The Challenge

An expert with a remarkable story and a manuscript is not the same as a published author with an audience. Books launch and disappear quickly, and a debut title from an independent publisher rarely reaches a national audience on its own.

 

What We Did

Hipsetter works with clients from the idea through to the audience: shaping the proposal, securing the publishing relationship, and then building a launch that puts the author in front of the people most likely to care.

Rather than conventional bookstore appearances, we build tours around institutions whose audiences already intersect with the subject -museums, science centers, festivals and schools - and handle the whole of it: venue relationships, institutional agreements, programming, publisher and retail coordination, sponsorship, scheduling, travel, media, and on-site production.

 

Execution

Vickie Kloeris was NASA's head of food science for nearly three decades, managing first the Shuttle and then the International Space Station food systems. Her memoir, Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist, was published by Ballast Books.

The Hipsetter Group built a 14-market national tour to launch the book, routed through high-profile science and space museums whose visitors are already curious about exactly what the book is about. The book is now carried in the retail stores at those institutions -a launch that turned into a standing retail presence.

Dr. Karen Nyberg's A Quilt of Stars, published in 2026, tells the story of the first quilt block sewn in space. The fall 2026 national tour includes programs with the National Children's Museum, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami, Space Center Houston, the Museum of Flight, and the International Quilt Festival in Houston, where an exhibition of Nyberg's textile work runs alongside her appearance. Guild and institutional dates continue into 2027.

 

Impact

Two authors, two audiences, one model - taking a book from manuscript to publisher to a national platform, with the institutional relationships already in place. In all cases, the tour did not end when the dates did: the book remains on sale at the museums that hosted her.

It works for any author with a story worth telling, not only astronauts.