Episode 224 - Secrets of Maximizing In-person Sales with Todd Fahnestock
February 6, 2024
"We want people to understand our work. As a writer, I get that. But understand that we can't make somebody who's walking by a booth understand all of the nuance and all of the character development and the world building and originality of our work in five seconds. We can't do it. Nobody can do that. So what we have to do is give them, and this is going to sound horrible to some of the authors out there, this cheating illusion for a moment." —Todd Fahnestock
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Todd Fahnestock discusses SECRETS OF MAXIMIZING IN-PERSON SALES, including the background of Todd’s less than successful early in-person sales experiences; his first success, and what he learned from it; how to find the opportunities, and the power of saying yes to everything (with some caveats); how to achieve a professional set-up, including advice on effective banner design, book displays, and use of QR codes; the four categories of readers, and tips for improving your changes of a sale for each; how to overcome the fear of being too salesy; options for a low impact approach when sales is not your main goal; the vital importance of understanding your goals and of knowing your numbers; and the importance of setting boundaries and conserving your energy.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Listen to the full episode ...
Listen to and watch the interview ...
Todd Fahnestock is an award-winning, #1 bestselling author of fantasy for all ages and winner of the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age Award. He is a founder of Eldros Legacy—a multi-author, shared-world epic fantasy series—two-time winner of the Colorado Authors League Award for Writing Excellence, and four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Tower of the Four: The Champions Academy, Khyven the Unkillable, Lorelle of the Dark, and Tower of the Four: The Dragon’s War. His passions are great stories and his quirky, fun-loving family.
Links
Todd's Links:
Author website: https://toddfahnestock.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/todd.fahnestock
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/todd_fahnestock/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Author website: https://toddfahnestock.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/todd.fahnestock
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/todd_fahnestock/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Todd! Have you had success with in-person sales and, if yes, do you have a tip we missed? If you’re thinking of exploring (or re-exploring) in-person sales, which of Todd’s tips do you plan to try out?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Todd Fahnestock. Hey Todd, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Todd: Hi, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. This is great.
Meet Todd Fahnestock
[00:00:10] Matty: It is my pleasure to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little more background on you, Todd Fahnestock is an award-winning, number-one best-selling author of Fantasy for All Ages and the winner of the New York Public Library's Book for the Teenage Award. He's the founder of Eldross Legacy, a multi-author, shared-world epic fantasy series. He's a two-time winner of the Colorado Authors League Award for Writing Excellence and a four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Award for "Tower of the Four," "The Champion's Academy," "Hive and the Unkillable," "Laurel of the Dark," and "The Tower of the Four: The Dragon's War." His passions are making great stories and his quirky, fun-loving family.
I invited Todd on the podcast because I heard him talk at 20 Books Vegas about the secrets of maximizing in-person sales. This is something that was of great interest to me because, after a long period of weighing going to in-person sales and feeling like the time investment really wasn't paying me back in the ways I wanted to be paid back, I finally, at the end of last year, 2023, decided to rethink that, and I am focused much more on in-person sales now.
Todd's early in-person sales experiences
[00:01:14] Matty: I've already implemented a couple of the tips that you shared at 20 Books and will be sharing here. So, Todd, I always think it's fun to start out when someone has become an expert on a topic, as you have about in-person sales, just to make us all feel a little bit better. Talk to us a little more about your early experiences, maybe before you learned the lessons you're going to be sharing with us today.
[00:01:33] Todd: Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny that people are starting to call me an expert in this field at all. Like I'm still stumbling along and learning things and figuring things out. But there's definitely been some successes along the way. But I'll start with the opposite. Because one of the things I really enjoy talking about is my failures, my crushing failures over and over. So yeah, so it was, I believe it was 2017. And I'll back up a little bit. So I went full time in 2017. Not because all of a sudden I had the lucrative 6-figure contract or anything like that. But because my wife and I decided to swap places. She had been the stay-at-home parent for the first 7-8 years of the kid's life. And she's, you know, I would actually like to use my college degree, get out into the workforce, do some things, make my stamp there, and I'm like, you don't have to twist my arm, I'll go home, I'll stay home, I'll write. And so, we kind of switched places, and of course, I mean, that's probably a very skewed version. I had been wanting to get home and write for a long time. I didn't tell that part. I'd kind of been, like, hammering on her, I want to stay home and write. So we finally made that switch.
And at the time, I had just, in 2016, released "The Wishing World," two TOR books. And I was waiting for them to pick up the sequel because, you know, we hit the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Top 10 list right up there with names like Dan Brown and some pretty big names from a lot of promotion that I had done locally. And they didn't pick up the second book.
So what was going to kick off my going full time as a writer didn't happen. It's like the floor dropped out from underneath me, and you know that's a lesson. One should never count on getting another book contract unless it's a three-book contract or four-book contract or whatever multiple book contract to start, and I had relied on that, and it didn't come through. My goal was to make 20 grand the first year, 50 grand the second year, and then be off and running, having a replacement income for what I was doing. And that first year, I made fourteen hundred dollars. It was just so, so, I mean, I was lost. I remember in October running around to some of my nonprofit cronies, going, "Have you got a job for me? Because I may need a job in like about a month and a half."
But one of the things my fabulously supportive wife said to me is, "You know, I'm like, what do I do? What do I do? I'm writing novels, but I've got no connection between me and where I need to go as far as making money." And she said, "Just say yes to everything. Anything that comes along, regarding writing, if somebody wants you to teach a class on writing, you say yes. If somebody wants to come down and volunteer reading to kids at the library, you say yes." So I just kind of took that attitude.
When the Colorado Authors League reached out to all the members of the Colorado Authors League, of which I was one, I planned that and still am at this point, actually on the board of CAL at this point, but they reached out and said, "Hey, we've got a holiday market that we're going to. If you want to, you can pay $50, come down, you'll get two hours on Friday, two hours on Saturday, two hours on Sunday, and sell books." And I was like, "Well, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do that. I'm a writer. I don't want to be a salesman, right?" But I thought of what my wife said, you know, say yes to everything. So I'm like, "Okay, what else am I doing? I'm going to go down."
So I went down on Friday, and I tried so hard to sell books. I was looking at the other authors that were selling books, and the ones that were, like, getting out there were like, "Hey, come on over here. It's the Colorado Authors League. Find a Colorado author that you like, and you can get a book in any genre." And it just sounded so horrible to me. I didn't want to be some 1800s barker with a shoe slamming on the table saying, "Come on over, you know, get a box of popcorn if you buy a book." Whatever, right?
And I tried that. I felt awful. I sold zero books on Friday, went home completely dejected. Of course, I had two more slots, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. I said to Laura, "This sucks. This is not, you know," and she's like, "Well, at least you tried it, so I'll finish out the weekend." I went in on Saturday, and I'm like, "You know what? I got to readjust my attitude because I just, I'm hating being here. I need to not hate being here." Well, I love the holidays, right? And it's a holiday market, so there's Christmassy stuff everywhere. So I'm like, "You know what? I'm just going to get into the holiday mood a bit and just sort of relax."
