What is a Bookstore Event For?
On having a reading with 5 people, one of them me.
Authors post shots of large audiences when they experience a large audience, because that is a truly amazing feeling. You feel kind of famous; it’s a dash of all the fantasies you might have had as a little kid about the life of an author.
But having an event with 4 or 5 people is a normal thing, too, though we don’t talk about it much. In the moment, it feels like a failure. Here was me, last night: oh gosh I am such a buffoon, I planned this event and didn’t realize it was on Yom Kippur, and plus on a Sunday evening when everyone is sad about going back to work the next day. It was at the coolest bookstore in Wicker Park: Volumes Bookcafe, and the bookstore owner Rebecca was so, so great. And let’s be real: there were 5 people and one of them was me.
But the “buffoon” moment passed really quickly, because this is what happens. In the attempt to welcome a book into the world, to do the job of publicizing and drumming up interest, you make events. You invite people to these events. All of the publicizing of the events is doing the work of letting people know about the book.
Here’s me with my book; photo courtesy of Martha Bayne.
Hey, get a copy of this awesome book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook here. It’s on sale for $17.95 AND here’s a stellar review in the Chicago Reader (another dream that I would EVER have a book reviewed in the reader) and another stellar review from Elizabeth Bales Frank in On the Seawall. (See what I just did there?)
And on that evening, sure, you’d love to have a bunch of folks, to feel popular. I had a number of folks contact me to let me know they wanted to come but couldn’t. Those messages made me feel loved. But this isn’t about who loves me and who doesn’t. It’s about selling books, but it’s also about letting people know that the book exists.
What a Book Event is For
To spam the crap out of friends and strangers with notices about the event.
To circulate flyers and online invites basically talking about how great your book is.
You sign copies of the book at the bookstore and then they are there with “signed by the author” stickers.
You appear on a bookstore calendar and on flyers and this will be part of the massive effort to get your book’s cover image and title into people’s heads and onto their “books to buy or borrow” list.
You get to see friends. This, I have realized, is actually the MOST important part of book events. Don’t organize a book event in a city where you don’t have friends or supporters. Instead, make it about visiting the people you love and who make you feel whole and who you wouldn’t otherwise see. This book tour is my celebration of the midwest I love, and a kind of glorious return after a few years that have been REALLY hard for me and for the entire globe. I just have gotten to see and hug people and eat outside and be with folks. And that has done my heart SO good.
And yes, to sell books. But I am mindful, given the urge to quantify “butts in seats” as universities so often do, that numbers of butts in seats are not really what we’re after. We’re after minds and hearts and lives.
I’ve had awesome events, mostly at universities, where a bunch of people were in a big auditorium. You never forget those, and I always take photos of those audiences. But last night was another kind of special, because I GOT TO HANG OUT AND TALK WITH MEGAN STIELSTRA who I have revered for so long and she was amazing. And she’d read my book and blurbed my book and really thought about my book and the writing, and she said nice things that almost made me want to cry and destroy my eyeliner. And Martha Bayne, who I love but who I have also never met in person, came and brought a friend named Eirin Caffall who has two books coming out and who I kind of immediately adored. And then Martha and Eirin and I went out and sat outside a bar and had drinks and cajun fries and green beans and I felt like I’d known them for way longer than one hour. And my love of Chicago and the midwest just exploded in my chest.
My worst book event ever was when I was promoting my first book, and I cold-called a Barnes and Nobles somewhere in Minnesota where I knew no one, and then I showed up, and one man with an intense focus on the boats of World War II came and gave me a detailed lecture on those boats for about an hour.
But was that the worst? It made a great story, and it also gave me an excellent reference point for “what’s a bad signing or reading,” and it was part of a tour where someone—a complete stranger—in another Barnes and Nobles near my hometown stopped and bought two hardcover copies of that book just because I was from near there, not a hotbed of authors and books, and “because you made us proud.”
This is the work: writing. Sharing stuff from an incredibly vulnerable place of hoping that someone will read it. Getting to be in someone else’s head with your words. Being like an indie band and playing to an empty bar. You know all those stories, right? I’m an indie band. And I enjoyed the conversation with Megan, Martha, Eirin, Mary, and me immensely, and I almost couldn’t stay in my body in that intimate setting where they were saying such nice things about my writing. And I was also enjoying the fact of my own complete okay-ness with the event. This is what life is like, and I got to go to a bookstore on Milwaukee Avenue as an author with 8 books, a block away from the In These Times offices where I’d worked 24 years before as a young writer with 0 books. And I wanted to yell back to 28-year-old-me, “Hey, you’re not gonna believe it, what’s coming.”
And meeting Mary: a complete stranger who also saw the flyer and came in because she wanted to hear about essays and who wanted to start writing, and who then bought a copy of the book for herself and one for her sister.