Every author has the same picture in their head. A table near the front of a big bookstore, a stack of your own book, a line of people. The fantasy comes from somewhere real. That’s what it looks like when a famous author tours. What that picture leaves out is why the line exists. A publisher spent money making it exist. The store agreed to host because the publisher’s sales rep asked. For a local author the mechanics are different, and you should know them before you spend a Saturday on it.
I think the chain signing is the most overrated event in an author’s first year, and too many people learn that the hard way. The fantasy is lovely. What it costs is a long Saturday of strangers avoiding eye contact, and the author goes home convinced the book is the problem when the format was the problem all along.
How do you get a signing at a chain bookstore?
You ask the individual store. Every branch has somebody who handles community relations and events, and that person schedules the calendar. (See also both Barnes & Noble stores on US 19) Go in on a weekday morning, ask at the information desk who handles author events, and get a name and an email.
What they’ll want to know is mechanical. Is your book orderable through their normal channel, which for practical purposes means it’s to sit in the standard wholesale distribution. Is it returnable. What’s the discount. What are the ISBN and price. Those are the same questions independent shops ask, and how you published decides the answer.
Then they’ll ask the question that decides it: what will you do to bring people. A local author with no audience is a table nobody visits. That costs the store floor space and costs you a Saturday.
Give them a real answer. A mailing list you’ll write to. A group you belong to. A club, a congregation, a professional association, a workplace. Numbers, if you have them. Say what you’ll do, instead of promising to post about it. That question is fair, and I side with the store on it. Floor space costs them money, and an author who turns up expecting the building to supply the crowd is asking the staff to do the marketing for free.
Why do most author signings fail?
Because the author expects the store’s foot traffic to be the audience, and it never is.
People in a bookstore on a Saturday are browsing. A stranger at a table with a book they’ve never heard of registers as an obstacle between them and the section they were heading for. Some will be polite. Most will look away, and it feels far worse than you expect it to.
Three hours of that teaches you what no advice can: an unknown book doesn’t sell itself in a room full of known ones. The chain store is the hardest possible venue for that, because it’s enormous and the competition is on every wall.
The authors who do well at these events do one thing differently. They invite people, personally, by name, ahead of time, and enough of them show up in the first hour to make the table look busy. A busy table draws browsers. An empty one repels them.
The empty table is the part nobody warns you about, and it’s cruel to a first-time author. People take it personally, when all it measures is how many invitations went out the week before.
What is a signing good for?
Set aside the sales, which will be modest, and there are three real returns.
The first is the photographs. You standing behind a stack of your own book, with the store’s branding visible, is an image you’ll use for years. On your site. In your media kit. In a pitch to a conference. People respond to that kind of proof, and it costs you one afternoon.
The second is the practice. Talking about your book to strangers for three hours will do more to sharpen your one-sentence description than any amount of drafting. You’ll hear yourself explain it forty times, and by the fifteenth you’ll have found the version that makes people pick it up. That sentence is yours forever, and most authors never find it because they never say it out loud enough times.
Of the three returns, I value that sentence most. Most authors can’t describe their own book in a way that makes a stranger lean in, and three hours of saying it out loud fixes that faster than any workshop I know of.
The third is the relationship. A store that hosted you once and had a decent experience will host you again. (See also the independents worth approaching first) It’ll stock a copy or two afterward, and mention you when somebody asks about local authors. It adds up.
When should you schedule a bookstore signing?
If you do book one, the slot counts for more than authors expect. Weekend afternoons look busy and are the worst, because weekend browsers are shopping with families and moving through. A weekday evening with a store event already scheduled nearby, or a Saturday morning when the coffee traffic is steady and unhurried, gives you people who will stop. Ask the events person which slots have worked for other local authors. They know, nobody asks them, and the question tells them you’re thinking about their store and not only your book.
Two hours is enough. Three is the standard ask, and the last hour is almost always dead. Finishing while it still feels lively is better for you and for the staff than sitting through the tail.
What should an author bring to a bookstore signing?
Bring more than you think and less than the store expects. Books, obviously, and check who’s supplying them, because sometimes the store orders and sometimes you bring your own on consignment.
Bring a way to take payment that’s not cash only. Bring a sign with the price on it, because people won’t ask. Bring something to stand a copy upright so the cover faces the aisle instead of the ceiling.
Bring a signup sheet for your email list. That’s the only asset from the day that keeps working afterward. Bring a good pen and a spare.
And stand up. An author sitting behind a table looks like a person waiting for someone to approach, and nobody approaches. Standing, at the side of the table instead of behind it, changes the interaction from an appeal to a conversation.
The stack problem
One more practical thing, learned the hard way by nearly everyone who does this. Decide before the day who owns the unsold books and how they get back to you.
If the store ordered them, unsold copies go back through the store’s returns and you never see them. That’s fine. If you brought them on consignment, somebody has to count what sold, pay you, and hand back the rest. Agree that in writing beforehand. Otherwise it becomes an awkward conversation at the end of a long afternoon when everyone is tired.
Get it in an email in advance: who supplies the stock, what the split is, when you get paid, and what happens to leftovers. Two sentences. That’s the only part of the day that regularly goes wrong.
Where else the same effort goes further
If the goal is selling books and meeting readers, a chain signing is rarely the best use of a Saturday, and I’d rank three things above it. A library talk, because the audience came for the subject and is listening instead of browsing. I go through how to get one in getting your book onto Pinellas library shelves.
A book fair or festival table, where everybody walking past is there for books. That removes the biggest problem with the bookstore table.
Speaking to a group that already exists. A club, an association, a company, a conference. Thirty people who came to hear about your subject will buy more books than three hundred browsers, and somebody in that room will book you somewhere else.
The chain signing is worth doing once for the photographs and the practice. It’s not a marketing strategy. Authors who treat it as one conclude that book marketing doesn’t work.
The part nobody schedules
All of this assumes the book exists and is good. (See also getting local media to cover an author) Most of the people who ask me about signings are further back than that: they have a manuscript that’s been almost done for two years, or a career’s worth of knowledge and no structure to put it in.
Booking events for a book that’s not finished is procrastination, and I say that with sympathy because it’s more pleasant than writing. The event will still be available when the book is done. (See also every venue here that runs literary programming) The book won’t write itself while you plan the launch.
My own day splits into three blocks, with client work in the morning and again in the evening, and my own books in the afternoon between them. I don’t set aside any of those blocks for planning a launch, and I don’t miss it. The launch only gets interesting once there are pages to launch.
If you’re at that point, the useful next step is deciding what the book is. I do that with people as a ghostwriter working in Clearwater and across the county. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive settles the shape in about thirty days so the launch has something to launch.
Do the signing once, enjoy the photographs, and then put your Saturdays where the readers already are. I think the chain table has knocked more first-time authors’ confidence than any bad review ever did, and the book usually deserved a better room.
