“What do you like to read?”

Selling books at cons and book fairs… and how not to scare your fans

There’s a piece going around the internet that is about 85 percent really good advice. So at first, I hesitated to say what bothered me about it.

Here, read it. It’s good stuff. “How Not to Sell Books at an Event.” I’ll wait.

I’ve been selling books at events for at least 15 years. I’m still not going to claim to be an expert. I know people who could talk a monk under a vow of chastity into buying a salacious BDSM romance novel. I know people who could talk me into buying a Western (but only that once). I don’t claim to have mastered their extroverted skill of charming the passers-by into forking over a twenty for their latest opus.

But if I had a dollar for every beginning author I’ve seen with one solitary copy of his book resting on a bare table…

I always have at least one backup tablecloth in my bag, sometimes more. I have been known to offer them on loan to cloth-less authors, and every single time that author came back at the end of the day to say, “Wow, that really made a difference! I’m going to pick up some of these.”

Note to authors: Remnant sales at fabric stores. Get an eight-foot length because you never know the size of the table you’ll get…