I'm like, okay, I'm happy to be here, and I don't have to do anything. I don't have to slam my shoe on the table. I'm just going to sit here. I'll just wait it out until the end, and then I'll be done.
Todd's first success
Across the aisle, there was a Christmas store, a Christmas booth with wreaths and all kinds of other stuff. A mother was looking at a wreath, and a little girl, like seven years old, maybe six years old, was holding onto her mom's hand. She had turned around to look at my poster, my "The Wishing World" banner. I caught her eye, and she immediately went and looked away and wouldn't look at me. I just chuckled because, you know, at the time, my kids were close to that age, maybe a little bit older, and so I love kids. I thought, "Okay, well, this is something I can do. I can play with this kid who's looking over at the banner, then looking away from the banner."
Later on, she comes up, kind of scared to come any closer, looking at the banner. I asked her, "Do you like this kind of story?" She said, "Uh-huh, I do." I said, "Do you want me to tell you about it?" She said, "Yeah, yeah, you can tell me about it." So I started telling her the story. I'm a storyteller. I love talking about my stories. By the end of the day, I had half a dozen kids gathered around the booth, listening to story time. By the end of the weekend, I'd sold 33 books. All the Colorado authors were coming up to me, saying, "How did you do that? That was the most we've seen sold in a weekend here by one single author. How the heck did you do that?" I said, "I don't know. I wasn't doing any sales tactic or anything like that. I was just telling stories."
So that's what I went forward with—this genuine, heartfelt urge to tell my story. That was the first success. I did another one, and that one went okay. Some of them went better than others. Eventually, there were some leveling up, which we can get into as we go forward.
Say yes to everything
[00:08:09] Matty: Well, I have all sorts of questions that I want to delve into, but I do want to ask you one question that's not related to in-person sales. The "say yes to everything" advice obviously worked out really well for you, based on the stories you're going to be telling, but it also sounds like it could be a recipe for a nervous breakdown. On this other topic, just for a minute, can you talk a little bit about, did you have to moderate the "say yes to everything"? What made it more likely that it turned out well for you than it turned into a nervous breakdown?
[00:08:39] Todd: Absolutely. No, that is a very good point. The "say yes to everything" was certainly situational advice that my wife had given me because I had nothing to do. I was at home, I was writing, but I knew that to level up my career, I had to do more than just write books at home. Right? So I had to do something, and I didn't know what to do. So she's like, how about you say yes to everything? Any little opportunity that comes along until you find your feet. Of course, I mean, now I have to say no to all kinds of things, right? I can't say yes to everything because, like you said, there's not enough of me to go around, and I still do need to write books at home. So you’ve got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that. But I got to get out and sell at cons, so I got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that, plus conferences, writers’ conferences, chunk out time for that, plus family, plus all the different things, right? So, yeah, you can't continue saying yes to everything all the time.
But the problem that I had was that I had nothing to do and my career was kind of flat. Now the career is on a right trend, so it's like saying no to certain things and then making the judgment call of, okay, what's going to push the career forward, what's going to just waste time, those kinds of things. There's still an art form, I think, to what to say yes to and what to say no to, which is probably a completely entire other topic that I could go into for a very long time, but yeah, I didn't continue just saying yes to everything. Eventually, your dance card gets full, but that's what you want, right? I mean, that's the whole point of saying yes to everything in the beginning, is that you want to fill up your dance card, and then once it's full, then you're off and rolling.
[00:10:13] Matty: Yep. And you can pick the people you want to dance with.
[00:10:16] Todd: Exactly, exactly.
The importance of a professional set-up
[00:10:19] Matty: So one of the things you had sort of mentioned in passing is, well, one of the things you mentioned in your talk at Vegas is the importance of a professional setup. And it sounds like you started out with at least some of that because you had something at your booth that attracted the attention of a little girl. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of a professional setup?
[00:10:37] Todd: Yeah, so it seems to me that the biggest difficulty of selling face-to-face is breaking it down into four different categories of people, right? It's a matter of catching attention. So the setup is one way that you can catch the attention of people. Another one is talking to them, right? Another one is having a welcoming demeanor, right? Another one is what you're wearing, even, right? I oftentimes in my Conquering the Con, I talk about, you have an opportunity all over the place. Are you maximizing those opportunities? How do you set up the books on your table?
Tips for effective banners
[00:11:18] Todd: That's another opportunity. So the setup, I mean, to me, it has to start with the books, right? You've got books, and you're going to put books up, so that's one thing. But another thing is the banners. The biggest thing that attracts people to my booth from a distance is going to be my banners. That is the staple. I've seen all kinds of different banners, and I'm not going to call anybody out for the way that they want to decorate their booth, but my personal thought is the fewer words you have, the better you're going to attract people from a distance. It's important to have a couple of things on there, but man, you better choose your words carefully.
If you've got a banner that has prose going all the way down the front of it, I mean, who likes to look at that? We all love to read. Anybody listening to this podcast is probably an avid reader, right? We all love to read. But catching somebody's attention out in the wild, out in the world, is not the same thing, right? We are visual creatures from a distance. We're far more inclined. Now, I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm sure there are some people that are like, "Ooh, words," and they'll come closer, right? I'm talking about sort of this mainstream attitude of what's going to catch the most fish in your net.
There are lots of specifics that will catch very specific clusters of people. If that is your entire audience, then don't listen to me. Do what you know that cluster of people is going to be attracted to. But for my part, let me just speak about epic fantasy, right? So I do my epic fantasy banner, and I told my artist, and this is my big 8x8 banner that, and I've got three 8x8 banners at this point, but the one 8x8 banner that I take with me no matter where I go is my "Tower of the Four" banner, which I told my artists, I'm like, "Okay, I want this to scream epic fantasy."
Which means we need a dude with a sword, somebody with a sword's got to be on that banner. We need a dragon, right? And we need somebody working magic. If you're trying to capture the people who like that fantasy-esque feel of this exotic place full of beauty and danger, then a good-looking female protagonist on the banner, not a bad idea either. So that was everything that my banner had, right? Had to do with the sword, had a fierce female mage working magic, and it had a dragon, right?
So this image from a distance, you can see it from a hundred feet away. You can see the dragon. You can't really see the characters. Maybe you can see the guy drawing the sword, but you're definitely going to see this dragon that is crouching in over the whole thing. And I've had people come up to me and say, "Man, that thing caught my eye from way up the aisle, and I had to come over and see what this was about." Boom.
And I've seen other people do banners where, and this is to give advice to writers who are doing this. We want people to understand our work as a writer. I get that, right? But understand that we can't make somebody who's walking by a booth understand all of the nuance and all of the character development and the world-building and the originality of our work in five seconds. We can't do it. Nobody can do that, right? So, what we have to do is give them almost this, and this is going to sound horrible to some of the authors out there, this cheating illusion for a moment, right?
