Gearing up for A Craft Fair

Worrying about my professionalism.

I've spent this morning making my most recent Wolfsburg Adventure story book-worthy and then making props for the vendor table I rented at the Redwood Writer's Crafts Fair.

It's the part of writing that isn't writing, and it always makes me nervous.

This isn't the fault of the Redwood Writer's Club. They hold this fair every November as a place for members to sell their stuff. This year, it is in the Finley Center in Santa Rosa. With luck, our fellow writers can sell to non-club members, though, in practice, club members tend to be the only people there.

There will be at least one person selling jewelry, and someone had some lovely greeting cards last year.

Of course, most of us will be shilling our books. That's what the entire program is for.

I am, however, bad at selling. I once wrote a post comparing my books to bleach. I wrote a description of my series and misspelled the name of the country that I made up.

Convincing people that your product is worth their money requires an attention to detail and a willingness to put yourself in other people's shoes. The second part I find easier as I get older. The more I watch newbies flail in the comment section of writing YouTube channels, where they try to explain why readers can't expect coherence or decent grammar from them, the more I don't want to be like them. Put yourself in other people's shoes: do you want to wade through weird formatting and misspelled words to get to the story you were promised? No. Of course not.

The first part is harder. There are formatting rules, and they can change over time. Some of these rules give you wiggle room, depending on genre and intent. Some of these rules are hard and fast. Some are culturally-agreed upon rules, rules because we said so, and some are rules of consideration, rules meant to make the reader's life easier.

Unfortunately, you have to go searching for this list of rules yourself. They aren't handed to you from Amazon or Draft2Digital. Amazon is perfectly fine with you making a fool of yourself in public, provided they can get a cut of any sales. Draft2Digital will only go so far as giving you a standard copyright page and refusing books for oversaturated markets. You need to suss out the rules and figure out how to apply them on your own. Then you have to be willing to wade through your writing and implement the rules.

This isn't what I signed up for.

But you who may read my book deserve to at least be able to find it and read it. And you will know that you will be getting a book that you can read without too many hiccups if I correct the spelling of my country's name on the description and stop comparing my books to bleach.