I heard a best-selling author once say that he paid a vanity press to publish his first novel. Then, loading his car with copies, he drove from bookstore to bookstore throughout his home state, trying to persuade sellers to stock his book.
My job is to autograph my books for the people who buy them. Someone has put two black pens on my table so I’ll have plenty of ink for signing, and the way they’re lined up so neatly parallel to each other on the white tablecloth fills me with hope. It’s a glorious early-spring day. Sunlight fills the first-floor atrium. Outside on the lawn the grass is greening and dogwood trees are white with blooms. On my table a flowerpot wrapped in festive purple foil anchors a hand-lettered sign bearing my name. I also have a blue ribbon pinned to my lapel that says, “Author.” In the hospitality room on the third floor, a free lunch awaits. The book fair’s organizers even left me a baggie filled with peppermint candies so I’ll have fresh breath when I chat with all my new fans.
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But I grew up in, and now write about, Illinois. Most of the stories in my first collection, The Least You Need to Know, are set in the state, as are my two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones. Only Quakertown, a historical novel set in Texas, has nothing to do with my home state. The week before I came to the fair the public radio station in Springfield interviewed me about Turning Bones for their Living in Illinois program. I have reason to believe, then, that since I’m an Illinois author–since I’m home–this state book fair will be more satisfying than the ones in Kentucky and Ohio and West Virginia, where I’ve watched authors with solid local ties do a booming business. I have faith in the people who have put this fair together and in the people they’ve assured me will come to buy my books.
I take a quick tour of the bookstore area, long enough to see that the organizers have stocked only one of my titles–The Least You Need to Know–and only a few copies at that.
So I say, “Hmm.” And leave him to think about that.
“Could be,” I say. “But that’s not the book you’re selling today.”
As far as I can tell by glancing at the list of my fellow authors, I’m one of two writers of quiet books here today. For the most part, our compatriots fit neatly into a specific genre: young adult fiction, children’s literature, true crime, mystery, romance, sci-fi.
