Briony Rose Smith
Aug 29, 20172 min
This Thursday I had my first real life event as an author at Chester's Storyhouse! I was given the opportunity to fill in one of their New Voices slots that allows a self-published author to steal a room for an hour, meet some potential readers and sell some books.
I was happy for this opportunity! The Storyhouse didn't charge me anything for the privilege so I didn't have to worry about getting back the price of the table.
Overall I sold a grand total of one book! Which might not be amazing but what I got back from that one book sale is basically ten times what I would get back from an Amazon paperback sale. It's already made this the second most financially successful month as an author so I can't complain too much. Also, I was only allowed an hour so I didn't have that much time to sell stuff.
Setting up my table was fun. In all honesty, I was looking forward to just that. I only took a small selection of art to go along with the books. None of them sold but I expected that, they were more to fill the table.
The business cards on the left and right were just from vista print templates which I did order a stand with but apparently, they didn't ship it with the actual cards... So I improvised. The cards on the left are in a necklace box, the cards on the right are standing in a WII U controller stand.
The one person I sold Moon to was a nice man working on his own superhero story so I hope Moon Girl helps him with some ideas. His free bookmark with the book was Lani so she is now winning as the only hero bookmark given away with a book on her own.
Generally, the whole thing was a lot of sitting around but even just for the hour it was a good test drive to see how I handle physically selling my book. I handled it better than I thought I would and feel much more confident about Chester Comic Con now!
Thank you to the Storyhouse for giving me the chance to do this.