Starting Thursday, August 4, at Asheville, N.C.’s Malaprop's Bookstore, three Southern YA authors will be touring together in support of small-town book lovers, the kind perennially overlooked by author tours.

Myra McEntire (Hourglass), Beth Revis (Across the Universe), and Victoria Schwab (The Near Witch) met at a writers’ retreat and, comparing notes, realized that rural burgs, like their own hometowns, were severely underserved by the author tour establishment. To correct that, they put together an eight-stop tour that will take them from Ashville (where Revis lives) to Forest City, Morgantown, and Sylva in North Carolina; Spartanburg in South Carolina; and Kingsport, Knoxville, and Nashville (McEntire and Schwab’s homebase) in Tennessee.

Along the way, they’ll be joined by local authors like Asheville’s Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss) and Knoxville’s Alan Gratz (Fantasy Baseball), and will have a “big doorprize” at each stop. The final stop, at Nashville’s Barnes & Noble, will feature three guests: Rachel Hawkins (Hex Hall), Julie Kagawa (The Iron King), and Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray).

Details can be found at ash2nash.blogspot.com, where commenter Becky has already promised to bring a “vanful of librarians and YA fans from Clarksville” to the Nashville finale, while Morgantown resident Heather reports that “this will be my first big book signing!”