just fun.
Bring in an expert. So, you wrote a poetry collection about OCD? Connect with the local (or national) organization for your conversation partner. Likewise, partner with an organization to create an event for their built-community. Make it a conversation with a cause. Talk about how poetry / novels / short stories helped you process x, y, z, etc.
Create a partnership. In that same vein, try to find something that connects to the book that would build community. Animals? Host an adoption event. Food? Invite a local restaurant to partner with you for the event. Perfume? Smelling station with the local apothecary. Baseball? Ask players from your local team to join you for a conversation. There are truly so many things out there.
What would you have done? Another craft talk disguised as a little game. This can be pre-planned with these hung up throughout the room and questions written on each (you have to bring pens for everyone) or it can be a simple conversation where you ask aloud (the conversation depends on a forthcoming audience, so you might need to have a plant or two there who are ready to participate. Probably your mom. Put conflict moments from the book at the top of each sheet, or as a prompt. “What would you have done if your mom mysteriously left before a trip to Antarctica?” (Maria Semple, Where’d You Go Bernadette?). “How would you know if your [x] was haunting you (what would the signs be?)?” (Toni Morrison, Beloved). “How would you react if you saw your parents dumpster diving while riding in an Uber?” (Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle). “What would your life say if it could talk?” (a line from Traci K. Smith’s Life on Mars).
Craft club. Is there something you can make with the folks who come related to your book? It does not have to be a keepsake, it has to be an experience. Can you make it relatively quickly without a table or stable platform? It can be elementary. Bead bracelet. Clay penguin. Homemade coloring sheet. Origami Question Game. Keychain. Lego figurine. Zine pages. Faux Pokémon card. Faux baseball card. Faux character card. No judgment tiny crafts are fun and liberating.
Faux Character card. What if you ask everyone to draw how they imagined X character. Like a stick figure drawing? Take Courtney Maum Alan Opts Out: how do you imagine Alan? Draw him. What does his playhouse look like? Draw it. Then you can make a sweet little gallery at the signing table.
Origami Question Game / Magic 8 Ball. Bring a “deciding factor” to the event, and use it to determine what you’ll do. Should I read … chapter 2 or chapter 10? Should we talk about x or y? It just adds a sweet little element of mystery and options.
Treat it like a book club meet-up. Rather than ask questions that are “analysis” like you’ve read this. Ask SIMPLE questions that relate to the book, but are no pressure to answer. How did you react to your first break-up? Let’s shout out some emotions. What did you look like? How did you describe it to friends? Where did you place blame? In this book x reacts like this … I wrote it that way because …
Sign my yearbook. Bring an author copy of your book on tour that gets passed around your events and everyone who attends has to “yearbook sign” your book with a little message. It’s like a book tour guest book.
Speed dating. Instead of setting the chairs up like an audience, set them up so people have to face each other when they sit down. The topic of the speed dates can be anything. They can be new topics each round. You can ask questions or say, okay, you have a minute to discuss the last time you felt frustrated. They should connect to the book. I would make them a little gossipy and probably a little in-crowd, so I’d be like, “Do you think Belle Burden left out financial information from her book on purpose?” or “What’s the last book that was super hyped that you didn’t love?” or “What’s your reading guilty pleasure?” Low stakes, but fun. And then the author answers the questions too after the minute is up.
Bring an instrument or a band. Have a musical interlude. An opener. Bring music.
Make the event group specific. Here are a few that have worked: Nicole Haroutunian’s Storytime for Caregivers, which in Chicago with Erica Stern is Mom Brain, and then Seersucker Live is a literary game show. There’s no reason you can’t create a one-off game show. Listen to enough episodes of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and you’re ready to host.
THREE QUESTIONS WITH NICOLE HAROUTUNIAN
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What I love about book publicity is that it gives me a wider view of community efforts to celebrate books, writing, and togetherness too!
THREE QUESTIONS WITH the CO-HOST OF SEERSUCKER LIVE, L.C. Killingsworth
So, about a year ago (two years? what is time), I pitched a “random” writer, Acree Graham Macam, an essay collection that I thought she might love, based purely on one publication and vibes. And since then, we’ve discovered that we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’ve hung out in multiple locations, we’ve taken many-…
Workshop. We’ve all been in one for the great and terrible. What could you teach as a one-off book experience. This one would probably involve registration beforehand through the place.
Epistolary. I love Off Assignment’s column “Letter to a Stranger” and you can use it as a kind of bookstore event. Figure out who they should write to (imaginary or real) related to your book. If you got nothing, have folks write to someone in the room a note of admiration. I would 100% write something lovely about a hair clip, or a purse, or the look on someone’s face.
Have a TOPIC of the conversation. Make the conversation more specific. Rather than a book talk or q&a or moderated conversation. Make the conversation have a very specific boundary or frame. And invite audiences accordingly. A tighter conversation (for me) is always better than a kind of wide-ranging “book talk” that could go anywhere.
