My computer is becoming increasingly unreliable, which is one of the reasons I’m not posting as much as I ought. After talking to my wife about it, I’ve decided to replace it once our tax refund arrives (we always get ours late, for reasons not worth explaining at the moment). We wanted to put that money toward the house, but this decrepit machine is making it difficult to write my books or do my other work, and I need to get a new one before it finally goes kaput. Years ago, I had dreams of saving up for a high-end gaming PC, but that’s not in the cards (or the budget), but I can at least get a respectable multimedia laptop similar to what my present computer was before it got old.
Although this is more than a week late, I want to report on my first author’s appearance. Last weekend, I was in a little town called Alva, Oklahoma, which has an annual festival for arts, crafts, and local performers. It also draws in a handful of writers.
I went with the assumption that authors’ booths are desolate places unless the authors are household names, so I didn’t bring much stock. I had a few books printed and brought them along with a folding table and a couple of posters, and I was prepared to spend a solitary day getting minimal attention. Much to my surprise, I sold out before noon. I will probably return next year—with more books and higher prices.
I also found myself wishing I had some books with more toned-down content, as it were. A lot of the interest I got was from children, and I had to tell them, “Um … ask your parents first.”
And speaking of children, my success was likely due to my sales assistant, pictured in the image up top (with her face hidden for safety, of course). She loves reading, even though she can’t do it yet, and is always flipping through any book she can get her hands on. In the days leading up to Nescatunga, I had to keep those two posters out of her reach because she would point at them and yell, “Book!” before trying to grab them. She likes ripping paper right now, so the posters probably wouldn’t have survived if I’d let her have her way.
Speaking of which, you can have those posters if you want:
I mocked those up myself in Canva and had them professionally printed. They turned out better than I expected. But as a vaguely amusing aside, the backdrop on the poster for Rags and Muffin is one of Canva’s free backgrounds, “city at sunset,” to which I added more reddish tint. On the computer, it looks like an urban hellscape and therefore an appropriate representation of the book. When blown up to poster size, however, it is obvious there are a lot of trees and parks, so it’s not quite as threatening as it is on the screen.
