Selling books at markets, fairs and conventions
A table at a market, a craft fair or a convention is the only place you sell a book where nothing is taken out on the way. A store takes a cut, a distributor takes a cut, a platform takes a cut. At a table you buy copies at author-copy cost, sell them at the price printed on the back, and keep the difference. See Ordering author copies for how that cost is worked out.
That sounds like the best channel available. It is not, because of the other half of the arithmetic: a table sells in tens, not hundreds. A very good day is a couple of dozen copies; an ordinary one is a handful. An author who treats markets as the plan runs out of weekends before they run out of stock.
What a table is good for is different, and worth more than the money.
What you actually come away with
Names on a list. People who liked you enough to write down an email are reachable for free when the next book is done. The mechanics are in Events, signings and selling books in person and are no different at a stall.
Contacts you will not get by email. The person who stops may run a bookshop, a reading group, a festival, or the school two streets away. They browse markets like everyone else, and they will talk to you standing up in a way they will not answer a cold message.
Fifty rehearsals of your pitch. By mid-afternoon you will have described your book aloud fifty times to strangers who owe you nothing, and you will know which opening sentence makes someone pick it up and which makes them nod and keep walking. A blurb draft cannot teach you that.
Picking the event
The two kinds of event fail in opposite directions.
A general craft fair has footfall and few readers. Hundreds pass, almost none arrived intending to buy a book, and you compete with candles and jewelry for the same impulse. It is still worth doing occasionally, because the people who stop are ones no online channel would have reached.
A genre convention has fewer people and far higher conversion. Everyone in the hall reads the thing you write. You may see a fraction of the traffic and still sell considerably more, because you are not explaining what a cozy mystery is before you can sell one.
Before you pay for a table, ask the organizer two questions in writing. What was attendance last year? And who else is selling books — how many tables, in what genres? The first tells you whether the event is growing or dying. The second tells you whether you are the only book among forty craft stalls, which can cut either way, or the eleventh fantasy author in a row, which is a harder day. Ask where your table is, too: a corner by the exit is not the same event as the main aisle.
In the tools. Mockups render your finished wrap as a physical book, and the Social Pack makes matching stills from the same cover — which is what you need for the event poster, the organizer's listing and the posts that tell people you will be there. Start your book → · about the tools
What goes on the table
Weighted stock. More copies of your best seller than you expect to sell, fewer of everything else. Two titles selling well look like a range; six titles at two copies each look like a clearance.
Something to raise books to eye level. A crate, a riser, a small stand. A stack seen from above is a pile of edges, and a table that is all flat is a table people scan past.
A cloth. It covers the trestle, hides the boxes underneath, and is the difference between a display and a table with things on it.
A sign with the price on it, in large figures, facing the aisle. Most people will not ask. They will assume it is expensive and move on, and you will never know it happened.
A card reader and a float of small change. Plenty of people carry no cash; plenty of others carry a twenty. Bring both, and test the reader on the venue's signal before the doors open.
A pen that does not bleed through. Test it on your own paper stock — cream and white take ink differently, and a wet rollerball ghosts onto the next page.
Bookplates. Signed adhesive plates let you sign for the reader who already owns the book, which is the most common awkward moment at a table.
The sign-up sheet, with its own pen, where someone can reach it without leaning over your stock.
The pitch, and what it is for
Write one sentence, and say it standing up: a seated author behind a table reads as staff, a standing one reads as a person.
The sentence names what kind of book it is and what happens in it — "a murder mystery set in a Cornish fishing village in the 1950s" — and then you stop talking. Someone should be able to decide in three seconds whether this is their kind of book and walk away comfortably if it is not.
That is the part authors resist. You are qualifying, not converting. Talking a non-reader of your genre into a purchase costs four minutes, and the person who actually wanted the book walked past while you were doing it.
Prices and change
Round numbers make a table faster: one note, no counting, which matters when three people are waiting. Decide the price before the day, print it large, and hold it — discounting in front of a queue teaches everyone to ask. A two-book price for a series is the one deal worth offering, because it moves the second title of a set that is otherwise hard to start.
Count your stock in and out. The gap between what you sold and what you think you sold is how a good day turns into a confusing one.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Events, signings and selling books in person · More: Selling books directly to readers · Mockups: showing a book that does not exist yet · Getting into libraries and bookstores