Phone a friend. I use this as an example all the time, but Marie Helene Bertino did this kind of call-in-show with friends about “Disrupting Magical Realism.” It was virtual in 2021, but you can still watch it here, I think. I loved it because it never got old. In a world of Facetime and zoom, could you have conversations with folks from all over at your local bookstore? Yes, you could. My friend Megan Posco planned an entire book tour with John J. Lennon for The Tragedy of True Crime where Lennon called into his book tour from prison. So many things are possible if you try.
The industry conversation. You might think, hey! I thought she said this was beyond that. But what if you did a conversation with your agent, with your editor(s) (your in-house editor, your copyeditor, your freelance editor, your editor at a specific magazine), with your betareader, with your factchecker, with your publicist, and the list goes on. It could be a peak through the curtain. It could be a genesis story.
The page annotation. This involves tech. But I loved this interview with Lauren for her book Woman House, where the interview is an annotation. And I think it would be really cool (and really geeky) to see an author annotate specific pages of their book live. Folks can ask questions about elements, sentences, sentence structure.
Track changes. With the page annotation, another riff on this could be: bringing in all the iterations of a paragraph (if you work in Google Docs or Word track changes or Scribner) and go through each iteration of a paragraph or moment in the book (a poem! an idea! a research element! the ideas are endless here). Maybe you hang them all on the wall of the bookstore, maybe you have them in a powerpoint (is this a dirty word? I immediately reference this with boredom but it can be used for good), and you go through the changes. Why do I love this?Because I am a NERD.
People standing. If you’re on Tiktok, you’ll find the viral videos with the dads and their kids where someone is like “take one step forward if your dad read to you at night” and the dad never steps forward but he made generational change, and everyone in the comments is crying. In a feel good riff on that, what if you pulled things from your book (that weren’t the most vulnerable things ever) and had everyone get in a horizontal line in the bookstore, and you said “Take one step forward if x” and then the person who gets to you first (maybe 8 questions), gets a prize! These should be fun, they should not out anyone’s trauma. I feel like people standing is against the rules of a book event, but truly the more I could get folks to stand and move, I’d do it. Same for the classroom.
Erasure / Blackout poetry. You’ll have to destroy your book for this and/or scan pages. But you could give everyone in the audience a page to create an erasure or blackout poem from your book pages. You could share OR not. You might, again, need an audience plant for that part. Bring markers.
I spend a lot of my life listening to children’s shows soundtracks. This morning I was listening to Blaze and the Monster Machines on the way to the museum. There’s a song about adhesion that is a true banger. Anyway, I would pay good money to create book jingles at a book event. I love a jingle. The author could be like “give me a beat” and someone in the audience could do some drums. Someone will be an effortlessly talented for beat boxing. Someone has a mean air guitar. And together (you might need tech) create a jingle based on your book. Is this my greatest dream? I think so.
Rewrite it! Fully admitting that this is something I did in the classroom. But take a paragraph from your book and assign everyone a character. You can have a journalist, a weather person, a traffic reporter, a circus clown, a Dr. Seuss character, Blue from Blue’s Clues, Spongebob, a heavy metal guitarist or specific rockstar, a nursery school teacher, etc. And each person has to rewrite your paragraph as their character. Audience participation has to be high with this one, but honestly—we’re at a book event, the likelihood that this people write or live adjacent to writers, is quite high.
[I’m starting to slow down, but I will not give up! I will get to forty!]
Watch What Happens Live! Pretend for a second you’re Andy Cohen. What words are you going to repeat 2349 times during your book event. Andy will say drink every time you hear the word/ phrase “x.” You could do a clap every time, or a shout “ENCORE” every time. Or throw their hands up in the air like they’re on a rollercoaster every time you say that word. Or something to keep things interesting and lively. Then folks will be paying attention for that phrase or word and paying attention to whatever the conversation is.
Guess that word. You could do this in a few ways. You could literally read off a sentence and have the audience shout out ideas for the ________ word. Have someone write them on a big sheet of paper or white board for extra fun. Or you could create little book Mad Libs with a page / scene / poem from your book and have the audience literally make their own page / scene / poem Mad Lib from your book page. Read for fun!
Finish that sentence. Much like “Guess that word.” this is the same thing, but finishing a phrase or sentence. Demand audience participation! You are an author, hear you roar!
[I’m “near email length limit,” but you can’t stop me, Substack!]
Alternative title. Could also be alternative marketing copy. Alternative blurb. Alternative dedication. Alternative x. You could have folks look at a random page, look at the synopsis on the back, read the blurbs, whatever you want and they have to write an alternative title. This book is no longer called Motion Dazzle (shout out to Jocelyn Jane Cox), it’s now Sandwich & Slice! Silly, but adaptable.
Yesterday I googled, “what to do with boys who just want to bang.” You can imagine my Google results, but it was because my four year old wanted to go around our house banging something. (If you’ve ever had a four year old, you know the vibes). My miracle worker spouse then found a “Spiderman workout” on Youtube which was a woman in a Spiderman costume who created a work out with web-shooter hands and all. We did it together. Jazzercize (TM) always gets the people moving. [I’m not sure where I’m going here, I’m gassing out.] But I feel like if you could manage some sort of movement: a stretch session, a toe touch, a “so big” with your arms up in the air (this one brought to you by my seven month old), that would break up the forty-minutes of sitting for a reading and conversation. So, Add a little movement?
