Man Cannot Live on Hot Dogs Alone (The Fair Day 1)

Today was the first official day of the local fair. I manned a booth all day, selling books and handing out bookmarks. (I hope to post a picture of the booth later, after I have my banner, posters, and uh... hopefully books.) And I ate two hot dogs (lunch and dinner) in the process!

I sold 12 pre-orders, which I think is pretty good for a low traffic setup day in a small community. I handed out a TON of bookmarks, and got many assurances from people that they would come back and buy a copy in the coming days. Tomorrow, stories about KMS will hit the local newspapers, so I expect that to be a big boost, and I think I'm on track to hit my goal of 100 copies sold by Sunday.

I made some new friends with my neighboring booth-mates, as well as a kid named Matt. He wanted a copy of KMS but couldn't afford it, so I told him I'll give him a copy for free if he roams the fairgrounds handing out bookmarks and directing people to my booth. This arrangement has proved quite beneficial thus far. He's really good at it.

Some things I've learned:

-Nothing seems to grab people's interest more than seeing someone else in front of my booth talking to me.

-Some people (more than I would have thought) think all authors are rich and famous. I'm starting to wonder if a joke I made in my acknowledgements will backfire badly.

-There are a lot of aspiring authors out there.

-Eleven hours is a long time. Sixteen will be longer.

Highlights:

-Some teens asked me to sign bookmarks for them. One of them kept coming back for replacements because he kept losing his. I said, "I think you're just stashing them somewhere so you have more to sell on eBay," and handed him a new one. He said, "Yeah, I am. See you tomorrow."

-Some smaller kids didn't believe that I was really the author. I asked how I could prove it to them, and they looked into the ARC and told me to name the first chapter, when I did, they asked me to name the second chapter. When I did that, they believed me.