An American author tour visits a familiar set of cities in a familiar order. The route is built from media access and store relationships rather than from where readers live.
The stops are chosen for coverage, not attendance
A tour city is selected because it holds a public radio station, a newspaper book section or a regional television segment that will interview the author.
The event itself may draw a modest crowd, but the interview reaches a whole metropolitan area, and that reach is what the travel budget is actually buying.
This is why cities with strong media outlets appear on itineraries ahead of larger cities without them.
Bookseller relationships anchor the schedule
Publicists work with stores that host events well, promote them to their own customers and order enough stock to sell through on the night.
Those relationships are built over years and across many authors, so a store that delivers gets offered the next tour and the one after that.
A new store can enter the rotation, but it usually does so by succeeding with a smaller author first.
Geography is constrained by connections
An author typically does an evening event, sleeps, and flies the next morning, which means each city must connect conveniently to the next one.
Routes therefore follow airline hubs, and a city that is hard to reach gets dropped even when the local audience is strong.
Regional clusters emerge from the same logic, with a short drive substituted for a flight where two markets sit close together.
The economics rarely work on their own
Flights, hotels, escorts and staff time cost far more than the copies sold at the events, so a tour is not evaluated on ticket or book sales.
It is evaluated on the coverage generated, the booksellers energized and the signed stock left behind, all of which sell copies after the author has gone.
That is why publishers tour selectively, funding it for titles where national attention is plausible rather than for every book on the list.
Virtual events changed the mix, not the logic
Online events removed the travel cost and let an author appear in many markets in a week, which widened the map considerably.
What they did not replace was the in-person relationship with a store's staff, who handsell a book for months after meeting its author.
Most touring now combines the two, with a short physical route through the media cities and a longer virtual tail through everywhere else.