Thirty Books, Five Boxes, and a Violin

There is a particular kind of quiet that happens the night before your first event. The books are boxed. The tablecloth is folded. You have checked the card reader four times. And somewhere underneath all of it sits the question you cannot answer yet: will anyone stop?

Last weekend I found out.

Big Lick Comic Con

Big Lick was my first event as an author, and I went in deliberately careful about it. Convention booths are not cheap, and I did not want to learn an expensive lesson. So Roanoke was the test: close to home, a reasonable booth fee, and a real crowd.

Friday was load-in, which is its own small education. You learn what your table looks like from ten feet away, which is the only distance that matters. You learn that a 10x10 space is smaller than it sounds on a floor plan.

Saturday and Sunday were the actual thing.

I sold thirty books across the two days. Thirteen of them went out as a pair, LOST with its companion novella UNTOLD, which told me something useful: when people bought in, they bought all the way in.

Here is what I did not expect. A comic con is not a romance crowd. There were four authors on that floor and I was the only one selling romantasy. I had braced for that to be a problem, and instead it turned out to be the whole advantage. People came looking for prints and pins and dice, and they found one table with a woman in Kennedy clan colors playing Celtic fiddle beside a stack of Irish-myth novels. There was nothing to compare me to. There was just: what is this?

That question is the entire job. Everything else is answering it.

The violin did more work than any sign I own. I would play, people would drift over to listen, and then they would notice the books. And once someone picks up LOST and opens it, the hand-drawn interior illustrations do the rest. The covers and the scene illustrations in this series are hand-sketched by an original illustrator. No AI touched them, and every word between them is mine. That is not a marketing line I invented for a table. It is the reason people stayed at mine.

The 10x10 booth was genuinely too small. When a few people gathered to listen, they had nowhere to stand but the aisle, and I spent part of the weekend feeling apologetic toward everyone trying to walk past. I have already asked for a larger footprint at my next outdoor event, and the organizer said yes. Learning that cost me one weekend, which is cheap.

The verdict: cons are worth doing. That question is answered, and it changes what my next year looks like.

Bookstore Romance Day, this Saturday

Tomorrow I will be at The Book Dragon Shop in downtown Staunton for Bookstore Romance Day, with signed copies, swag, and yes, the violin.

Bookstore Romance Day exists because romance is the genre that quietly holds up a great many independent bookstores, and does not always get the shelf space or the respect to show for it. Spending a Saturday inside a shop that champions it is not a hardship. It is the point.

If you are anywhere near Staunton, come find me. Bring a friend. Downtown Staunton is walkable and beautiful and full of places to spend an afternoon, and the bookstore is the best of them.

Five boxes, five states

The part of this month I am proudest of is the part nobody sees.

Ahead of Bookstore Romance Day I put out an open call to independent bookstores: if you want swag for your Romance Day table, tell me where to send it. Five shops raised their hands, and on August 6 five boxes went into the mail so they would land in time.

They went to Wallflower Book Co. in Walnut Cove, North Carolina. Fables and Fairy Tales in Martinsville, Indiana. Love Story Book Co. in Tallahassee, Florida. Tuliptree Book Co. in Tomah, Wisconsin. And In Bloom Bookery in Temecula, California.

Each box carried bookmarks, stickers, temporary tattoos, a signed bookplate, and a sell card. Some of them carried a display copy as well.

I want to be honest about why this matters to me, because it is not really a marketing tactic.

When the special edition of LOST was still at the printer, several of these shops asked about display copies. I could have let them order the older edition and quietly put the new one on the table. Instead I wrote to all five and told them exactly where things stood, and let them choose. A bookstore that stocks a book it cannot sell is a bookstore that lost money believing me. I would rather sell fewer books and have five booksellers who know I will tell them the truth.

Independent bookstores took a chance on a first-time novelist from Blacksburg. The least I can do is make sure their shelves work for them.

What is next

There is a lot of it. An artists and authors event in Roanoke at the end of the month. A Celtic festival in September, which may be the best possible match for a book like mine. A book fair in Virginia Beach. A Renaissance festival at a winery twenty minutes from my front door on Halloween weekend.

And FORGOTTEN, the second novel in Of Irish Myths and Incan Legends, which is closer than it has ever been. I am planning to have early copies with me at signings this fall, before the wider release. If you have been waiting to find out what happens next, come see me at a table.

If you are a bookseller and you would like a signed copy, a shelf talker, or swag for a table, the door is always open. Everything you need is on my booksellers page, and you can always just write to me.

Thank you for reading, and for coming to see me at a folding table in a convention hall. It means more than I know how to say.

The Fates do not punish. They prepare.