That it's just not what the book is about, but it sort of talks about the tropes, right? You just want to create a funnel, right? All I want is people that are vaguely interested in dudes with swords, girl working magic, and a big dragon, right? That's all I need to funnel the audience this way. Once I get them closer, then there are next steps. But for that first one, I don't want to make it complicated. Like I said, image over text. So, I've seen some banners where it's, "Oh, I want to make sure all of my books are shown," because part of us as writers is like, we want to feel worthy to be writers. Every writer I've ever met has imposter syndrome. Every single one. The successful ones and the non-successful ones alike, or the newbies and the successful ones alike. Everybody's got it. We wonder if we're really worthy to put stories out into the world that people are going to want to read, right? So, we want to prove to them our credibility.
I think this works really well in non-fiction books, but for fiction books, it's more important to get them pulled in based on what genre they like, based on the kinds of things that they're going to be interested in, right? When they get closer, then, like I said, you can start pouring on the layers. But for the image, don't put all your books up on a big 8x8 banner. It is, in my opinion, a waste of an 8x8 banner. You've got all this real estate, and you've put four images on. Guess what you just did? You just shrank your images a quarter of the size that they could be, and you put four of them up. So now, people aren't really looking at anything. They're looking at four books, you know? That's what they see from a distance is, "Oh, there are four books over there," as opposed to, "Whoa, dragon and magic," you know? I mean, that's what I want them to think when they're walking up to my booth.
[00:16:19] Matty: Yeah, I was inspired by your talk to get two banners of my own. I made them on Canva and then I ordered them through Canva, and there was only one retractable banner size. I decided I wanted to make them plain for all the reasons that you're describing and also so they wouldn't get outdated because if I put all my book covers on them, then the next time I put a book out, suddenly they're outdated. I didn't want them to get outdated because I doubt this is much in comparison to the 8x8 thing, but they were like 150 bucks apiece, so I wanted to make sure I was going to be getting my money's worth out of them. So one of them has, I have one for my nonfiction, one for my fiction, the one for my nonfiction just has my logo, my name, the writing craft, and the publishing voyage. That's everything that's on one.
[00:17:06] Matty: And then, the other one has my name and the two series titles. I have my name separating the middle, and I have the series title and the cover background of one at the top and the series title and the cover background of the other at the bottom. They turned out to be so big that, being 5'4, I'm not tall enough to hook them at the top of the little...
[00:17:29] Todd: Are they three feet by seven feet banners?
[00:17:31] Matty: I think they must be. But that was fun, and it does attract attention. Also, the other tip that I came up with was not putting anything too low that you want to make sure people see because if it's behind your table, then people are going to miss that, yeah. But it does make a nice backdrop.
[00:17:48] Todd: Absolutely. And here's another sort of hack that you can do. You can get a plastic bench at Costco or Walmart or wherever, and you can jack those banners up another foot and a half because those little legs on them, you can turn them so that they're at an angle and they'll still stay up. If you get a stiff breeze in there, they might fall over, but I mean, come on, you're in a con setting; probably there's not going to be any breezes going by. So yeah, you can do that also. I've done that before, where I have like a bench, and I jack up those 3x7 banners. So, that works too, to get a little extra visibility.
[00:18:22] Matty: Yeah. Another pro tip.
Finding the Opportunities
[00:18:24] Matty: So, there were other things about setup that I wanted to talk about, but I realized that we really haven't talked yet about finding the opportunity. Is finding the opportunity something you should be looking at first, or do you already have your setup, and then you look for opportunities?
Don't Knock the Small Events
[00:18:41] Todd: Yeah, so for me, it happened really organically. Like I said, I got invited to do this Christmas thing. And my advice to somebody who's just starting out in this is: Don't knock the small events.
I mean, the small events are where you can cut your teeth on your pitch and things like that, and there's not a lot of investment. At this point, I'm paying as much as $1,700 for a booth in certain areas. You don't want any piece of that unless you know you're going to make $2,000, $3,000 from that con. You'll never earn your money back.
But some of these local holiday fairs, like I started at, that I still go to—I still go to that same holiday fair; I've got my own booth now—but I mean, I still go to that holiday fair. It's one of the more expensive booths that I pay for, but it's totally worth it.
If you start small, you could go to a local farmer's market or something like that, get a booth for 50 bucks, and then you're not on the hook to sell 100 books. All you’ve got to do is sell 10, and you can go home saying, "Hey, I paid my booth cost back, and I got a little extra change on top of it, and I met some new superfans." My assistant actually just got a new book out, and she's starting to build her, in-person sales in Utah. She's setting up at this little atrium off of the symphony—people get out of the symphony, and they come out and they're buying books and things like that.
There are so many different places to sell books, and she's getting her pitch in shape, right? Because it only cost her so much money, and she's not on the hook to make a whole ton of money, so she gets to play around with the pitch. You talk, you know, you do a pitch to this one person, and they're like, "Ew," and they walk away like they smelled something bad, and you're like, "Okay, I need to adjust that pitch." So you get to try on the next person, and there's not a whole lot of pressure on you to really perform.
That's what I would recommend to start. So, any city's community calendar is going to have these types of local sales opportunities. And then, of course, there's the con circuit, the comic con circuit. For somebody who sells science fiction or fantasy, it's great for that. For somebody who sells mystery, it could work.
I mean, I've never sold mystery books, so I really couldn't tell you firsthand, but I know that the fans coming to a comic con are not completely plugged into that, though I'm sure there are plenty of them that would buy a mystery. So I'm not saying don't do it, but you make the call based on what you think is going to work best.
Know Your Numbers
[00:21:16] Matty: Setting aside the size of the event, any types of events, like I think you mentioned in Vegas that craft fairs turn out to be a surprisingly successful approach because it's not wall-to-wall books.
[00:21:30] Todd: Yeah! Yeah! So, I mean, you’ve got to kind of do the math on it. You go to, say, FanX, and FanX has 70,000 people showing up as attendees, but it also has, you know, probably 100 authors there, all in Artist Alley trying to sell their books, right? So let's say, you know, 10,000 of those 70,000 are people that are going to buy books, right?
And then, you know, so you divide that by, let's say there's 100 authors there. I'm not big on math, so if I screw this up, you got it, but I figure if I'm working with 10,000 and 100, I should be able to figure that out. So that's like 1,000 people per—is that right? I've already screwed it up. Anyways, you get my point.
There's a certain amount of people that you can expect will buy your book, you know, if they haven't already bought somebody else's. If you're at a small event, right, and there's a thousand people at this event, and you're the only author, and ten percent of that thousand people are going to buy books, they're all coming to your booth.
So you're going to make as much money there as you might at Comic Con, and it's going to be way cheaper for you to get into that booth, right? So that's something to think about. Just, I mean, I'm always looking at the numbers, despite the fact that I'm mathematically challenged. I use spreadsheets to help me out with that, right?
Because you have to know the numbers. You have to know them. If you're going to a con and you sold 300 books, and you're like, "Wow! I am making so much money!" But the costs to drive there, to put you up at a hotel, to eat food there, to get the booth, and that sort of thing, not to mention the cost of the books, you could be underwater.
You could have made $3,000 at that con, and you're $1,000 in the hole, you know, as opposed to this little con where you made $500 and you only spent $150, you made $350. Your net is higher at that small event where you only sold 30 books than this other event where you sold 300. I mean, you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise, your business is going to go down by the head.
