What I Did for My Summer Book Tour

To promote his new novel, Canaan's Tongue, John Wray will navigate his hand-built raft down the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tenn., to New Orleans, coming ashore for events at five inland bookstores along the way. The book, based on the trade of stolen slaves in the mid-19th-century South, is set on the banks of the river and inspired in part by Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.

Wray isn't the only writer making unusual transportation choices. Earlier this month, TV producer and former Blue Angel E. Duke Vincent piloted his own jet to five cities, to promote the June 1 release of his novel Mafia Summer: The Ballad of Sidney Butcher. Steven Raichlen, author of the bestselling Barbecue! Bible cookbook series, is currently traveling to 20 cities in a Chevy mini-school bus with six demonstration grills in tow. And on June 29, conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher will set off on a one-month–long, 25-city tour to promote his political satire, Surrounded by Idiots: Fighting Liberal Lunacy in America, in a rented bus emblazoned with his book jacket.

Whistle-stop book tours aren't new—Stephen King revved up the trend with his 1994 motorcycle tour for Insomnia—and they remain popular as a way of reaching small communities with big summer crowds. Steve Amick will spend July promoting his first novel, The Lake, the River & the Other Lake, by driving through Lake Michigan's "gold coast," where the book is set. Pantheon's publicity director, Elisabeth Calamari, said the aim was to hit all the "small independent booksellers who see most of their traffic in the summer—think Martha's Vineyard, only in the Midwest."

A raft may be just what's needed for an author to compete for the attention of busy readers and booksellers. Britton Trice, owner of New Orleans' Garden District Bookshop, where Wray will be stopping in on July 6, said, "The whole raft idea was part of why we wanted to have him come do a signing in the first place."