Reader’s Respond. Stealing this straight from The Sun Magazine, which you should support as a bastion of the personal essay that still stands, and saying that brave authors could do a reader’s respond. You do your 5-8 minute reading and then you prompt your audience to write a response (provide notecards and pens). Not a—was this good or bad? But more of—what did you notice and wonder about the piece? Then those responses become the conversation. This would be for authors who don’t fear the off-the-cuff experience.
[I’ve gone to Reddit, don’t hate me!]
The “Daniel Wallace” on Reddit obsession. Need I say more than this comment on Reddit? Okay, I will, make it a conversation about obsessions. There are so many places it could go.
Should I use the post above twice, I think so. I’ve been thinking a lot about Justin Bieber singing with his old-self through Youtube at Coachella. I love that Daniel Wallace made fun of his own Wikipedia, but we’re not all famous enough to have Wikipedias in our name. (amen). But I wonder if something writers could do at a book event is read their oldest writing. Their high school journal. Their fourth grade cardboard book. Their first college research paper. A little embarrassing? Maybe. But you just published a whole ass book. Show the people how far you’ve come. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo? Nay! The seven lives of X author.
Escape from the book event. Oh, you have a lot of time on your hands? And you love a scavenger hunt or an escape room? Create an escape from the book event. You can use books from the bookstore, get the staff involved, plant clues. This would actually be so much fun, I should start a business. And the whole thing (imagine there being a map for a fantasy and science fiction book! AHHHHH) could end in them reaching your signing table for a quick conversation with you. Folks can work in groups or alone. There could be tangents based on your book. If you would do A, do this. If you do B, do this. If you would do C, do this. OMG. I’m obsessed.
If you don’t fear being poisoned and it’s a book event that’s intimate, host a pot luck.
[Yea, that last one might be a cop out, but look at how far we’ve come!]
Book trivia? Listen, if you can make anything a game, people will come. Create a trivia game for your book. Create a trivia game based on inspiration or research or pop culture references or poetic forms. You could play jeopardy if you can’t think of a way to structure trivia.
Bad art. Another kind of reader response event, but give everyone a page with a clear scene—it could be projected or it could be an individual scene for every person. Everyone gets a notecard and a set of four restaurant crayons. Actually my kid has this crayon that he got from his cousin’s birthday goody bag that is like every color in one crayon (folks can keep it), and they all have to draw the scene (and present it. Everything is cringe, we can get over it!). Lynda Barry would love this one, and I love her.
I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how to do a game of MASH with a book. I think you could do it with plot point choices. Like a make your own zine, or make your own Mad Lib, make your on MASH sheet. Could you imagine a Gatsby MASH sheet? Hell hath no fury like a green light across the bay.
[Can she do it? I need y’all to know that I’m writing this from a play space where there are no less than 387 children riding a slide that makes guitar noises. Just so you know the scene. Yes, she can! (To the tune of Bob the Builder)]
Tour of the store. Maybe this is actually a good one as my brain drains of all resources. This kind of event would work if only 2-10 people show up. Go around the store and talk about all the books you loved that inspired your writing journey. That are comp titles. That you hate. That you think should have won major awards. That you still remember a line from. That you couldn’t put down. You could do any sort of tour. Act as the docent to imagination. Get your facts straight. Make cue cards. It’s all an act anywhere, we’re floating on a giant rock through an infinite space!
This or that. Am I remembering this as a baby shower sheet? Play a game of “this or that” and everyone gets two sets of cards, one blue and one green, or one yellow and one orange, or one pink and one sky blue. Pick your favorite colors. And you play a game of “This or That” inspired by the book. A would you rather with only two choices. Then, the author discusses what they would personally do, and what their characters chose to do and WHY (or they made them do if we’re killing darlings). It’s another craft conversation hidden in a game.
[My spouse just walked by me while I was typing away and said, “are you at 40 yet?” The people are counting! He said “one every four minutes! Get your game up.” He keeps making eye contact across the room. He’s wearing the sleeping baby. She always sleeps in chaos. Two minutes ago, he had to stop the four year old from full barbarism in the jump house. Send help!]
Book tour bucket list. Make a bucket list for your book tour (big and small) and do AT LEAST ONE of the things at each event. And they have to be … experiential. They cannot be boring. If this list is any indication, you are NOT ALLOWED to be boring. Take photos. Share on your socials as you check things off your list, but don’t share the whole list until the end.
[We made it, one of my kids is crying. I have to go! I love you all! Goodbye, I said, goodbye!]
Brilliant ideas! Thank you for sharing!
These are SO brilliant! I had a similar fortune cookie idea but yours is better so I'll be doing that one, LOL. So many terrific ideas here!