Talk to the author
It's happened to me quite often: I'm in a bookstore, and an author is doing a signing. It's an author I know nothing about, and I'm pretty darned sure I won't buy his or her book. So I avoid the signing table. The last thing I want is someone pressuring me to buy a book I have no interest in.
Well, never again. Having been on the other side of that interaction, let me offer a request on behalf of bookstore-appearance personnel everywhere: please, talk to the author!
He -- and if I'm using the male pronoun here, please understand it to stand for the first-person pronoun -- won't be terribly offended if you don't buy his book. He may not even have the skill to lay a heavy sales pitch on you (he is, after all, an author, not a salesperson). But he would really like somebody to talk to.
The signing (where the author sits behind a table of books for two hours) is a far more difficult event than a reading (where the author makes a speech about or reads from the book), unless you have terrible stage fright. Whether you're doing a reading for one person or 100, you can give pretty much the same spiel; it takes up a good chunk of time and the rest can be devoted to questions.
But at a signing, if only one person shows up -- or if 100 show up in the first hour, but none in the second hour -- the author is stuck sitting at a table alone. With a bunch of copies of a book he doesn't need to read. Time drags.
At the best stores -- which in my experience have always been the independent bookstores -- the staff is there with him, chatting about the book or drawing him into their other conversations. But even these can run dry sometimes.
So my new pledge is that when I see an author sitting alone at a signing table somewhere, I'm going to go up and talk to her. I may ask obvious questions ("What's the book about? Who published it?"). And I may walk away empty-handed without saying anything more than "Thanks for telling me about it." But if the author I've talked to is anything like me, she'll be grateful nevertheless.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
Well, never again. Having been on the other side of that interaction, let me offer a request on behalf of bookstore-appearance personnel everywhere: please, talk to the author!
He -- and if I'm using the male pronoun here, please understand it to stand for the first-person pronoun -- won't be terribly offended if you don't buy his book. He may not even have the skill to lay a heavy sales pitch on you (he is, after all, an author, not a salesperson). But he would really like somebody to talk to.
The signing (where the author sits behind a table of books for two hours) is a far more difficult event than a reading (where the author makes a speech about or reads from the book), unless you have terrible stage fright. Whether you're doing a reading for one person or 100, you can give pretty much the same spiel; it takes up a good chunk of time and the rest can be devoted to questions.
But at a signing, if only one person shows up -- or if 100 show up in the first hour, but none in the second hour -- the author is stuck sitting at a table alone. With a bunch of copies of a book he doesn't need to read. Time drags.
At the best stores -- which in my experience have always been the independent bookstores -- the staff is there with him, chatting about the book or drawing him into their other conversations. But even these can run dry sometimes.
So my new pledge is that when I see an author sitting alone at a signing table somewhere, I'm going to go up and talk to her. I may ask obvious questions ("What's the book about? Who published it?"). And I may walk away empty-handed without saying anything more than "Thanks for telling me about it." But if the author I've talked to is anything like me, she'll be grateful nevertheless.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
