I did my first live author event a week ago: The Mercer County Library System’s second annual Book Festival! As you can see from my enthusiastic punctuation, it was cool, and you can see at least one picture of me looking like I’m having a good time on the MCLS Instagram.
I wrote some thoughts about the event and its place in my fragile psyche in my newsletter, but if you haven’t read them already, I’m gonna make you click. (Have you considered signing up for my newsletter? You get a free book of poems and short stories for the admittedly not inconsiderable price of your email address, to say nothing of 11 emails a year with updates on my books and the unknowable convolutions of my fevered cerebrum.) What I’m here for is to memorialize a couple of brass-tacks things that might assist others facing the horror of talking about their books to readers:
- Venmo is for humans. Super easy to set up, super easy to accept. More than 50% of my sales on the day were through Venmo, and I’m glad I took the hour or so to make it happen rather than take cash only. (And I’m glad I printed the QR code.)
- Eye-catching covers are a superpower. All the love to my cover artist, who made the candy-colored palette I asked for into a set of covers that pulled people in from across the library just to ask about them.
- Write down what your books are like. I refined a nice little semi-elevator pitch pretty quickly, but I think a few key phrases in large, readable font might have been a slightly more reliable magnet and/or filter for interested readers.
- Economize on table space. I had a lot of room to spread out, so it wasn’t too bad that I had my books in little stacks, but I’m doing an event at the Princeton Public Library in a couple of weeks where I’ll only have half a table, and I think it’s going to be better to have them standing up and facing out. People seem to like those little kind of L-shaped picture stands, which are very cheap; I’ll have to hit Target or something.
- Carrying boxes of books sucks and is not sustainable. I am a strongish person and the boxes aren’t that heavy, but making a bunch of trips is a good way to get sweaty and waste a lot of time, and if I’d had an expectation of selling, say, 50 books instead of 10, then I’d probably want to bring 80 instead of 20, &c. Pretty much everyone else had a handcart or a foldable wagon: pro shit.
- Collect emails. I got what is, for me, a lot of emails from this event — and I forgot to ask a bunch of my buyers for their emails! I don’t know that this is like a fabulous way to grow your list to massive sizes, but it’s at least a good way to help make sure that people who are definitionally in the middle of my series (since I’m not done with it yet) know when the next book is coming out.
- Consider swag. Bookmarks are rumored to be cheap, and are a logical accompaniment to a book sale. They also might be a good opportunity to keep your book and contact information in a reader’s mind.
… I was going to upload some pictures of the blackout poetry craft I offered, but my children are disintegrating, so I’m going to post this now and get back to that later.