theartofnotwriting:

I am really excited to announce that my publisher, HarperCollins, is launching a fan-voted tour stop campaign today! What that means is that you (if you live in the US— more on that later*) can get your friends, your family, your shockingly intelligent cat, your neighbor Bob, your fifth period English teacher, whoever you want, to vote for your state, and if your state wins, I will go there on my Allegiant tour this year! I love this because it means that places that don’t usually get author visits have the chance to make that happen.

Also, if you vote, you’ll be entered to win a trip to one of my tour stops, too!

All of this is taking place at the Divergent tumblr: divergentofficial.tumblr.com/competition

Segue: this feels like a good time to talk about my events this year. They’re going to be a little different than they have in the past— basically, there are going to be two rules. One is a “one book per person” rule (meaning that I’m signing and personalizing one book per person), and the other is a “no posed photos” rule. (Posed photos are when I take a break from signing and lean over the table/walk around it to take a picture with you.)

There are two reasons for these rules. The first one is time. I am extremely lucky in that my book events have gotten sort of…big. Which is amazing. But that means that the thirty seconds it takes to set up a photo, the sixty seconds it takes to sign a few books, is multiplied not just by 50 or 100, but by several hundred, and that can add a couple hours to an event that’s already pretty long.

Another thing that has happened as a result of the growing size of these events is that they have become much more stressful for me. For a long time I watched rockstar authors take All The Photos and sign All the Books and they were so good at it and so calm while they were doing it that I got mad at myself for not being the same way. But recently I’ve accepted that everyone has a different capacity for certain things, and everyone’s stress/nervousness is triggered by different things. I have isolated the things that stress me out (really long signings, lots of photos), and am trying to accommodate my own limits into my events so that I’m still able to be friendly and upbeat while I’m doing them (instead of entering panic mode).

I really hate imposing limits on my interactions with you guys. I mean, we have a special bond, right? (I think so!) But events were starting to become unmanageable for me, and we threw around a lot of solutions here on Team Divergent— like not doing them at all, or limiting the amount of people who can come to each one— but this is the solution we’ve landed on, and I’m happy with it because it means that a lot more people can come to the events, which is good for everyone, including the bookstores that will be hosting us.

Thanks for reading. When I mentioned this photo-related nervousness on Twitter last week during BEA, so many of you were so sweet about it, and I really appreciated that. As always, I love chatting with you guys when I see you in person, and it’s totally fine to take pictures of me while I’m signing or speaking, neither of those things makes me nervous at all.

I can’t wait to see which state I will be traveling to!

*I know, US only stuff is sad for those of you who don’t live in the US. But I’m hoping to be a little more international in the near future!

theartofnotwriting:

Full disclosure: as our car approached the set, I turned to my husband and said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up.” I mean, I spend most of my time in front of a screen. Set visits to the movie adaptation of the words I scrawled over winter break three years ago were never something I was…