Feeling seen, even when I'm not
Good morning friend,
I was totally going to bitch and moan today about where a bookstore set up my signing table this past Friday. I took some photos of my perspective from where I was sitting, but I also took a short video from the front door of the store.
This part of the store was a dead zone. As a former retailer, I know this corner is where product goes to die. Even though I am no longer in retail, I still have my retail brain. I am fascinated with how people move through a store. I watched people come in, march right up to the bestseller wall, grab what they came for and head for the cashier. The people who came in and headed right for fiction had been in this store before. The ones who meandered are the ones I was looking for. But alas, only one person came to my table in my first hour.
“You look lonely over here,” she said, “so I thought I’d come over and say hello.”
I was so excited, my Fitbit registered the increase in my heart rate. I started to tell her about Katya and she listened, then politely said, “I’m not going to buy it. I’m just killing time until my lunch date gets here. Good luck.”
For the next hour, I waited for anyone to come close enough so I could greet them and invite them to hear about my book. There wasn’t any traffic coming my way. I was near to tears. I then started getting angry about being shoved in a corner. I took a walk into the fiction section and picked a couple books to read.
By the third hour, I chose to have hope. I noticed two ladies had been standing at the table at the front of the store, picking up many books, reading the back, then having a discussion.
Look here, look here. Please walk this way, I thought. If I stared at their backs long enough, maybe they would feel my burning desperate gaze. They didn’t. But…they did meander in my direction. I walked up to them and invited them come check out my book. They were a mother and daughter who just liked to spend an hour or so wandering the bookstore and stocking up. We chatted about historical fiction for about twenty minutes and the daughter said she would be back for my book.
She did come back and was my first sale of the day.
In my third hour, I went back to the fiction shelves to put away the books I had been looking at. As I started to head back to my table, a young man came around the corner.
“Excuse me, can you help me?”
“Uh, I can try, but I don’t work here,” I said, “I’m an author selling my books.”
“Oh. I thought you worked here. You look so at home among the books.”
I swear to god, my eyes teared up. I am at home among books. In fact, in Spent, I talk about how working for Chapters was the best job I ever had. This man saw the real me.
“I can probably help you,” I grinned.
“I’m looking for the new book by Matt Dinniman. The one that’s not supposed to be out yet?”
“It’s right here,” I pointed to the end cap of the aisle we were in. I grabbed the book and handed it to him.
You need to know something. I have not read any Matt Dinneman, but an author friend of mine recently raved about the first book in his series, Dungeon Crawler Carl. All I know about the books is that the covers are flashy and weird. I peripherally had picked up the neon green text on the cover of The Butcher’s Masquerade when I went looking for books to occupy me.
And for those of you who might be interested, Dinneman self-published his books starting in 2020. In 2024, Penguin Random House acquired the rights and is re-releasing the series.
(if this sounds eerily familiar, that’s because two weeks ago I wrote about this happening to Penelope Douglas.)
It was a very weird day. The store got a little busier and I was able to pull more people over to the table. Eight more copies of Katya Noskov’s Last Shot have found new readers. And one little girl, Poppy, has a signed copy of my middle grade novel, Shift.
Near the end of my fourth hour, I asked the manager on duty if this was normally where they put authors. She told me they had some new display fixtures come in and have been forced to try different spots for author signings. I told her the spot where I was wasn’t the right one. I gently suggested they consider moving a table or two for the short window an author was in store.
“I like that idea,” she said. Then she laughed. “You should totally work here.”
I would, my friend. In a heartbeat.
xo Dana
What I’m reading
I’ve been feeling the need for something a bit off-track lately and so far, Layne Fargo’s They Never Learn is hitting the mark. It’s a dark thriller about two women who give bad men exactly what they deserve. Will there be blood? I don’t know, but I kond of hope so.
I can totally picture you with your own bookstore, doing things your way. :-)
Sounds like a successful day, Dana!