Why I Don't Do Event Recap Posts: An Event Recap Post.

For one thing, all the photos look the same. There's the picture of the author speaking at the podium. Here's one of Christopher Moore for The Serpent of Venice. Dare I say signed copies available?

This one's Gabrielle Zevin. The pictures are blurrier when I use my cell phone and slightly less blurry when I periodically find my camera. Then I promptly lose it again. This is not that uncommon for booksellers and apparently is a discarded chapter of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

Then there's the crowd scene. Really all that does is show that the event was crowded. You usually can't even make out the author. This is one from our Gentleman's Tour--John Corey Whaley, Jason Reynolds, and Brendan Kiely. Yes, we have signed copies of their books too--Noggin, When I Was the Greatest, and The Gospel of Winter, respectively.

I suppose that one proves to the publicist that there really were 50 people and not 5. Of course they could also ask the author. Here's proof that we really had 72 people for Meg Wolitzer. You should all be kicking yourself because she was amazing. I can think of another 100 people that would have been blown away by her talk and reading. But we did beat several other similarly sized and even larger cities in terms of turnout, and that's part of the game if you want to keep getting authors.

It turns out there are four components to a good event: 1) Attendance 2) Sales 3) Media coverage 4) Author Experience. Of course the fifth one is customer experience. That won't determine if you get the next booking, but if you fail that, you won't get the attendance next time, so you won't get the booking after that. 

I could probably Photoshop different authors into the photo and you'd never notice. Of course there are sometimes variations. Here's one of Edward Kelsey Moore playing the cello.

And here's a variation on the crowd scene. It's Theatre Gigante dramatizing chapter one of The Serpent of Venice. It's my only shot that didn't come out blurry. Or the one that came out least blurry. Theatre Gigante's Midsummer in Midwinter opens May 9 at Kenilworth Studio 508.

Oh, and here's another kind of shot I usually don't get, me or other booksellers with the author. We should probably do that more often. I'm sure several of my booksellers are secretly kicking themselves that we didn't get a group shop with the Gentlemen. I had promised someone we'd get Gabrielle Zevin and myself in front of our anniversary widow, but then it turned out everyone left. So I guess it turned out to be selfie time.

I am apparently not fluent in selfie, but we did get one shot where you can actually see the sign between us and we are both looking happy, having come to the conclusion of another nice event at Boswell.