Tales from the Fair

I’m not an early riser, but there is one event that drives me to get out of bed before noon. Several hours before noon, actually. In May, the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin holds an event that includes a writer’s conference and a book fair. 2026 was my second appearance at the event.

Selling books in person to someone you’ve never met is a strange experience that I’m not sure many people can relate to. It’s not the same as selling to family and friends, especially when you’re in a conference room full of people fighting every introverted impulse to get a potential buyer’s attention. Still, I had pretty good success this year!

While I’m not the only fantasy author that seems to regularly attend the book fair, I felt outnumbered. The type of people that typically go to local book fairs seem to be more interested in non-fiction and literary fiction, making epic fantasy like Withered Kingdom and Monsters & Steel a hard sell. Plenty of people go in with one type of book on their mind, and if your work isn’t their speed, there’s not a lot you can do.

Here’s a link—I can’t seem to embed the post—to an official video from the event organizers. If you look really close you can spot me:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Cp6oJNUYw

Here are some of my favorite memories and takeaways from the event:

• I sold more than two times as many books as I did last year
• I sat next to the same author I sat next to last year
• No matter how prepared you are for an event like this, you’ll never be fully prepared. At least not when it’s only your second time going
• When it rains, it pours (Most books sales happened within a two hour span of the six hour event)
• Someone came to the book fair looking specifically for Withered Kingdom, which is a huge first for me. He had checked the book out from the local library and wanted to buy it for himself but didn’t know where else to find it
• If you use 3D printed tabletop RPG set pieces to display your books, you will get a lot more comments about that than your books
• Tabletop model trees shed a lot of little green leaf dust, so be ready to clean that up
• Book Fairs are EXCELLENT networking opportunities
• Being able to take card payments is essential to modern face-to-face book selling. Luckily, I was ready for that this year
• Even if people haven’t read your book, they do want to know when the sequel is coming
• No matter how often people say, “Never judge a book by its cover,” when it comes to actual books, people absolutely do
• You really can’t judge a ‘book’ by its cover when it comes to trying to guess if a person walking past your table is into fantasy or not
• Romantasy is where the money is
• I saw someone wearing a “Hoid for President” shirt, which was awesome. Brandon Sanderson really is the king of Fantasy right now
• Free Comic Book Day seems to always happen the same day as the book fair
• No matter how tired you are, it is always worth it to meet readers and other authors
• The post-fair tacos and nap are some of the best of the year
• One of these years I need to try and make it to the Writer’s Conference the day before the Book Fair