Remember when the Scholastic Book Fair was set up in the hallways at your school? With clean order forms and a pencil in hand, you and your class got to walk through the stacks and pick out books that birthday money or your parents might buy. Then there were the cool stickers and trinkets that could only be bought during the event. It was hard to stretch your dollars during this once a year delight.
Zoom through a few decades to attending a regional book festival as an author. You do a short reading to a small audience then stand at your publisher’s booth to help sell books. That’s called a signing, but is really a selling. It’s a heady experience to wear an author nametag and be a part of something so vibrant. There are hundreds, make that thousands, of new titles displayed across the publisher and book store booths. It’s hard to not be intimidated as lines of buyers snake around stanchions to wait for one of the national authors to sign his book. People pick up books to save for Christmas gifting. The book … Continue reading