Another Book Signing

I had another successful book signing at the end of June at the Coles book store in Fort St. John. Somehow I missed blogging about it, so here it is!

Now for the real crux of the matter – what constitutes “successful”, anyway? The obvious answer is sales. Thankfully, I had a few of those, although not enough to pay for my gas there and back. (I live about two hours away.) In my case, I like to visit my daughters and grandchildren who live in Fort St John, so any excuse is a good excuse. However, if one was doing signings purely for the money, it wouldn’t be worth it, especially when you add the sales commission owing the store.

There are other benefits to signings, though, which can’t be measured quite so easily. Events like these provide both photo ops and Social Media opportunities, which are important in this day and age. It gives authors like me something to post about and share online, (this blog post included…) and put into newsletters and such.

Finally, in the case of this signing, it is a requirement of the book store if I want to keep my books in stock. They like local authors to host an event at least once per year to help boost sales and presence in their store. I get that, and in fact, after the event I was able to take stock of the inventory in the store and saw that I had actually sold more books than I had expected since the last time I did inventory – always good news!

In the end, these types of events are worth it in my view, even if they don’t generate a lot of income. There is more to this writing gig that the bottom line, and book events are just one piece of the bigger picture.