Selling Books at Festivals

All week, the weathermen said the weather would be beautiful for the weekend. Here we were, invited to join the community booth section of the 38^th Annual Downtown Arts Festival in Gainesville, Florida, and we were all bundled up in hats, coats, and sweatshirts, typical Floridians shivering as we set out our books for sale. The Arts Festival is a good venue for book sales because it’s close to the winter holidays and people are planning for their upcoming gift-giving.

But books do not like damp weather. Usually, at the end of the first day of the festival, we can put the books under the tables and leave them overnight. But since this particular festival was damp and dreary, we had to pack the books up at the end of the first day and keep them safe in a van. Still, this was better than last year’s festival when we got rained out completely.

Selling your books at an art festival is challenging. We had books from 32 separate authors this year, an impressive display of titles in genres ranging from fiction, sci-fi, children’s lit, young adult lit, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir. When a potential client comes into our booth, it’s tempting to start telling them about our own books, but we’ve found that the best way to make sales is to let the browser make their own decisions.

Those who are interested in books often have very specific desires. Yes, we put the books out by genres. But they know whether they want hard core mysteries or cozy mysteries. That’s not up to us, and we can’t convince them that our fantasy book will meet their “hard-core science” sci-fi expectations.

Yet advertising local writers represents a worthy component of these exhibits, no matter how sales go. The advantage to festivals such as the Downtown Arts Fest is that we have an opportunity to show the locals how many talented authors there are in the area. Each time we exhibit, we sell more books, even when the weather is dreary and the crowds are fewer. Over time, people begin to look for our booth and look forward to seeing what’s new.

In the future, we hope to become more digitally-oriented for such events. We’d like to be able to take credit cards, and we’d like to have flyers with information about how to get the books digitally. At some book festivals, authors come with their own bar codes so that clients can take a picture of the QR code for a particular book, go home and download it, and even get a discount. But right now, we’re just trying to figure out how to keep the books dry when the weather doesn’t cooperate.

To all those who helped with WAG’s book festival event, thank you! And see you again at the next one.