[00:23:16] Matty: Yeah, I'm definitely not at a point where I'm planning on going anywhere that requires me to stay overnight unless I'm there anyway, you know, for other reasons, and there's an opportunity to sell books, but.
Tips for Displaying Your Books
[00:23:30] Matty: You had also talked about the setup of the actual books on the table. Can you talk about that a little?
[00:23:35] Todd: Yes. Okay, so everybody's got their way of looking at this, and some people really, like some readers, some customers, really like the idea of walking into a library, right? That's kind of what draws them, right? And so that's definitely an effective way of doing it. I've seen, you know, Barnes and Noble setups or tatter cover setups, where essentially they create a little library. You walk in, and you've got all the books lined up, or rather I should say a bookstore. You know, you've got the sort of typical racks and that sort of thing with the books facing out and that sort of thing, and some people really like that.
In an individual table, the way I like to go is clean and sparse, 25 books. I don't want a stack of books, every single one of my books, with a book on top of it. It's just so busy, right? I want one book on display, laid out in the series set. I've got several different series, and that is part of my selling structure as well. I separate the series, use little table banners behind them, and make it as clean as possible because with 25 books, it's hard to make it clean anyway, right? One book in the middle of the table looks lonely. Three books on a four-foot table looks clean. For two eight-foot tables, with 25 books, it's still getting kind of crowded, but it's definitely more crowded if you're just piling books on top of books, right?
Some setups I've seen, I just shake my head. Somebody has one book, and they've got 500 copies of their book on this table, with maybe two of them faced out. It looks like you can't sell books unless there's a line up to your table, and people are just buying that book and moving along. It looks like you can't sell books, and you don't want that impression. You want something clean and simple where people can come up and look and say, "Ooh, I like this cover" or "I like that cover." I can't tell you how many times, even at my table where I'm trying to make it as clean and simple as possible, people say, "I really want something with dragons," and they're looking at one of my series that doesn't have a dragon on the cover. Literally, 12 inches away is a cover that has a dragon on it. I'm like, "What about this one?" They're like, "Oh, ooh," like they just discovered it. They didn't see it because there's so much stimuli at a con like that, where there are images everywhere, and they tunnel vision on something. They're really doing everything they can not to look at everything else at that moment.
Even if you have it laid out simple, the odds are against you of somebody looking at exactly what you want them to look at. So, helping them also sometimes is good.
[00:26:13] Matty: I'm taking it you have one copy of each of your books out, and then somebody looks at, finds the one with the dragon, then do you have a little stash behind the table where you take out a different book, a separate copy of that book so you're not handing them the one on the stand and say, "You know, take a look, read the back cover or page through."
[00:26:34] Todd: Oh, of course. I mean, I go to something like FanX, or Planet Comic Con, or Fan Expo Denver, these are some of my heavy hitters that I go to, and I can barely belly up to the table for all the boxes of books that I have underneath the table. It's an issue. Some of them I have to sell a bunch one day and then bring in more the next day because I just don't have enough space underneath the table to fit all the boxes of books that I want. And yes, I always take out a fresh copy. I shouldn't say always. That is my method, but sometimes you get a reader who comes up, they pick up a copy, and they're literally clutching it to their chest. I'm like, "Well, I'm not going to take it away from them. That's the one they bonded with. They can buy it. I'll just put another one on the rack. It's fine."
A Low-Impact Approach When Sales Are Not Your Main Goal
[00:27:24] Matty: So, I had a little bit of a tangent, but I'm going to a conference this summer where I'm a speaker, and there's this opportunity to have a book sales table that's part of the conference setup. And I really don't want to go with any book. The idea I had was I'm not going to be able to bring my fancy banners or anything like that. It's basically what can I put in a knapsack or something like that. So I have ten novels now, and I don't even think I'm going to bring stands, but have the 10 books out, have one copy of each book, and then I was going to have cards with QR codes that would take the reader to either where they could buy the print book either from me or from a major online retailer, same for the ebook, which I realized isn't optimal from a sales point of view, but it's the best I can come up with in terms of meeting this requirement that I don't want to have any extra luggage or boxes or anything like that when I go to the conference. Can you talk about if that's worth it?
[00:28:30] Todd: Yeah, I've done that before. I've actually done that before because sometimes you sell out, right? And then people still want more books, and then you've got to figure out a way to sell them those books. So there's different ways to do it. One, the QR code that takes them to your Amazon page, or your website page, or your Nook page, whatever it is that you want to send people to. That works really well. I've got a lot of cards of those myself. Something else I do is if they want hard copies, for example, when I've sold out and have no more hard copies or in this case where you've only brought one of each and can't sell them hard copies but they want a hard copy, I will take their information. Usually, I work in tandem at the big ones. I'll ask my assistant to take down their information, say we want an email address, a phone number, we want your address so that because I had once where I took somebody's address, and that's all I took, and there was something wrong with the address, and I never could get them the book. You know, I kept waiting for them to email me and say, "You're never sending my book, you jerk!" and I'm like, "Oh, I'm glad you reached out to me. There was something wrong with the address, and it never went out." So, I collect all the information just in case something goes wrong. And then I mail them all out when I get home, you know, and some people prefer that. I did that at 20 books to 50k just because people were like, "Ah, my suitcase is full, I don't want to carry anything." I'm like, "Oh, I got you, you know, let's ship it to you." So yes, that can work.
I will say that it has a disadvantage. If you're comparing that to actually having the book there, it's a pretty big disadvantage because people get attached to material things when they get them in their hands. So, you can definitely sell them that way, but I wouldn't do that for an entire event if it was going to be like, "Oh, I want to make a lot of money at this event," but what you're talking about where it's like, "Oh, I'm going to this thing, and there's an extra thing." It's perfect. It's perfect.
Using QR Codes
[00:30:06] Matty: I've started experimenting with QR codes, and what I found is that I think so far I only had two QR codes. One was where people can go to sign up for my email newsletter and then some other one. I forget even what the other one was. But having enough text on whatever the material is that has the QR code on it to explain what it is without it being like a novel they have to read was kind of confusing. And then I've also seen people do the QR code where they almost have a binder. And it's like pages, maybe one page per book. And so if someone says, "Oh, I'd like this one," then they get out the binder and they flip to the page that has that stuff on it. Do you have any advice about the best way to execute on the QR code approach?
[00:30:54] Todd: The QR code is hit and miss for me. I mean, that's why, like I said, I usually write down their information. I charge them right there. I take their money right there, and then I'm on the hook to deliver the products to them. Giving them just a QR code and saying hit that QR code. I've even done that where I'm like hit that QR code right here at the table. They're like, "Oh, okay, great. I'll do this later." What are you going to tell them at that point? "Okay, no, do it right here. Do it right now." I mean, that doesn't work, right? So, you're taking the control out of your hands, and if you put time and energy into trying to sell them on the story, and then essentially you cut them loose with the QR code. Roll the dice, you know, I mean, they may buy it, they may not.
My experience with people who are like, "Oh yeah, I'll buy this later," 1 in 50 maybe that follow through on that. It's not high because I'm watching, I'm like, I give them the QR code that takes them straight to my website or whatever, and then I look for that sale or even look on my Amazon reports for that sale, and nobody bought a book that day or the next day or whatever, right? So, I'm not a big fan of that. It's certainly better than nothing, but if you're trying to make money and build superfans with it, it's a backup at best, I think.
