{"id":20814,"date":"2017-03-21T08:20:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T12:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20814"},"modified":"2017-03-21T08:20:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T12:20:37","slug":"lessons-from-two-author-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=20814","title":{"rendered":"Are We Still Friends? After This Event, I Hope So!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When picture book author Ruth Horowitz<\/a> (Are We Still Friends?<\/em><\/a>) contacted us last fall\u00a0for\u00a0an author event in March, we wavered. March was shaping up to be a crowded month with several offsite events planned, and we wanted Ruth to\u00a0have a successful reading.\u00a0Since Ruth was sure she could help draw a crowd, and we like to say yes if we can, we did. And boy, were we happy we said yes! Little did we know how much of a crowd Ruth would gather.
\nRuth\u00a0has lots of local connections, having once lived and worked in Vermont. She was sure her friends and colleagues would turn out, got in touch beforehand to warn us that she’d run out of books at a previous event. We’d ordered 30 copies from Scholastic and another 10 from a distributor, so we felt comfortable. Authors\u2014optimists that they\/we are\u2014tend to overestimate how many books will sell during an event, sometimes by a lot. They also aren’t usually aware that\u00a0the cost of returning unsold stock can make a bookstore actually lose money on an event.\u00a0Forty books is a solid number for most regular events, and we’d also brought in Ruth’s backlist.
\n
\nBut we hadn’t counted on Ruth’s extraordinary powers to bring in her people. Usually, authors estimate how many of their friends and family will attend an event, and the actual numbers\u00a0generally turn out to be about 1\/3 to 1\/2 of the guess. Weather, unexpected illness, forgotten appointments, and busy lives can conspire to keep people away at the last minute. But our last two events with authors with VT connections have been spot on! Jason Chin and Ruth Horowitz both drew terrific crowds, made up of the public as well as personal friends. But Ruth’s event was, I think, the first in my 20 years of bookselling where the author brought in even more of her own invitees than she expected.
\n“All of my worlds are colliding!” Ruth said, looking out at the 50-60 faces in the crowd. Work colleagues from her days years ago at\u00a0Seven Days<\/a>\u00a0(a local arts and events newspaper), friends, and family were all there, in addition to new faces. People were lined up in the aisles. Below is a photo of\u00a0some\u00a0of the audience\u2014there’s another chunk to the right and left out of\u00a0the camera’s range:
\n\"\"
\nIt was a delightful event, full of warmth and good feeling\u2014and worth all of the store fixture rearranging we’d done to accommodate the crowd. (We have to get creative with larger audiences!) I just love it when the bookstore is filled with laughter and book joy. The theme of Ruth’s picture book \u2014 salvaging a friendship after an unhappy incident \u2014 resonated with listeners young and old.
\nRuth had brought apples and honey sticks, and we’d brought honey teddy bear cookies, so younger kids went outside to the snack table while Ruth signed and chatted with the adults waiting in line.\u00a0It was a crazy scene, but a really fun, relaxed kind of crazy.
\nIn the end, we’d done a pretty good job of predicting book numbers, or at least would have done if five of the copies hadn’t arrived damaged. At the end of the day, we\u00a0were four copies short. We had Ruth sign bookplates for those copies and for a new stack of stock for the store’s shelves. All in all, it was the best incarnation of a happy bookstore event for a local \u2014 well, used-to-be-local \u2014 author!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were warned we might run out of books, the kind of prediction and promise that usually requires a grain of salt. But in this case….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}