Tips for Pitching Local Author Events

Many authors participate in the book marketing process by setting up their own readings. The good news is that booksellers are aware of this trend and will respond to your professional queries. Here are some guidelines to prepare for pitching to local bookstores and other venues.

Signing books at the 2015 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Conference.

 

• Determine how booksellers would like to be contacted – you can introduce yourself to a manager on the bookstore floor or visit bookseller websites and follow their requested protocol, which in is often an email query. Fill this out exactly as requested.
• Attend a reading in a venue you like to meet other authors and store personnel; this is not only a good way to participate in the community but could lead to a book event of your own.
• Have book boilerplate text prepared – basics include a 100-word description of the book, a one-sentence “elevator pitch” that captures the essence of the book, and an author bio of no more than 50 words. Images include a jpg of the book cover and an author photo. If the bookseller agrees to a reading, store personnel will use these materials to market the event.
• Frame event queries as requests – most booksellers receive many requests for author readings, and in some instances can’t accommodate all of them. Be positive and professional in your request, but also be prepared to face being turned down with grace.
• Start booking events several months before the release of your book—bookstores plan their calendars well ahead of time.
• In addition to bookstores, consider book clubs, local museums, and other venues appropriate to the subject matter of the book ­– I read from my book on Texas dance halls in several of the venues I wrote about.

Booking events is a great way to market your book and participate in a local literary community. What tips about book events do you have to share? 

The Nature of Writing: Holly Tree

The Nature of Writing: Holly Tree: Every fall the berries appear in spiked leaves of the 30-foot tree my mom planted, little red dots eaten by birds and deer. From the glossy...

Holly Tree

Every fall the berries, little red dots eaten by birds and deer, appear between the spiked leaves of the now 30-foot tree my mom planted years ago. From the glossy, curling leaves, I suspect it’s an English holly, on a watch list of non-natives in the Northwest as a plant to monitor, although not subject to outright removal.

The holly tree was adopted by the Romans and druids, who celebrated it as a symbol of endurance deep in midwinter. Holly continues to be celebrated as a Christian symbol of life after death.

The tree my mom planted lives on years after she’s gone -- at Christmas, I place sprigs of holly mixed with cedar at her grave, which is located on the other side of the mountain from the holly tree. Across the cemetery lawn, a woman cleans a headstone of moss. The Douglas firs surrounding the graveyard still, and then waver in the windstorm that’s coming.

The next day, after hours of cold rain, I wake up to what I'll always think of as Mom's holly dusted with snow, its bright berries popping against a deep and everlasting green.

The Deer Hour

Slowing the car so gravel won’t scatter, I see a buck in the middle of the driveway, his antlers outlined against the woods. Instead of running, he stares at me, as if I’ve interrupted his evening. I stop, and he takes careful steps, not hurried at all, long legs deliberate across the gravel and eye toward the woods.

In this place between urban and rural, the deer, like raccoons and other animals well adapted to humans, thrive. There’s no hunting here, another reason for the deer to linger. Dusk, a good time for them to eat, represents a shadowy, in-between time – not quite day, not yet night.

Humans turn to in-between times for different reasons, many choosing to feed their creativity, particularly writing, in the early hours before the new day or late in a dark velvet night.

The light retreats faster every day now, lending any concrete, daytime task greater urgency. Even a late afternoon hike in the woods catches me off guard one day, with the sun full across the path on my way up the mountain and the forest turning gray on the way down, racing night.

The next day, I walk around the neighborhood to yet another dusk, the moon glowing after a shadowed start. Toward the end of my walk, I spot two does grazing. They’re in someone else’s yard this time, under cover of apple trees.

They don’t move, leaving the next move up to me. I’m the one who drifts across the street instead, leaving the deer to their mysterious in-between, their hour on the mountain. 

Break in the Rain

It’s the rainy season, with clouds so low they hide half the mountain and platter-sized maple leaves layer the ground. Rain has fallen steady for a week, pouring all weekend and tapering to clouds by Monday.

