Sea to Shining Sea

With the New Year underway — and some of us still digging out from various snow and other weather events — it’s time to get the Wander the Rainbow roadshow back on the road.

The beginning of 2011 sees us heading to America’s biggest cities — New York City and Los Angeles. While in the conventional publishing world these are typically the first spots on a book tour (to say nothing of movie premieres), in the case of a grassroots, indie-publishing effort, the calculus is reversed: we waited for Wander the Rainbow to garner momentum, and now — thanks to social networking, “backdoor” publicity, “guerrilla” marketing… plus some marketing of the more conventional kind — we’re finally ready to hit the big-time.

Well, mostly ready. I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess to some pre-event jitters. As always, we’ll be offering up some unique event goodies — prize giveaways for those of you who best answer our travel questionnaire, and (of course!) complimentary chocolates.

But for New York and L.A. we’re going one further.

In New York, our event — happening this Thursday, January 20 — is at venerated indie bookseller McNally Jackson Books. Located in the heart of historic SoHo/NoLita, this bookstore is looking to the future: they’re one of the first customers for the Espresso Book Machine, a device that prints books on demand right in the store. We’re planning to demo this groundbreaking piece of technology and maybe print off a few copies of Wander the Rainbow on demand before your very eyes. Appropriate for a city that’s often synonymous with book publishing.

For our return to the West Coast, and our debut in tinseltown, we plan an equally showmanlike event. We’ll be at Distant Lands on Monday, February 7, a bookstore-cum-travel-outfitter in the heart of Old Pasadena. Using some of the store’s travel-outfitter wares, we’ll talk about how to pack light, efficient, and fabulous for a long journey. Living out of a backpack for seven months sounds like a hardship for many — but we’ll show that it need not be.