Niya asked Rick Riordan:

Hey, I love your books, and they mean so much to me. I have a question about the upcoming book tour you are going on. How do you decide where to go? Do the bookstores ask you or do you look how densely populated the area is? Thank you.

Rick Riordan Thanks for reading! Typically, I only have time to do a tour in North America for my publisher here when a new book comes out. The tour is usually about one week long, so somewhere between five and seven stops. Bookstores submit proposals to my publisher to host these events, and the publisher chooses the best / most likely to draw a good crowd. That means that for me to visit a place, it has to have a well-established bookstore (or great library system) that has experience doing large events and an enthusiastic, well-organized staff that can commit to putting on that sort of book signing. Since I usually do large events (like 500-2000 people) it also means the bookstore has to be able to find a site that can hold that many, like a local theater or school auditorium. We try to pick different places for each tour, but we do tend to go to cities where the publisher knows they've had successful events in the past, and where there is a big reading community. Over the years, I've been all over the United States and Canada, with some strange exceptions I can't really explain: never been to Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana or Wyoming, for instance. Never been to Hawaii, sadly, or anywhere in Canada except Toronto and Vancouver. As for international touring, I usually simply don't have the time or bandwidth to do that. I'll be doing an event in Italy later this month, and that's the first time I've done so in eight years. I'll be doing an event in December in London (more on that later) and I haven't done one of those in over a decade. Fifteen years ago, I did a week of events in Malta, which was cool. But that's it. As far as I can recall, I have never done a public event in any other country. Most of the time, I need to be at home in Boston writing in order to keep up with my deadlines!

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