Midweek, I wake up to the sun. It's really more of a hazy glow than gold, but on a freelancer’s schedule, I have the luxury of capturing it when I can. Because it feels so rare, even though winter has barely started, I harness the dog, lace up my shoes, and head up the mountain.

It’ll only be a short walk, I tell myself, much like I promise myself to write a few paragraphs in hopes there’ll be more. My dog dives for the switchbacks, the light-spattered road enticing us just another turn, even though there’s work waiting back home.

We aren’t alone, spotting two other people on the route, one on foot with five dogs spilling over one another. We ask each other if we’re headed to the top of the mountain, replying cheerfully that we’re not, a brief outing good enough. On the way back down, the skies turn gray with insistent drops smacking what’s left of the leaves.

Given the Northwest drought this past summer, the shift to rain is welcome, a return to normalcy. The El Nino winter forecast promises dryer conditions for the North, rain for the South, and warmer temperatures for the West. This means loving the rain alongside the sun breaks, embracing the 4:30 pm, damp-spattered darkness and what it provides the landscape long term. On the last curves of the trail, the dog and I don’t rush, letting the cool drops spot our hair, reassured we’re almost back. 

NOAA Winter Weather

Weather Network Prediction

Salmon Are Home

A few days before my hometown’s Salmon Days Festival, I take a sunny afternoon to pop onto the bridge downtown in what is Washington State’s most visited hatchery. The pink-tinged salmon are what colored leaves are to other geographic areas – a sure sign of fall.
  

On a warm footbridge, I watch Chinook salmon making their way back in water turned shallow by a warmer than average summer. The King County Department of Natural Resources says “Warm waters and low flows have made 2015 a tough year for salmon as they work to return to streams and rivers around Puget Sound this fall.” A hatchery volunteer walks by while I stare at the water. “After it cools off a bit they’ll start jumping,” he promises.

I move over to the holding tank where the salmon glide by, eggs and milt ready for harvest and their journey and life cycle complete. The stream supports both wild and hatchery salmon, the hatchery fish distinguished by a removed adipose fin.

The hatchery, built in the 1930s, is a Depression-era project designed to replenish salmon from the logging and mining that took place in the area. More recent efforts to preserve the creek habitat include removal of a dam, which the state replaced with a series of weirs to make the salmon’s journey easier.

A few others join me on the bridge to take in this upstream journey and the pull of home. In shadow-spotted waters, lines of salmon return to the same place I’ve come back to, navigating the familiar along with challenges to come.

 

Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery

King County Department of Natural Resources

 

What the wind says

In Wisconsin, I walked our dog under a row of pines planted as a windbreak. Instead of stopping the wind, the trees came alive in it, their roar coming from a deeper place.

I looked up at their branches, thick at the top and trimmed, by our neighbor, at the bottom. When not trimming the branches, she often stopped near the trees to pick up leaves and sticks. I took the dog over to say hello.

In a fresh gust, one of the trees lobbed a pine cone at me. Doesn’t it sound nice, I said.

My neighbor, dressed in flannel for the cool fall day, looked around to see what I meant.

The trees, I said, remembering the versions I’d grown up with – Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar, the wind slipping through them like water, even mimicking the nearby Pacific in their constant sigh.

The sound the wind makes, I said.

She looked from me to the trees. Having lived here all her life, the trees had been a practical constant and something to maintain, something she stopped listening to, just like I stopped hearing a backyard stream and its determined journey down the mountain where I grew up.

Maybe my neighbor considered those pines simply a deterrent to more insistent winds, especially Midwest winter gusts so frozen they coated your eyelashes. The Northwest, too, offered windstorms swaying branches and felling trunks--even last week, a rare summer storm offered winds of 46 mph-- while West Texas fronts heaved tumbleweeds across Highway 84.

My neighbor and I looked up at the branches together. It does make a sound, she said after a moment or two, the wind's sigh filling the space between us.