When Sales Aren't Your Primary Goal
[00:32:07] Matty: Well, I'm realizing that I almost said yes to the option of having books in this author event because more as a resume builder, because otherwise, the people who are there hearing me speak aren't going to have any concrete evidence that I actually have the experience to know what I'm talking about. So if all I get out of this is people wandering by looking at my books and chatting with me, I will have met my primary goal of that event, which is to show them that I have books. My primary goal of that event, of course, it would be nice to sell books, but it's not really what I'm looking for, as opposed to a book sales event where that is really what I'm going for.
[00:32:48] Todd: Yeah, well, I think that brings up a very interesting point that for people who are going to do in-person sales, I recommend you have an idea of what you want out of that event, right? And to, so actually, curiously, my priorities are not making money at a con. Believe it or not, even though I'm being pretty successful at doing that at this point, my goal is to meet and talk to superfans, market my books, and my tertiary concern is trying to walk away with a profit, right?
Understanding your goal gives you resilience.
[00:33:18] Todd: Now, all those are humming at a pretty high level at this point for me, but it wasn't always that way. When I started, I wasn't looking to make any money. Breaking even was like, "Hey, I made back my booth cost and my gas cost to drive down to Albuquerque or whatever it was. I was feeling good about that. More importantly was I want to get my books out into the world." Going to a con, I think it's pretty important, especially for your frame of mind and your perspective while you're at the con.
Here's something my friend Katie Cross said about cons, and she's right. It's like a constant reassessment of yourself, every single moment, every single new person that comes up and either accepts or rejects you. Man, you’ve got to have resilience to pick yourself back up and go, "Okay, I'm going to put on a smile and sell to this next person after that guy just kicked me in the teeth." You really have to have that. So, knowing what your priority is helps with that.
If I don't make a sale and I'm like, "You know what? I'm here to meet superfans. If I meet two superfans at this event, it's a success." Then you relax a little bit. Your shoulders unclench, and you're like, "Okay, I'm looking for that superfan who wants what I do. That's the most important from this event." It keeps you clear, keeps you able to be resilient.
[00:34:31] Matty: Yeah. And I think that if you have a series, especially a long series or a long set of series as you do, then that makes reaching superfans all the more important because maybe you don't make your money back with the books you sell at that event. But if there are 24 more books in the series that they can go to, then you're improving your chances that over the long haul, that turns out to meet the money-making goal as well.
[00:34:55] Todd: Well, it's my take that fans and superfans, readers, it's the only thing that's important. At the end of the day, it's the only thing that's important. They hold the keys to your dreams. If you can impress, please, and put out a product that your readers love, you win. How can you not win? They're going to tell all their friends about it, and you're going to build your audience that way. I mean, that's the only thing that's important. There are lots of other things that are important, but if you had to choose one thing, it's pleasing the reader and making sure that they're going to want to come back for more.
[00:35:31] Matty: Yeah, I had sort of talked myself into getting back into the in-person events on the theory that as long as I was going to be with another author that I knew and liked and was going to enjoy spending the day with, it was going to be worth it because, in the worst possible case, the two of us or the three of us or the four of us or whatever would sit around and chat for the duration of the conference, and that would still be a good time. I think that was valuable to get me back into the mindset of doing it. But there's a trap that if that stays forefront in my mind, then I spend my energy on with my fellow authors, not on networking with the readers that come to the table. So I have to be careful about to what extent I lean on that.
[00:36:12] Todd: I completely agree. Being clear about why you're there is going to define whether or not you succeed at why you're there or not. I've seen a lot of people show up at cons, not just authors, but others, who came because they wanted to be in the atmosphere of the con and play. They got a booth, they'll sell what they can, but mostly, they'll run off to do cosplay and then come back. They'll have their friends sit at the booth, not interested in selling anything. They're there for a very different reason.
Me? I'm there for a very professional reason. I love cons and enjoy the atmosphere; it's one of my favorite places to be. But I'm not there to play. I'm there to work. I will only leave my booth for five minutes to go to the bathroom or grab a hot dog and run right back because I'm there to work. I paid the money to get in here, and I want to make sure I squeeze every ounce of what I came for from that. Honestly, authors sometimes come up to chat with me, and I will chat with them, but I'll give them a caveat. No offense, but if someone looks even vaguely interested in my booth, I will stop talking to you and go pay attention to them. That's what I'm here for, and everyone knows that about me at this point. I get real serious about social interaction when I'm at the booth. I'm as friendly as the day is long with customers, but when it comes to others wanting to hang out and have a beer, I say, "Nope, not during the con. Come see me afterwards. Let's talk when I'm done working."
[00:37:43] Matty: Yeah, that's great advice to set that expectation at the beginning of the interaction with that person.
[00:37:48] Todd: Yeah, I don't want to be rude, but that's what I'm here to do.
[00:37:52] Matty: I've found that's a benefit of being at a conference with other authors at the table because there have been times when I've rescued someone or someone has rescued me. Just tapping somebody on the shoulder who can't get away from a conversation and saying, "Oh, there's somebody over here who wants to look at your book or chat with you," and we help each other out that way.
The Four Categories of Readers
[00:38:12] Todd: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's on your roster of questions to get into my four categories of people at a con, but that's wrapped up in that.
[00:38:22] Matty: Yeah, please. I think this is a good entry to start talking about that.
[00:38:25] Todd: So, I break down the people at a con or a selling event into four categories. The first category is the one I wish all cons were comprised of. These are the people who came there for you. They know about you, want your latest thing, and make a beeline for your booth. You're their first priority. Alternatively, these are individuals who are really into what you do. They may not know specifics, but they see the dragon or the person with the sword and magic, and they're saying, "I'm buying that. I am buying that." Well, I don't care what it is; I'm buying it. They're your pre-sold customer, right? So, that's the first category.
Really, with those, I don't even pitch much. You stand back and don't get in your own way. Let them sell the book to themselves because they've already sold it in their mind. The only thing you can do is mess that up. So, I stand back. The second and third categories are what I call the bread and butter of the pitch.
The second one is people who would buy your book if they noticed you. These are the ones who say, "Oh, I saw your banner from a distance, and I had to go check this out. Maybe tell me a little bit about this. I don't know about this." They are perfect for the pitch. They're the best people to pitch to because they're going to get into what you're saying. Give them a chance.
Then there's the third category of people. They probably wouldn't buy your book. It's not really their genre, but they don't hate that genre. They just aren't really into it. Those are the ones where you're going to stretch a little bit. You're going to stretch your skills, pour on what you know about pitching your book and what you can do when you get into the excitement of your story.
Setting Boundaries and Conserving Your Energy
[00:40:07] Todd: And then there's the fourth category. It doesn't matter what you do. They don't want what you're going to sell. You're talking to a stone wall, and there have been times where they're just not going to buy a book for whatever reason. Either they don't like your genre or there are subcategories of that.
