This week I have been communicating with the authors at Nightengale Press, encouraging, cajoling, sweet-talking and pushing them to join with their publisher to rent a half booth at Book Expo America 2007 in New York City, June 1- June 2. We have 32 authors, and 15 have signed up for the event. Perhaps five or six will attend in person, which will allow them a chance to do at least one, if not two booksignings, go to workshops, attend talks and events, and have a great time in the Big Apple. They will get to know each other and their publisher in a completely new way. These authors will get an education they cannot get any other way. They will grapple with the clarity of just how many books, publishers and purveyors of the written word there actually are. They will wrestle with the feeling of smallness and insignificance that attending huge tradeshows can bring on for even the most stalwart of the self-confident personalities who write books. They will discover that their task to rise to a point of visibility is gargantuan.
But, they will be there. They will be promoting their books. They will be rubbing elbows with the literati and glitterati who inevitably arrive on the scene, reminding the rest of us mere mortals who we really are in the scheme of things. Every signed book they give away, every business card they take, every connection they have with others who love books will enrich them as writers and as people.
Will this experience help them sell more books? Hopefully. Will they spend a bunch of money doing this, only to go home with a sack full of handouts and a heart full of dreams overwhelmed by the power of the written word? Possibly. Will they be energized or drained by the realization that their book is only one of 200,000 or more published every year in the United States — that’s more than 500 books published every day? Hard to say.
I recall how it was for me the first time I attended Book Expo in 2004. As I lugged my rolling suitcase filled with my 50 books and handouts across the gravel parking lots and broken walkways leading to McCormick Center in Chicago, not quite sure if I was going the right way, two thirty-something men slowed their long-legged pace to ask if they could help.
“That thing looks heavy, could I help you pull it into the building?” The New York accent punctuated his question, as I welcomed his assistance with, “Yes, if you have an idea where you think I should go once we’re inside.” It turned out these fellows were jobbers, guys who buy back-listed books for resale to the likes of Wal-Mart, Costco and Sam’s Club. The conversation was pretty one-sided as they explained the purpose of their work to be “buying up the books that have been returned unsold from the bookstores, you know, the ones the publishers can’t sell any other way.”
From my limited experience at the time, I didn’t know, and my eyes probably gave that fact away. But they pulled that heavy baggage of mine all the way to the Publisher’s Marketing Association Section of the main floor, smiled, and bid me a good day. Looking back at that moment, I realize now they were helpful in a more than co-incidental way. I had a lot to learn about the business of selling books, and that Expo taught me a lot. I still have connections with people I met that first year. I have come to know some of them well. These associations build trust and credibility, and I hope my authors will all realize this is but one more step in their long journey along the road to recognition. It may not happen there. It may take years more work and persistence to succeed. But, they have the gumption to try, and that is the most essential ingredient in any success.
“What happens to the books of the other authors who have decided not to go to Book Expo?” you may ask. Nothing. And that is the problem.
