Engaging Readers at Local Events
By Guy Morris
Ask a hundred authors what they find the most challenging, or the least fulfilling, about being an author and the majority will tell you it’s marketing and promotion. Authors crave readers, but we don’t enjoy self-promoting, placing ads or choosing a Twitter promotion. These same authors will admit that the most rewarding time is when they get to engage readers directly.
Let’s face it: readers are difficult and expensive to find. Most marketing campaigns deal with online systems, a newsletter service, a blog tour, an ad placement, a book club email, or a book give-away. While popular authors can afford a PR service to set up a book tour or a dedicated booth at a major book festival, most authors, including me, find these venues too expensive or impossible to get.
Most formats do not allow the average author to engage the reader directly. Even worse, few provide a positive return on investment (ROI). ROI means that you’ve earned enough royalties to get your money back, plus a profit. Even the Amazon ad ROI is based on the price of the book, not the royalty for the author.
Why is engaging the reader so important? Simple: authors can convert more readers by pitching them directly. I spent decades in a business career learning that nothing sells better than getting in front of the client. I also learned that sometimes the traditional channel is not always the highest ROI channel. When I launched my first self-published thriller in November 2020, I spent my entire budget on producing a top-quality book with very little left over to promote. Sound familiar? I tried Amazon ads, reviews, give-away promos, Twitter campaigns and more with only moderate results. While my reviews were excellent, my initial sales and revenue lagged expectations.
I joined a writers’ conference group just to take part in the LA Times Festival of Books with hundreds of book publishers and up to 125,000 attendees. An amazing experience, but very expensive, which cut into the profitability. More profound was the realization that even for the avid reader, the choices were overwhelming. As an author, the competition for getting any reader’s attention was savage. While I made positive ROI, I came home with something more valuable: I learned the power of pitching my books directly to a reader and watching their eyes light up at the part that resonated with them. Readers are honest and will tell when they love a good story, or your pitch. I practiced my pitch hundreds of times.
What are the options for the average author? Bookstore signing opportunities are very hard to arrange and may only produce a few dozen sales. Online promotions and ads can be very costly and rarely return the investment. Are there other venues that can replicate the best parts of a book festival, namely the sizeable crowd, without the choking competition and high cost?
Yes. Local festivals, fairs, and other events can be a lucrative new channel. The 2022 PNWA Conference will feature an Autograph Party on September 24th.You can register for the event here.
For some authors, it may seem counter-intuitive, or maybe even insulting, to sign books at some place other than a bookstore. For the author who simply wants to sell more books, engage more readers, and build their platform, filling a summer with local events can add hundreds to thousands in incremental revenue.
Why? Because festivals and fairs attract thousands to tens of thousands of attendees. Even if only a percentage of attendees are readers, the volumes will easily exceed the total volume of people in a Barnes and Noble. With events scheduled throughout the year, especially during the warmer months, the author can find recurring opportunities to sell. Typically full of craft, cosmetic, jewelry or food vendors, a booth of multiple genre authors signing books makes for a unique attraction. All genres can find readers at such large events. While events near more affluent and educated areas will contain a higher ratio of readers, there is a share of readers at all events.
Before you get too excited, there are some logistics and cost issues with this approach. For a single author, this approach can still be too expensive. Another consideration is that a single author or genre will not present an interesting enough draw for attendees. This channel takes a community of authors willing to share the cost and the booth space to offer the event reader with a bookstore in a booth. In addition, just like book festivals, the community of authors will need to supply a tent, tables with coverings, signage, and book display, or rent them, which can be cost prohibitive. Finally, someone needs to organize the authors, events, and cost sharing.
While often more expensive, associations such as PNWA will provide signing events at annual conferences and discounts to book fairs. Other organizations such as spellbindingevents.com and anytimeauthorpromotions.com will focus on the east coast and mid-west events. The Greater Los Angeles Writers Association will focus on festivals in Southern California. Each will focus primarily on book festivals rather than community festivals. During early 2022, the Author Event Network (AEN) formed in Seattle as a pilot program to build a local community of published and accomplished (vetted) indie authors to collaborate in finding and applying for local events. Authors of crime, mystery, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, romance, horror, historical fiction, children’s, memoirs, inspirational non-fiction, poetry, and short stories have joined the association. A small annual membership fee buys signage, tents, tables, and other equipment for the authors to use. The authors themselves choose which events to attend and how much time they wish to share, meaning that each author chooses their own cost level.
By sharing space and time, the cost of three to four--hour session at the booth can range from less than $10 to an average of $25. Since most authors will buy their own books at cost, and sell them for retail, their royalty or profit per book sale can be two to three times the amount on Amazon or other channels. A recurring schedule of five or six events per season can significantly augment online or bookstore royalties.
There are hundreds of both book and non-book festivals and fairs around the country that represent amazing opportunities to find new readers. For example, there’s Wild and Windy in the City for Chicago authors, Boulder Creek Festival in Colorado, the Summer Solstice Festival in New York, the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair in San Francisco, and the Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles. In fact, every major city will feature festivals, street fairs or other events that can open a new channel for a community of authors either working with a local author community or forming an AEN chapter. The Seattle area features several large events that attract 10,000 attendees or more, such as the Fremont Festival, U District Street Fair, the Kirkland Summer Fest, the Bremerton Blackberry Festival, Issaquah Salmon Days and many more. AEN will attend most of these festivals in 2022 and all of them in 2023 to build a sales channel.
As an active author, you can engage your reader, grow your email list with sign-up sheets, and earn higher margins with a strong return on investment. When I meet authors who are excited to get a single sale on Amazon and then I tell them how they can sell dozens to hundreds of copies per summer, I love to see the excitement and disbelief in their eyes.
Here’s the great news: any moderate to large size writers’ community can replicate this model for their members. All it takes is an administrator, a shared equipment budget, and published or high-quality authors to fill the booth. For authors in Seattle, you can join the AEN. It won’t put you on the New York Times bestselling list, but it just may fund your next book.
Since his 2021 debut as an indie-author, Guy Morris has released two pulse-pounding thrillers inspired by true stories. A third thriller, The Last Ark, is pending release. Recommended twice by Kirkus who compared him to Dan Brown, his books have earned BookTrib’s Best 25 Favorite Books of 2021, Reader’s Favorite 2021 Gold Award, a 2021 finalist for IAN Book of the Year, and semi-finalist for Cinematic Book. His articles have been published in Mystery & Suspense magazine. Guy recently presented at the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Conference. In early 2022, he formed the non-profit Author Event Network association, where local accomplished authors collaborate to sign books at community events and festivals.