They want to tell you about their book. They're a writer who has never written a book before, but they're going to come up and take as much time as they can. As long as you'll listen to them talking about their book. Or you've got the guy who wants you to tell them every single pitch on the table, but they have no intention of buying because they have no money or aren't going to buy anything.
There are those guys that fit into that fourth category where they're not going to buy. The first subcategory of that, I will try and pitch them sometimes if I'm feeling saucy. It's okay; I know that guy's not going to buy anything, but I'm going to sharpen my skills as finely honed as I can and see if I can hook somebody like that. “Nope. I don't read fantasy.”
I'm like, "Well, do you want to start? Do you want to try?" I'll come up with some hook based on their demeanor, and sometimes they'll chuckle, and I'll be like, "Fine. Tell me." I actually had somebody buy a book that was like that. "Nope, I hate fantasy. I'm not going to read it." I'm like, "Well, do you want to start?" And he just laughed. He said, "You know what? Okay, fine. Tell me your pitch." At the end, he's like, "Okay, you convinced me. I don't usually read fantasy, but I'll give it a try."
That is, I think, pitching 2.0. You're not going to try that every single time, and in fact, a lot of times, it could be a waste of your time. One of the things I will talk about maybe later is how you've got to conserve your energy at a certain point. If you're wanting to sell a high number of books, you really have to pick and choose how much energy you're going to put into something.
But one of the things I did want to say, since we talk about people who come up and want to talk about their stuff to you, and to them, they're here to socialize and see all the cool stuff. They're sort of in the mindset that everybody's here to do that, and so they're thinking, "Well, you know, this guy's got nothing better to do than to spend 60 minutes talking to me about my book."
You want to be gentle with those people because they're the aspiring authors, right? They're the next generation. I always tell myself, "You've got a business to do here, but you also want to give a leg up to those that are coming behind you." So, I will tell myself, "Okay, five minutes. I will give myself five minutes with this person." And, in some cases, if someone has picked up a book across the table and they're looking at it like they want to buy, I'll say, "Give me just a second. Hang on. Hold on to that thought. Give me just a second." I'll go over, take care of that person because they're clearly a sale. Then come back and say, "Okay, tell me more. I'll give you two and a half more minutes. Tell me more about it." But as you said, I establish the boundaries. I'm like, "I'll give you two minutes to talk." Most people will be like, "Oh, wow. I'm sorry. I didn't realize. Yeah, you're working here." They didn't see it because they weren't thinking about it. But once they see it, they're aces.
Then you got the people that don't care. They're going to keep talking about what they want to talk about no matter what. Like I said, I'll give them their five minutes as well, but I don't mind being a total jerk if they're being a jerk to me. It's, "Look, I’ve got to go work now." Yeah, but there's this thing, and da da da. They want to keep talking. I'm like, "I'm going to go talk to this person over here now." Yeah, but there's, and then I'll stop talking to them. You know what? If you can't engage with me on a human level, then I got no more time for you. But, like I said, I feel that it's important to be kind.
They're there, and I would much rather inspire somebody to be the next great writer, you know, to get to the keyboard, to do their thing, than have them walk away feeling like, "Wow, he didn't care at all about what I'm doing."
But I mean, again, you got to balance that. It's just like those "say yes to everything" kind of thing. You get to a certain point where you can't say yes to everything, and you have to prioritize your time. But I do feel that it is a priority to give at least a few minutes, encourage them, and then set your boundaries and move along.
[00:43:55] Matty: Yep, that's great advice. I think that the whole thing that stands in the way of many authors doing in-person events is the idea of being too salesy. So, do you have tips you can offer that will improve your chances of actually making a sale but make it feel comfortable for people for whom that is not a natural state of being?
[00:44:17] Todd: Yeah, so there's a whole spectrum of this, and my first bit of advice, the most important bit of advice, would be to harken back to what I said at the beginning of the podcast: be a storyteller first. Find a way to get into your story and show them that. That's the baseline. There are lots of tips and tricks, kind of salesmany kind of tricks, that will heighten your ability to do that, both in terms of effect, dramatic effect, and in terms of speed and efficiency. Because if you're trying to sell 300 books over the course of a weekend, you kind of got to move it along. You can't spend 20 minutes with each person talking about a book. You've got to juice it up and move it along.
I think that if somebody doesn't ever want to do anything salesy, that's fine. That's totally their call. But you're probably only going to go so far, right? I mean, there are certain things that you, and that was a lesson that I learned in 2021. I met this guy at FanX, Lance Conrad is his name. And he fine-tuned his salesmany ability. Sometimes people were turned off by that, but man, he just jumped right back into the cycle and got the next person. It was amazing watching this guy, like watching a fisherman who knew exactly where all the fish were. He would just put his line in the water, haul out a trout, put his line in the water, haul out another one. I'm sitting here trying to pitch to people, and afterwards I walked up and I was like, "I sold 14 books today. How many did you sell?" He's like, "66." I'm like, "How did you do it? How did you do it? I'm falling on my sword here. I thought I was pretty hot to trot at this, and I'm nothing compared to what you just did. Tell me how you did it." And he was really cool, and he did.
The next day, I sold 77 copies. He came up, he's like, "How'd you do today?" I'm like, "77." He's like, "Way to go, man." I'm like, "How many did you do?" He's like, "84." I'm like, "Mother." But it was great to know. He kind of talked about how to pull them in and then how to do a pitch. I do it differently than he does at this point. I've developed my own system, but it was good to know. It was important to know that you do, at a certain point, you just, I mean, if you want to do this and never develop a thick skin, I don't know what to tell you, except that you're probably going to get your feelings hurt a lot.
One of my favorite stories about this, again, my assistant Becca, who was selling a book, there was this family, a mom and two kids, and I think the daughter was like 10, and the son was like 13. The son kind of gravitated over, and she was going into her pitch, and she got halfway into the pitch, and the little girl comes walking up and she's like, "That's enough out of you," and she grabbed the son and pulled him away. The mom said nothing. It was so, I mean, these are the kind of rejections that you're going to get. So we joke about that, "That's enough out of you."
[00:47:17] Matty: Can you share, if we're assuming the type of shopper who isn't there because they already know you and are planning on buying a book, it's that in-between person who's like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting," can you just give a sample pitch of how you would approach that person?
[00:47:32] Todd: Absolutely. Do you want me to give you a pitch from one of my actual stories?
[00:47:34] Matty: Yeah, that would be great.
[00:47:36] Todd: So, first thing I would do is be like, "Do you like fantasy? Are you a Lord of the Rings fan? Do you want to hear about a book?" Something like that. That's the hook. That's your hook phrase. And you've got to develop that hook phrase and figure out what works best for you, right? And that gets them to essentially look over at you, right, and have them say, "Yes," because you want that buy-in. You don't want to waste your time on somebody who has no interest in buying your book, right, that fourth category of people, right? You want someone that at least has a glimmer of, "Yeah, no, I will." So you want that buy-in to start, right?
"Do you want to hear about a book? Yeah, I want to hear about a book. Well, let me tell you about this one. This is my Threadweaver series, and it centers around these two main characters. And I've got a poster out in front of me that's got the two main characters on it, right? This one right here. And by the way, when I say Threadweavers, I want you to think magic user, think wizard. That's what they're called in this world. And like I said, it centers around these two main characters.
