Considerations for selling books live & in person

I did my first live author event a week ago: The Mercer County Library System’s second annual Book Festival! As you can see from my enthusiastic punctuation, it was cool, and you can see at least one picture of me looking like I’m having a good time on the MCLS Instagram. I wrote some thoughts about the event and its place in my fragile psyche in my newsletter, but if you haven’t read them already, I’m gonna make you click. (Have you considered signing up for my newsletter? You get a free book of poems and short stories for the admittedly not inconsiderable price of your email address, to say nothing of 11 emails a year with updates on my books and the unknowable convolutions of my fevered cerebrum.) What I’m here for is to memorialize a couple of brass-tacks things that might assist others facing the horror of talking about their books to readers: Venmo is for humans. Super easy to set up, super easy to accept. More than 50% of my sales on the day were through Venmo, and I’m glad I…