Doing a book signing is not at all unlike a date. It either went wonderful and left you glowing afterwards (and perhaps smiling for a day or two to come) or it skidded and awkwardly jerked along until, at the end, you said to yourself, "Thank God! It’s over!" and then you ruminated for the rest of the evening about all the things that went wrong.
The good news is that, of the half-dozen or so "Supergirls Speak Out" events I’ve done so far, only one was a borderline-flop. The other five were great events where lots of people came, I sold lots of books, and it was totally worth the makeup! But I couldn’t get over just how much my poorly-attended event felt like being on a bad date! After an "intimate" reading at a bookstore, I stopped at a cafe and got some pie, laid in bed, and watched Beerfest in the hopes of salvaging my night.
(Although… bad dates sometimes require three slices of pie to remedy.)
Luckily, it’s not just me. The majority of the first-time authors I know have drawn skimpy crowds to events, and it’s something that happens that we all accept. But the lack of attendance at book readings and signings has me worried about Generation Y, and whether we’re less literary of a generation than our predecessors. After all, celebrities draw jostling crowds to Virgin Megastores any day of the week… but I don’t think that most Gen Y-ers could point out a bestselling author in a crowd. Admittedly, I’m talking about two very different kinds of celebrity here, but I’m starting to wonder whether free literary events are uninteresting or irrelevant to the mainstream of Gen Y, and it worries me!
What do you think?