Eighteen-year-old Myrilla. Now, she's just a young woman in a small town and all she wants is a normal life. But that's not going to happen for her because she's the first Threadweaver to arise in a hundred years. A hundred years ago, there were lots of these Threadweavers, and they misused their magic, and they just about destroyed the world. Essentially, they created this magical nuclear war that did three things. One, it sucked all the magic from the lands. Two, it killed all the Threadweavers. And three, it destroyed 80 percent of the world. Everybody else, okay?
Now, the magic was taken and locked in this tower far to the north, and that's where it stayed all this time. So, fast forward a hundred years. The lands are dry, they're brittle, they are dying because of this lack of magic. And people hate Threadweavers. So, if the villagers in her town find out that's what Mirela is, they're going to kill her.
Cut to the second main character and the title character of the first volume. 1400-year-old demigod and legend known as Wildmane. This guy is an immortal hero who's been fighting for us and kicking butt for 14 centuries, but something happened to him 400 years ago and since that day, Wildmane wants to die.
Now here's what happened. During one of his many epic battles, the love of his life, this immortal woman who could turn into a dragon, got caught up in a spell during the fight that took her and put her into this gemstone, and there'll be a picture of the gemstone, right, and then the gemstone locked with a riddle that only Wildmane can solve. Now, if he solves it, the gemstone will open and she'll go free. But it's been four centuries, and he has not solved this riddle. He's languishing in a castle by the sea, and he wants to die. All very well and good for him. But Mirella needs to save the world.
Because the lands are dying, the only way to save the world is to go to that fountain far in the north, destroy it, and return magic to the lands the way it's supposed to be. But over the last century, that fountain has twisted, and now it is surrounded by these evil monsters one can't even imagine.
No mortal could possibly get through that, but Wildmane could. She needs to pull him from his self-imposed exile. She needs to save the world; he has to get her there. That's "Threadweavers."
[00:50:58] Matty: Fantastic. I wish people listening to the podcast would pop over to YouTube and watch it because what I appreciated is the physicality behind that description, which can play nicely in the environment of an in-person sales table or an event.
[00:51:20] Todd: Yeah, especially when you've got images to point to. I kept referencing the images I would point to. The drama of my finger coming down, you know, It's the gemstone, dun dun dun. I actually had one woman who I think was a dancer herself. She definitely looked like it. She said, "Wow, I love this dance we get while you're telling your story." So, yeah, I mean, again, these are opportunities, and everybody's got their talents. One of my talents is I enjoy talking to people. I'm extroverted enough that I really dig that. I was a dancer in college, so the big hand gestures and the flowing movements, I mean, I wasn't even really getting into it because there's only so much space in the frame here, but at the table, sometimes I will even take a step and point to my big eight by eight banners, you know, "This is the guy I'm talking about." That's an advantage. Wearing a Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt is an advantage. Mixing up the levels of your voice when you're telling your pitch is an advantage. Shortening your pitch, making it hit all the right things is an advantage. All of these things are advantages, opportunities you can grab to use, and you don't have to use them. You could tell your story in a monotone if you wanted to, and it might come off for a certain number of people, but for another group, it's not going to come off, and it's an advantage you're kind of leaving on the table.
[00:52:41] Matty: So great. Well, Todd, I could keep talking to you all day about this, but I don't want to press on your time, as we were talking about before. Thank you so much for sharing all these tips. It was great fun to talk to you and also to watch you give your pitch. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and your books online.
[00:52:59] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. So ToddFahnestock.com. That's my website. Everything about me is there, and all my books can be purchased there. So yeah, that's the quickest one-stop-shop for everything I've got.
[00:53:16] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
[00:53:18] Todd: Yeah. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. Appreciate it.
[00:53:21] Matty: Oh, it's been fun.
[00:00:06] Todd: Hi, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. This is great.
Meet Todd Fahnestock
[00:00:10] Matty: It is my pleasure to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little more background on you, Todd Fahnestock is an award-winning, number-one best-selling author of Fantasy for All Ages and the winner of the New York Public Library's Book for the Teenage Award. He's the founder of Eldross Legacy, a multi-author, shared-world epic fantasy series. He's a two-time winner of the Colorado Authors League Award for Writing Excellence and a four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Award for "Tower of the Four," "The Champion's Academy," "Hive and the Unkillable," "Laurel of the Dark," and "The Tower of the Four: The Dragon's War." His passions are making great stories and his quirky, fun-loving family.
I invited Todd on the podcast because I heard him talk at 20 Books Vegas about the secrets of maximizing in-person sales. This is something that was of great interest to me because, after a long period of weighing going to in-person sales and feeling like the time investment really wasn't paying me back in the ways I wanted to be paid back, I finally, at the end of last year, 2023, decided to rethink that, and I am focused much more on in-person sales now.
Todd's early in-person sales experiences
[00:01:14] Matty: I've already implemented a couple of the tips that you shared at 20 Books and will be sharing here. So, Todd, I always think it's fun to start out when someone has become an expert on a topic, as you have about in-person sales, just to make us all feel a little bit better. Talk to us a little more about your early experiences, maybe before you learned the lessons you're going to be sharing with us today.
[00:01:33] Todd: Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny that people are starting to call me an expert in this field at all. Like I'm still stumbling along and learning things and figuring things out. But there's definitely been some successes along the way. But I'll start with the opposite. Because one of the things I really enjoy talking about is my failures, my crushing failures over and over. So yeah, so it was, I believe it was 2017. And I'll back up a little bit. So I went full time in 2017. Not because all of a sudden I had the lucrative 6-figure contract or anything like that. But because my wife and I decided to swap places. She had been the stay-at-home parent for the first 7-8 years of the kid's life. And she's, you know, I would actually like to use my college degree, get out into the workforce, do some things, make my stamp there, and I'm like, you don't have to twist my arm, I'll go home, I'll stay home, I'll write. And so, we kind of switched places, and of course, I mean, that's probably a very skewed version. I had been wanting to get home and write for a long time. I didn't tell that part. I'd kind of been, like, hammering on her, I want to stay home and write. So we finally made that switch.
And at the time, I had just, in 2016, released "The Wishing World," two TOR books. And I was waiting for them to pick up the sequel because, you know, we hit the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Top 10 list right up there with names like Dan Brown and some pretty big names from a lot of promotion that I had done locally. And they didn't pick up the second book.
So what was going to kick off my going full time as a writer didn't happen. It's like the floor dropped out from underneath me, and you know that's a lesson. One should never count on getting another book contract unless it's a three-book contract or four-book contract or whatever multiple book contract to start, and I had relied on that, and it didn't come through. My goal was to make 20 grand the first year, 50 grand the second year, and then be off and running, having a replacement income for what I was doing. And that first year, I made fourteen hundred dollars. It was just so, so, I mean, I was lost. I remember in October running around to some of my nonprofit cronies, going, "Have you got a job for me? Because I may need a job in like about a month and a half."
