A Disorganized Author Fair

 

I've always had mixed feelings about the value of attending author fairs, and Saturday was a good advertisement for staying at home.

Here is how they usually go. After paying a table/registration fee, which varies with the venue, I sit at a table for 3 to 5 hours talking to visitors and selling books. For part of the time, anyway. Although I enjoy the interaction with readers, there is a lot of down time. I take something to do, but it isn’t always enough. Still, if I make more than my table fee, I usually consider it a success.

By that measure, Saturday’s Hammond Author and Art Fair was a success. And I did get a lot of work done. But by other measures, it was a failure.

The Hammond Public Library event is the most expensive author fair that I participate in, so I was pleasantly surprised when they gave participants a ticket for lunch at a food truck. Unfortunately, the line was too long. I didn’t want to take that much time away from my table, so I munched on the snacks I had brought from home.

The bigger problem, though, was the distraction. The material soliciting author participants said we would have a fifteen-minute slot somewhere else in the library to give a reading from one of our books. I went through Learning to Surrender and selected two related passages to make up my quarter hour.

When I arrived at the library, the reading opportunity had morphed into fifteen-minutes each to discuss why we had written our books. Furthermore, the schedule for the two rooms to be used did not include me. (More about that later.) The employee who was passing out the schedules promised to slot me in at the end, however.

I might have been okay with that format, but just before these sessions were supposed to start, they morphed again. Now the 15-minute presentations were to (and did) take place in the same room as the book sales.

That was totally counter-productive. Before then, visitors felt free to walk from table to table, talking to the authors and buying books. Now, sales suddenly stopped. Too many people thought it was rude to wander around looking at books and talking to other authors while someone was giving a public speech. (Fortunately, I had already made my table fee back before the sessions started.)

That wasn’t the worst problem, either. I felt as if I was forced to sit through solicitations I had no interest in, and I imagine I wasn’t alone. The original format would have allowed people to choose which, if any, of the sessions they wanted to attend. The revised location made that impossible.

The Hammond Library staff who work on the author fair are extremely nice, but the fair itself has always been badly managed. My checks don’t get cashed for months, and this time they lost the check and messed up my registration. They must have found it because they allowed me to participate without asking for a replacement check, which I was prepared to give them. However, that is probably why I wasn’t on the original presentation schedule, and when they moved it to the other room, they simply forgot about me. I don’t know if I would have had additional sales if I had been called up to present, but I definitely felt left out.

If they use the same format next year, I won’t participate. Like I said, though, the staff is extremely nice, so maybe they’ll listen to feedback.

I certainly hope so.