I recently participated (for the second time) in the annual Author’s Night that the Oceanside Sunset Market puts on.

I've done many an author event in my day, various festivals or community nights where markets or bookstores feature a group of authors for an afternoon, an evening, a couple hours here or there. These events see the authors setting up tables with flyers, bookmarks, and, of course, books to sell. I immediately loved them when I started 10 years ago, because they made me feel so official. Like a real author. Over time they got harder, mostly because I started to learn how difficult it is to sell books. Picture readers perusing a parking lot full of author tables, where they mull over everything from poetry to mystery to romance to self-help to literary novel to historical non-fiction to delightful everyman memoir. With such selection (and with every reader coming into such events with his or her own specific genre preferences), I can tell you that the odds of these readers selecting YOUR book to purchase are low. So I got used to ending these events having sold almost no books. (In some cases, selling actually no books.) In short, it started to feel discouraging.