Six Towns, One Estate Car and a Boot Full of Paperbacks: My DIY Tour of England's Unfashionable North

The email that started it

My publicist — a lovely, exhausted woman who handled eleven writers at once — sent me the autumn plan in one sentence: London launch confirmed, regional appearances TBC. TBC, it turned out, meant never. The budget had gone on a drinks reception in a Soho basement where the wine was cheap and the canapés were gone by 7:40pm.

So I did what any stubborn northerner with an estate car would do. I opened a spreadsheet, Googled every independent bookshop between the Peak District and the Humber, and started emailing booksellers directly. No agent. No publicist. Just me, asking if they fancied hosting a midlist novelist on a Tuesday evening.

Six said yes. Doncaster. Wakefield. Stockport. Hebden Bridge. Bury. And, for reasons I still can't fully explain, Oswestry.

Booking it yourself is easier than you think

Here's the practical bit, because someone will want it. Indie bookshops are desperate for events that aren't a celebrity memoir. The bookseller who runs the shop on Doncaster's high street told me she gets maybe two genuine author approaches a month, and half of those are vanity-press hard sells. A polite email with your ISBN, a proposed date and an honest description of your book puts you ahead of the game.

A few things I learned by trial and error:

• Avoid Mondays. Tuesdays and Wednesdays work. People will leave the house for a talk on a Tuesday in a way they simply won't on a Monday.
• Offer to bring your own card machine. Half the shops don't have a spare one for events.
• Ask what time suits them. One shop wanted 5:30pm so the staff could get home. Fine. It's their room.
• Accept that the fee is books sold and a cup of tea. I made £43 in Wakefield and I'd do it again tomorrow.

The motorway is a state of mind

The M62 gets a bad press, mostly from people who've never had to drive it in horizontal rain at junction 25. But there's something meditative about it, especially at the stretch where the moors rise up on either side and the sky goes properly enormous. I did a lot of thinking on that road. Mostly about whether I'd remembered the tablecloth.

I became a connoisseur of services. Wetherby remains the gold standard — decent coffee, a Wetherspoons attached for when the day goes badly. Ferrybridge is best avoided unless you enjoy the specific sadness of a chicken baguette at 10am. And I developed a whole taxonomy of greasy spoons, culminating in a café outside Stockport where the owner asked what my book was about, listened to my entire rambling pitch, and then bought a copy for her daughter before I'd even given my talk.

That café sold more copies that week than my London launch.

The rooms are smaller and the people are better

Here's what nobody tells you about capital events: the room is full of other writers, a few industry folk scanning for the exit, and your long-suffering partner. The questions are polished. Nobody buys anything because everyone there has already been sent a free copy.

In Bury, a retired plumber asked me a question about my protagonist's motivations that was sharper than anything I got in a broadsheet review. In Hebden Bridge, a book group of eight women had all read the novel in advance and argued about the ending for forty minutes while I sat there like a slightly overwhelmed referee. In Wakefield, the bookseller had made a handwritten sign and put it in the window, and three people came in off the street purely because of it.

Small rooms are honest rooms. If the talk is going badly, you know within four minutes, and you adapt. If it's going well — really well — you get that rare, electric feeling of a room actually listening, and it doesn't dissipate the moment everyone goes to find their coats.

What the booksellers know

I started collecting their wisdom like souvenirs. The Stockport bookseller keeps a notebook of every customer recommendation she's made in five years and follows up. The Doncaster pair — a mother and daughter — told me that crime sells all year but 'spikes when it's grim outside', which is basically a meteorological theory of publishing and I believe it entirely.

They also know their readers in a way no algorithm does. One of them reordered my novel after the event without being asked, based purely on 'the sort of people who came'. That's market research you cannot buy.

Would I do it again?

Already planning it. Next time I'm adding a Lincolnshire leg and a proper overnight stop, because Oswestry to Doncaster in one day was a mistake I won't repeat.

The maths of a DIY tour is humbling — after petrol, services and one regrettable hotel in Rochdale, I probably broke even. But six shops now stock a book they might otherwise never have seen, and six booksellers know my name. In an industry obsessed with reach, that's the small, stubborn kind of success you build by hand, one Tuesday evening and one greasy spoon at a time.

And honestly? I'll take the M62 over the Northern line any day of the week.