Saturday At The LA Times Festival Of Books

So I was up there peddling my wares a good part of the day yesterday. I bought space at the last minute with Authors Den, a web service and fair service for self-published authors. $200.00 for an hour, which seems a bit steep but what are you going to do. The set up of the booth wasn't great, and again I was stuck in a back corner and so if I really sat at my little table they gave me, I would have talked to about five people. The booth was set up for people to walk into, but most didn't and there were people in front blocking the strollers access. I really started around 10:00 and wandered up and down the sidewalk giving away my relabeled water bottles. I had made about 150 of them.

It looked like this. By 1:00 all the bottles were gone, as well about 50 bookmarks. I print the "Round The Block Books" Logo on heavy stock paper. Women like the image.

My hour at the table was spent out glad-handing and passing out water. Talked to two or three people about the book.

The sidewalk Nazi appeared early and told me I couldn't pass out promo stuff out on the sidewalk, that I had to be at my booth. God forbid, there's someone there selling stuff that the Fair didn't get a part of. The sidewalk Nazi didn't stop the food vendors from running around all over the fair grounds selling lemonade. The family running the booth were nice people and were out front trying to promote us, so that was a big plus over the arrogant management of G.L.A.W.S. (Though, when I did go by their booth, it seemed a better set-up and there were no recruiters out front like last year, but maybe they were all at lunch. XLibris and  iUniverse were there, giving away their books. You had to pay them for your time and then give away your books. It still doesn't seem like a good deal. I'm going to try to do non-profit next year for sure.

Anyway, I went for the advertising aspect of it. $200.00 wouldn't get to this many people in any kind of print media.