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And oh boy was the response incredible.
Apparently, indie authors were super excited to have the opportunity to put their books on the shelves of a store. It made sense. Browsing online was a completely different thing than browsing in a store. And there were still those holdouts who wouldn’t buy a book if the publisher name on the spine wasn’t one they recognized.
Sad.
Anyway. I’d ultimately gone with the plan of purchasing the books outright so I could shelve them by genre with all the other titles. No one was going to be able to tell at a glance which ones were from the big publishers, so why not give the stories inside a fighting chance?
I’d also mentioned that I was open to book signings for anyone local—or willing to travel—and wow had I underestimated the desire for that kind of thing. I’d started with offering two Saturdays a month, and I was booked solid through March.
Today was the first one.
The author was local. She actually lived in Alexandria, just not Old Town, and her focus was on what she championed as noble bright fantasy. Basically, fantasy that was full of good conquering evil with a lot less focus on the darkness and more emphasis on the light.
I was a fan.
I’d read several of her books that featured the Fae and couldn’t get the next one fast enough.
I had a pretty good audience for fantasy at the store, so it made sense to start with an author who could feed those voracious readers. Now I just had to pray they’d actually show up. I’d only been advertising C. J.’s appearance for a week and a half.
Maybe I should have waited to start at the end of October so I had more time to try to build buzz? But I worried that the more I delayed, the easier it would be for me to talk myself out of doing any of them at all.
I might have been secretly hoping no one would sign up for the first spot, but she had. So.
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out.
It was going to be okay. Good, even. Maybe even great.
Okay, I couldn’t quite get myself to great. Positive thinking when it came to the bookstore was still a bit of a work in progress.
I’d shifted the comfortable seating out of the way to make a signing area. It didn’t look too awkward having the couch and stuffed chairs moved over against the wall. I’d set up a four-foot-long rectangular table and covered it with a black cloth that reached to the floor in the front and on the sides. I’d stashed boxes of C. J.’s books underneath. It was probably better to just set out a few of each title and restock them as they sold rather than making huge piles, right?
I’d ask her when she came. She did a lot of craft fairs, apparently, so she probably knew more about this than I did.
Everything was ready. I checked the time and groaned. I still had too much time before C. J. was going to show up. And she was supposed to arrive at nine, about an hour before we opened for the day.
I went to the back room and dug my wallet out of my purse. I’d go down to the café and get coffee. Maybe a treat of some sort. That would kill a little time. And then? Well, maybe I’d be able to focus enough to do some of the paperwork that was waiting for me at my desk.
I locked the front door and enjoyed the quiet of a Saturday morning as I made my way down the brick sidewalks to the café. There was some traffic—foot and cars both—but that wasn’t unusual. In the DC area, and Old Town was no exception, there was always traffic of some sort. Even at three in the morning.
The café was bustling. The clientele was different than a weekday, though. Saturdays brought out the families with kids dressed in sports uniforms and parents sharing amused glances as the children babbled.
I got into line and checked my phone. I itched to text Cody and see what he was planning to do today. This was the major downside of retail work. I hadn’t really had a serious relationship…well,ever. So it hadn’t been a problem that my Saturdays were long and consumed by my job.
It wasn’t as if Cody could just take off on Mondays so we could spend a day together, either. Which left Sundays.
And Sundays were hard because we had a group of friends who expected us to be at church and go to lunch with the group. All the while, we were pretending that nothing in our relationship had changed.
It was hard.
And kind of fun.
But mostly just hard.
“Heya, sis.”
I turned as Austin poked me in the ribs. “Hey. When are you going to outgrow that?”
“How about never?” Austin grinned.
