The other day I saw a sight which took me right back to my childhood. A stretch of open ground was being transformed by bright flashing lights, gaudy structures and a particular kind of music. The fair had come to town.
When I was a kid, they sprang up regularly for a few days around every public holiday: a bunch of rides and games that always included a carousel, hoopla and rifle range, sometimes a ghost train and a rollercoaster.
The little fairs still exist, but these days rollercoasters are so huge and complicated that you only find them in theme parks; the kind that can be built up and taken down in a few hours are too tame for modern kids.
It’s more than twenty years since I braved that kind of rollercoaster – but these days my life feels like one big one. (Swoop) How do I know if people who buy books will love a particular title as much as I do? (Tweist) Or if I don’t love it myself, but can see that it’s well done and could well appeal to other people, will I still be able to put my heart and soul into it? (Down the slope at breakneck speed) On a practical level, will we sell enough of this title to pay the print bill on that one? (Up again, achingly slow) And will the hefty discount we’ve agreed to in order to get a title into one of the chain bookstore’s summer promotion pay off in increased sales?
Closer to the ground, over the past few weeks we’ve taken stands at two book fairs. Not the exhibition kind which are actually huge promotion events; at these little local fairs real money is exchanged for real books.
One was a small press fair on the last day of a small book festival. The place was buzzing: lots of talks and events going on close by, lots of booklovers keen to find a bargain, lots of variety among the stand-holders. We talked to dozens of people, introduced them to our authors – not literally this year, though some have attended in previous years – and went away at the end of the day with book boxes a lot lighter and wallet a little heavier. That was clearly our kind of event.
The other was… different. It was bigger, and most of the other stands specialised in secondhand books. I checked out some of the price stickers; ours were pretty good value in comparison, and clearly marked, but I had a distinct impression that people gave us a wide berth when they saw that our books were new.
Maybe it was just that the people who visit that kind of book fair have a different agenda. Maybe they’re not in the market for something new. Some of the stands were selling first editions, or out of print books that are hard to find. If you were looking for something specific, old orange-striped Penguin paperbacks, perhaps, or the one Raymond Chandler that’s missing from a collection, you were in the right place.
In the event we covered the stand hire, but there wasn’t much to spare. I don’t think we’ll go back.
The problem, of course, is predicting which events will work for us and which are not worth our time and energy. There’s no magic formula. We’ve been running promotion events like our murder mystery evenings for a couple of years now, and there’s no way of telling in advance if we’ll sell two books or twenty. Looks like the book fairs are much the same. And whether the promotion element works, and people remember our name and look for our titles later – that is a complete unknown.
Which all adds to the rollercoaster ride.
