BOOK SIGNING IN DENVER, SEPTEMBER 9

I will be joining about 40 other authors from across the fiction world at a book signing in Denver Friday night September 9 at 8 PM. Come to the Renaissance Hotel at 3801 Quebec St, Denver, CO 80207 and say hi. There will be a cash bar. I look forward to meeting each of you!

BOOK SIGNINGS: UTILITY OR VANITY

   In a prior life I used to manage local music talent, mostly helping teen garage bands make the transition into actual performance venues and the like. It was not uncommon, unfortunately, to schedule an opening act and a headline act for a venue and, no matter how much advertising is done - print, social, marquee, etc. - the bands are the only ones to show up, some stragglers aside. The headliners would sit and watch the opening act perform, and then they'd trade places on the stage and the openers would watch the headliners perform. I used to call nights like that, none too politely, Incest-a-poloozas. Maybe we could say it was good performance practice, but let's agree that's just putting lipstick on a pig.

   Sometimes an author's book signing can feel like that - the number of friends and fellow writers that show up can be counted on one hand, and the rest of the time you're left smiling at passers-by, attempting to look friendly and approachable, and just generally looking like a doofus!

   So why do we do book signings? It certainly isn't for the one book or two we might sell at every third appearance, which is a distinct kind of thrill, more like a drop of water on a dying man's tongue, great for what it is, but hardly life-saving. Is it vanity? Is it just to see our name on the chalk-board-sandwich-board set on the sidewalk outside the store? Does it make us feel somehow like real writers to sit idly behind a banner touting our latest release, sorting the three pens we brought with us, rearranging the books from one pattern to another? If we don't sign a single book, or even sell one or two, is there really any utility at all in working so hard to schedule book signings for ourselves?

   There are self-promotion superstars, personal-marketing gods who will tell you to pick creative, out-of-the-box venues for your signings; promote your appearances with contests and giveaways; don't wait for customers to come to your table but go out and engage them; etc. But the secret little truth is these people are making more off the money you pay for their advice than they are from putting their own advice into practice.

   So do appearances and signings have any utility at all? Or is it all just a single tear into the ocean?

   The answer is in how you, yourself, shop for books. I'm betting the vast majority of you out there are like me. How many of you have walked by the lady offering samples at the grocery store, maybe you take a sample, maybe you don't, but you don't take one of the boxes or packages she has stacked around her for sale. Then, later, on another aisle, you see the product, the very one she was pushing, and you take your purchase from here? No one likes to be sold stuff, even if later they decide it sounded pretty good after all.

   Like me, you are reluctant to pick up a book written by someone you've never heard of before. You almost always buy books by author's you already know, or someone whose opinion you respect has recommended. Name recognition is the key. Getting your name out there so often and so much that people begin to recognize it, even if they don't know where from. So much that one day they pick up your book, recognize your name and think, "I've heard a lot about this guy/gal before, so he/she must be good." And they buy your book!

   Book signings - indeed all self promotion - is all about name recognition, putting your name on the lips of customers, or in the backs of their minds like a seed to take root and bear fruit at a later time. So, book signings: vanity? Maybe. Sure. Okay, a little bit, yeah. But utility! Very much so!

OPEN LETTER TO A BOOKSELLER

    In today's post I'd like to reprint an email I sent to a local independent bookseller in response to their email detailing their outrageous policy for hosting book signings for local authors. This is not, of course, any representation of independent booksellers as a whole. In general these are some of the warmest, friendliest people with the biggest hearts that has ever been my privilege to know. But I do think the last paragraph of my letter to this particular bookseller says it all.

"Dear M. Bookseller,

    "Thanks for your courteous and professional email. Unfortunately it appears I will not be able to do a book signing at your store after all. Let me explain why.

    "Your requirements are, to be brief: a reasonable expectation of 40-50 attendees; at least 20 sales at the event to consider it successful; a $200 co-op fee; a 40% discount on at least 50 books; and a $5 voucher fee from each attendee. I am surprised if, under these strictures, you are scheduling any such events at all at your store.

    "For anyone to be willing to buy a $5 voucher to attend such an event, they would already have some certainty of buying the book, in which case they most likely have bought the book already, given all the more convenient options than attending a booksigning at a store to do so.

    "If I do not have a reasonable expectation of drawing 40-50 people to a signing event you will not host it. On the other hand, if I already had a reasonable expectation of 40-50 such people in any one community attending such an event my sales would already be strong enough in the community not to warrant the 40% discount, $200 co-op fee, and $5 vouchers to do such a promotion. I would simply choose another, more writer-friendly venue. I am scheduling book signings to attract new readers for my books, not to simply glad-hand the readers I already have, grateful as I am for them.

    "The margin of markup for all of the participants involved in publishing a book - writer, publisher, printer, distributor, retailer, etc. - is already narrow, and you are asking me or my publisher to remit a $200 co-op fee for an event only considered successful if it sells 20 books, which comes to $10 per book if that many are sold, more than that if fewer books are sold, when books in general are priced between $12 and $20 retail. Then, additionally, you want a 40% discount on 50 books provided for the event, and the right to return unsold books.

    "In short, you will only host a book-signing event at guaranteed revenue for yourself, 0 risk, while beggaring every other participant along the supply chain who also has fair expectation of making a profit on the enterprise.

    "Finally, I was not even asking for a formal signing event, with reading and discussion and Q&A. I was only asking to set up a table somewhere in your store to sign books purchased by your customers. Such an arrangement requires minimal but equal effort on both our parts (you have an employee set up a table, I carry boxes of my books in from my car) and $0 in cost to each of us, since the retail space my table would take up in your store is presumably empty at the moment anyway. As to promotion, we each do promotion on our own parts utilizing our own resources to benefit the enterprise collectively.

    "Respectfully, in today's anemic print-book-selling climate I feel it is the responsibility of all of us in the industry, especially us independents (publishers and booksellers) to work in unity to promote reading and the enjoyment of the written word, not to further the demise of reading as an entertainment form by seeking to exploit each other out of all possible profit.

    "It pains me that we cannot help promote each other in that spirit of cooperation.

"Sincerest best wishes,
"Kevin Paul Tracy"