This past weekend I attended the 2nd Grand Rapids Indie Flea as a vendor to sell my book. While the people in my life have been very supportive, insisting that selling 8 books is a good thing, I had definitely set my sights higher.
Still, for a first event, I suppose it’s not bad. Part of the problem was that I was set up in an annexed area with a bunch of other vendors who encountered the same problem I was having; next to no foot traffic. The people just weren’t coming in. After some investigation we learned that the majority of the people were in the main area and were not coming to our smaller area.
I did learn some valuable lessons from this event though. Such as the need for a table cloth. All in all, considering I was doing it by myself, I think I did a pretty good job. I haven’t had to use my customer service smile in several years and was worried it wouldn’t work, but I dusted off the cobwebs to work with what I had.
I don’t think this kind of event is my kind of crowd though. For one thing, I was the only one there selling a book. The majority of the booths were home to artisan/craft goods or food stuffs.
At the end of the day, I made enough to cover my gas and the cost of admission to the event so it’s not like I lost anything. More valuable even than the book sales, were the number of bookmarks with my website that people took. I’m hoping they will see something they like in my blog and become followers!
Bye for now!