The Rules of Book Events

Yen, of The Book Publicity Blog, has a fabulous post today -- and you folks know I say "fabulous" very infrequently -- all about how off-site author events work, and in particular how to go about selling books at them. As usual with posts like this, there's a whole lot of preconception-shattering. (Not everyone will buy a book; getting books to a particular spot is time-consuming, and unless you are John Grisham on the week of release, the books will not already be there; and so forth.)

All excellent advice. I'll echo her suggestion about flyers at the end -- we create a lot of flyers for authors where I work, in large part because we have a lot of professional authors who do a lot of speaking at conferences, seminars, and whatnot, and they're great for non-fiction writers of most stripes. (Less so for fictioneers, I expect.)

She's also not nearly as gloomy as I would be, if I were writing a similar post: I imagine I'd start with "probably no one will show up, anyway" and just get less cheery from there.

Update: Alison Morris, a childrens' bookseller who blogs for PW, gives the nuts-and-bolts of ordering books for one particularly challenging off-site event.