I am thrilled to be appearing at
Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH tomorrow night! There is nothing more
gratifying than an invitation to share your work with warm blooded readers. And
places like Gibson’s, with its enthusiastic events team, just warm my heart.
I’m quite certain things will go
smoothly. But it never hurts to be prepared. I thought I’d share this silly
little incident that I witnessed years ago while doing an internship at a Big 6
publishing house. It was a Summer Friday.
I don’t mean it was merely a Friday which occurred in the summer. In
publishing, a Summer Friday was a mini holiday. All the important people left
at noon, if they bothered to come in at all. The pavement was hot outside, but
the air conditioning was on full blast, which was one of the reasons that I was
still at work at 4pm.
The phone rang, and it wasn’t good
news.
The caller was a frazzled editor.
Her author, a prominent New York Times editor, was at a midtown bookstore for
his scheduled event. Unfortunately, there weren’t any of his books at the
store. Wires had been crossed, balls had been dropped. In fact, it didn’t
actually matter which cliché was most apt, because that author had no books, in
spite of the fact that there were customers there to meet him, who wanted to
buy them.
We did our best. A couple of
assistants went down to the desk in the lobby which served as a conduit to the
book storage in the basement. We pulled the very few copies of that author’s
work which were on the premises, and somebody ran them over to the store.
They were, unfortunately, backlist
titles by that author.
Everyone ended up feeling stupid:
the author, the store, the editor. Even me, and I just happened to answer the
phone. The moral of this story is to always bring some copies of your book. These
days, I keep a dozen of mine in a box in my trunk.
Because you never know. What could
be worse than having a willing customer, and no copies on hand? You don’t even
need to be at a bookstore to sell them. I sold one to another hockey mom at the
rink this winter. Bonus!
I hope you sell at least a dozen, Sarah!
ReplyDeleteGood advice. Hope you sell mucho.
ReplyDelete