Setting up Civil War Round Table Speaking Engagements

This is a guest post written by Savas Beatie author Larry Tagg. We are publishing his book The Unpopular My. Lincoln in May of 2009. The author has been working to set up talks to Civil War Round Tables and has had a lot of success getting bookings so far. Below are Larry Tagg’s tips on how he set up the events.

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Early on, I decided to make speaking engagements at Civil War Round Tables an important part of the publicity campaign for my book published by Savas Beatie, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln (May 2009). I looked for all the Civil War Round Tables within driving distance of my house, which in my case included the Civil War Round Tables in California, plus Las Vegas.

I am more comfortable using email than the phone (are most writers like me?), and looked around for websites that might have the email addresses of the California CWRTs. I found them at two addresses:
http://www.civilwararchive.com/RNDTABLE/webtable.htm and
http://www.civilwarriors-wsfv-ca.org/cwrtlink.html

These websites gave me a contact address for the dozen or so of CWRTs I was after (the first has links for CWRTs all over the country). I composed a generic request to each, with the subject line, “May I speak to your CWRT?” The text was the following:

Hi Mr. _____,

My name is Larry Tagg. I had a book out a few years ago, The Generals of Gettysburg. Some of your members might have seen me speak at the West Coast CWRT Conference at Harris Ranch back then.
I have a new book coming out, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, which will be published by Savas Beatie next May. I was wondering if we could set up a date next summer for me to talk about the book with the ________ CWRT.
The book tells the story of how reviled Lincoln was, even in the North, during his presidency. Although it is unequivocally pro-Lincoln, it runs against the grain of Lincoln-worship, of which we ought to be getting an earful in the Lincoln bicentennial year.
Savas Beatie has a video of me giving a talk on the book, and if you would like, I’m sure they would be glad to send you a copy. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
Larry Tagg

I received uniformly affirmative replies from the chairmen of the CWRTs, telling me when their CWRT met—usually a Wednesday evening once a month, but sometimes a Tuesday or Thursday. I kept a careful log of the replies, and made a folder of the CWRTs in my email “Contacts.” I committed to speaking engagements on a first-come-first-serve basis, although I tried to schedule the southern California ones—the ones farthest from my Sacramento home—so that I could do a “swing” and schedule a couple in the same week.

The one problem with this method was that the contact address listed in the online links above was obsolete for some CWRTs. In all cases, the persons I initially contacted emailed me the correct, current contact. If you would like to get a current list of the contacts for California CWRTs, you may email me at larryrtagg@yahoo.com and I will email you a current list, for a small percentage of your book sales. Ha ha, just kidding.