The Book Publicity Blog

News, Tips, Trends and Miscellany for Book Publicists

Why we schedule bookstore events (and why we don’t)

There’s no doubt that bookstore events (talks / signings) are an important part of the book promotion process.  At the same time, the goal of a book publicist isn’t simply to carpet bomb bookstores within a 50-mile radius of an author.  Let me break it down.

***

Why We Do Schedule Events:

Sales: Sending an author to a store to talk about / sign their book usually (hopefully) helps increase sales.

Support:  Thus, scheduling events is a way for authors and publishing houses to support bookstores.

Audience: An author appearing at their local bookstore is as close to a sure fire hit as you can get since authors can, generally speaking, get their friends / neighbors / colleagues to show up a book signing and buy books.

Way back when, I thought the only reason for an author’s friend (or mother) to show up at a signing was to keep the seat warm — they probably already got a free book, right?  Then my friends started writing books and I found myself buying books at their signings — even though I work in publishing and can often get them for free.  Moral of the story is that bookstores know they can count on pretty robust crowds and sales when an author’s friends show up at an event.  (Not to mention that as foot traffic in the store increases, so do spur-of-the-moment purchases.)

And Why We Don’t:

Topic:  Some topics work really well for certain stores — fiction, for example.  Other stores find novelists simply don’t draw an audience.  Some topics are great for certain types of venues, but not for general-interest bookstores.  Some stores only sell mystery titles, or travel, or science fiction.  Bookstores know what works best for them.

Location: Typically, we’ll schedule no more than one signing in a given area.  Realistically, there are a limited number of people in a designated location who will attend a talk / signing for an author.  If they show up for the signing at the local independent bookstore on Tuesday evening, that doesn’t leave very many people attending the signing at the Barnes & Noble half a mile away that Saturday (or vice versa).

Audience size: When was the last time you went to a book signing for a non-celebrity author?  How many people were there?  Bookstores do their best to promote events with in-store signage, information on their websites, newsletters and sometimes, advertising, and book publicists do likewise by trying to schedule interviews for the author with local media prior to the event, but sometimes even the best efforts don’t pan out.

Which is why if an author has no local connections and the book’s topic would not be of particular interest to a community, stores may be a little more reluctant to schedule events.  Of course, we know that plenty of stores do welcome authors with no local connections,  but they spend a fair amount of time and money promoting their talks and signings, so they do need to be selective about the authors they host.

Time: Events take time.  Book publicists take time to set up events.  Stores take time to promote them.  Authors take time to talk and sign at them.   All that time is time not spent promoting books in other ways.  So while scheduling some books events is a good thing, it is possible to go overboard and reach a point of diminishing returns.

***

I realize it looks like there are far more reasons to not schedule bookstore events than to schedule them, which isn’t necessarily the case — I think it’s more like the “Don’ts” just need more explanation than the “Dos.”

How do you feel about scheduling / hosting / speaking at bookstore events?

About these ads

March 2, 2010 - Posted by | Book Tour, Bookstores

8 Comments »

  1. Very interesting and helpful post and just a very useful and interesting blog in general. I’m finally getting into serious writing with hopes of publication so this blog may very well be very useful for understanding the new waters I’ll be traveling. With a little (lot) of luck maybe I’ll be doing my own bookstore event one day. Anyways, now I know a bit more about this particular subject.

    Comment by wiredthroughwords | March 2, 2010 | Reply

    • Glad you’re finding the blog helpful. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out the editor / literary agent blogs on the blog roll on the side of this site — you’ll find a lot of information on those sites about how to submit work / what agents are looking for / etc.

      Comment by Yen | March 2, 2010 | Reply

  2. I realize it looks like there are far more reasons to not schedule bookstore events than to schedule them, which isn’t necessarily the case

    Comment by Seminar Projects | March 3, 2010 | Reply

  3. Good explanation Yen. I don’t think people realize the amount of effort and money it takes to book/send an author on tour or book a signing at a store. And you are right to bring up the question “When was the last time you went to a book signing for a non-celebrity author? How many people were there?”. I think author’s lose perspective.

    Comment by Jean | March 5, 2010 | Reply

  4. I always find that a few sure-fire signings (local or well placed) do a lot to spark enthusiasm and confidence in a new author. In many ways the benefit of the author getting excited about promoting his/her book outweighs the cons and makes my job easier in the long run. Passionate, enthusiastic authors give better interviews.

    Comment by Marie | March 10, 2010 | Reply

  5. […] Why we schedule bookstore events and why we don’t […]

    Pingback by What authors (and venues) need to know about scheduling book talks / signings « The Book Publicity Blog | September 15, 2011 | Reply

  6. Very useful post and I am going to look around this site for other info. I’m at the point where I need to consider bang for the buck with my publicity budget. It looks like if you can create a buzz via other forms of local media first, leading up to an instore signing, you’ll get the most value.

    Thanks.

    Chris

    Comment by Chris Semal | October 11, 2011 | Reply

  7. […] Why we schedule bookstore events and why we don’t […]

    Pingback by What authors (and venues) have to find out about scheduling ebook talks / signings | JanNews Blog | September 11, 2014 | Reply


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 369 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
http://yodiwan.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/why-we-schedule-bookstore-events-and-why-we-dont/
yodiwan.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-52
87490
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SVW7FZOAJTU6V7HHJPHAVOWAYM3Q5AYO
<urn:uuid:57416960-e6bc-4a94-9af9-e95397ce2375>
2014-12-20T04:55:12Z
192.0.78.13
sha1:QTUL3KHHOOXNUDGC3DTMSEFYRIQJEHW6
<urn:uuid:8d8e5741-554d-4ae8-8651-d2fa42c947af>
http://yodiwan.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/why-we-schedule-bookstore-events-and-why-we-dont/
length
response
<urn:uuid:705029fd-de0e-4b52-a631-5a0d22ed0a3a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-52
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for December 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf