Hometown Book Signing
Some of you may want to know how the book signing in my hometown went.
It came. It went. A few people braved the torrential rain to come out and support me. The microphone echoed and the people in the back row couldn’t hear me. There were multitudes of cell phones, pagers, and random college study group conversations peppering the reading session. We had to start the signing late because at about ten after four, no one had showed up, except for the family members I’d brought with me.
We sold a few copies of the book, but the bookstore will return a good number of the copies it ordered. We expected a crowd; we got a handful.
An objective analysis tells me the reading went well. Hey, at least I wasn’t mute or blind this time…. Still, it makes me wonder why I had an underlying expectation that, simply because I was in my hometown, more people would show up. Book signings aren’t exactly the hottest ticket in town on a Saturday afternoon.
I suppose my point here is that we have to be careful of developing expectations about how an event should unfold because we think we know the situation. I’m certainly guilty of that. I thought I could coast easy on this one—it was my hometown, after all. I expected to be reading to my third-grade Sunday school teachers and other folks who remembered me in pigtails and braces and whose sons used to jump up and down on my bed and pull my hair and hide my shoes and… well, you get the idea. I felt secure in knowing that people would come simply because they’ve known me since I was six years old.
This business is tough. People’s tastes and affinities are fickle. People say things to be polite. People have great intentions, but when they see the sky turn black and it starts raining buckets, they balk. They become faint of heart and they understand that I’ll understand why they didn’t come. And you know what? I do.
I understand that doing this book tour was not about the number of books I could sell in one day. It was about the experience of sharing something I created with people I’ve never met, and of giving back to those who have supported me and believed in me all these long years. A decade of writing, summed up in the few random shoppers in the store who put their day on hold for almost an entire hour to listen to me read something that I wrote. If that isn’t awe-inspiring and humbling, I’ve completely lost my perspective.
So, how did the book signing go? It was a home run.