But one of the things my fabulously supportive wife said to me is, "You know, I'm like, what do I do? What do I do? I'm writing novels, but I've got no connection between me and where I need to go as far as making money." And she said, "Just say yes to everything. Anything that comes along, regarding writing, if somebody wants you to teach a class on writing, you say yes. If somebody wants to come down and volunteer reading to kids at the library, you say yes." So I just kind of took that attitude.
When the Colorado Authors League reached out to all the members of the Colorado Authors League, of which I was one, I planned that and still am at this point, actually on the board of CAL at this point, but they reached out and said, "Hey, we've got a holiday market that we're going to. If you want to, you can pay $50, come down, you'll get two hours on Friday, two hours on Saturday, two hours on Sunday, and sell books." And I was like, "Well, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do that. I'm a writer. I don't want to be a salesman, right?" But I thought of what my wife said, you know, say yes to everything. So I'm like, "Okay, what else am I doing? I'm going to go down."
So I went down on Friday, and I tried so hard to sell books. I was looking at the other authors that were selling books, and the ones that were, like, getting out there were like, "Hey, come on over here. It's the Colorado Authors League. Find a Colorado author that you like, and you can get a book in any genre." And it just sounded so horrible to me. I didn't want to be some 1800s barker with a shoe slamming on the table saying, "Come on over, you know, get a box of popcorn if you buy a book." Whatever, right?
And I tried that. I felt awful. I sold zero books on Friday, went home completely dejected. Of course, I had two more slots, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. I said to Laura, "This sucks. This is not, you know," and she's like, "Well, at least you tried it, so I'll finish out the weekend." I went in on Saturday, and I'm like, "You know what? I got to readjust my attitude because I just, I'm hating being here. I need to not hate being here." Well, I love the holidays, right? And it's a holiday market, so there's Christmassy stuff everywhere. So I'm like, "You know what? I'm just going to get into the holiday mood a bit and just sort of relax."
I'm like, okay, I'm happy to be here, and I don't have to do anything. I don't have to slam my shoe on the table. I'm just going to sit here. I'll just wait it out until the end, and then I'll be done.
Todd's first success
Across the aisle, there was a Christmas store, a Christmas booth with wreaths and all kinds of other stuff. A mother was looking at a wreath, and a little girl, like seven years old, maybe six years old, was holding onto her mom's hand. She had turned around to look at my poster, my "The Wishing World" banner. I caught her eye, and she immediately went and looked away and wouldn't look at me. I just chuckled because, you know, at the time, my kids were close to that age, maybe a little bit older, and so I love kids. I thought, "Okay, well, this is something I can do. I can play with this kid who's looking over at the banner, then looking away from the banner."
Later on, she comes up, kind of scared to come any closer, looking at the banner. I asked her, "Do you like this kind of story?" She said, "Uh-huh, I do." I said, "Do you want me to tell you about it?" She said, "Yeah, yeah, you can tell me about it." So I started telling her the story. I'm a storyteller. I love talking about my stories. By the end of the day, I had half a dozen kids gathered around the booth, listening to story time. By the end of the weekend, I'd sold 33 books. All the Colorado authors were coming up to me, saying, "How did you do that? That was the most we've seen sold in a weekend here by one single author. How the heck did you do that?" I said, "I don't know. I wasn't doing any sales tactic or anything like that. I was just telling stories."
So that's what I went forward with—this genuine, heartfelt urge to tell my story. That was the first success. I did another one, and that one went okay. Some of them went better than others. Eventually, there were some leveling up, which we can get into as we go forward.
Say yes to everything
[00:08:09] Matty: Well, I have all sorts of questions that I want to delve into, but I do want to ask you one question that's not related to in-person sales. The "say yes to everything" advice obviously worked out really well for you, based on the stories you're going to be telling, but it also sounds like it could be a recipe for a nervous breakdown. On this other topic, just for a minute, can you talk a little bit about, did you have to moderate the "say yes to everything"? What made it more likely that it turned out well for you than it turned into a nervous breakdown?
[00:08:39] Todd: Absolutely. No, that is a very good point. The "say yes to everything" was certainly situational advice that my wife had given me because I had nothing to do. I was at home, I was writing, but I knew that to level up my career, I had to do more than just write books at home. Right? So I had to do something, and I didn't know what to do. So she's like, how about you say yes to everything? Any little opportunity that comes along until you find your feet. Of course, I mean, now I have to say no to all kinds of things, right? I can't say yes to everything because, like you said, there's not enough of me to go around, and I still do need to write books at home. So you’ve got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that. But I got to get out and sell at cons, so I got to chunk out a certain amount of time for that, plus conferences, writers’ conferences, chunk out time for that, plus family, plus all the different things, right? So, yeah, you can't continue saying yes to everything all the time.
But the problem that I had was that I had nothing to do and my career was kind of flat. Now the career is on a right trend, so it's like saying no to certain things and then making the judgment call of, okay, what's going to push the career forward, what's going to just waste time, those kinds of things. There's still an art form, I think, to what to say yes to and what to say no to, which is probably a completely entire other topic that I could go into for a very long time, but yeah, I didn't continue just saying yes to everything. Eventually, your dance card gets full, but that's what you want, right? I mean, that's the whole point of saying yes to everything in the beginning, is that you want to fill up your dance card, and then once it's full, then you're off and rolling.
[00:10:13] Matty: Yep. And you can pick the people you want to dance with.
[00:10:16] Todd: Exactly, exactly.
The importance of a professional set-up
[00:10:19] Matty: So one of the things you had sort of mentioned in passing is, well, one of the things you mentioned in your talk at Vegas is the importance of a professional setup. And it sounds like you started out with at least some of that because you had something at your booth that attracted the attention of a little girl. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of a professional setup?
[00:10:37] Todd: Yeah, so it seems to me that the biggest difficulty of selling face-to-face is breaking it down into four different categories of people, right? It's a matter of catching attention. So the setup is one way that you can catch the attention of people. Another one is talking to them, right? Another one is having a welcoming demeanor, right? Another one is what you're wearing, even, right? I oftentimes in my Conquering the Con, I talk about, you have an opportunity all over the place. Are you maximizing those opportunities? How do you set up the books on your table?
Tips for effective banners
[00:11:18] Todd: That's another opportunity. So the setup, I mean, to me, it has to start with the books, right? You've got books, and you're going to put books up, so that's one thing. But another thing is the banners. The biggest thing that attracts people to my booth from a distance is going to be my banners. That is the staple. I've seen all kinds of different banners, and I'm not going to call anybody out for the way that they want to decorate their booth, but my personal thought is the fewer words you have, the better you're going to attract people from a distance. It's important to have a couple of things on there, but man, you better choose your words carefully.
If you've got a banner that has prose going all the way down the front of it, I mean, who likes to look at that? We all love to read. Anybody listening to this podcast is probably an avid reader, right? We all love to read. But catching somebody's attention out in the wild, out in the world, is not the same thing, right? We are visual creatures from a distance. We're far more inclined. Now, I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm sure there are some people that are like, "Ooh, words," and they'll come closer, right? I'm talking about sort of this mainstream attitude of what's going to catch the most fish in your net.
There are lots of specifics that will catch very specific clusters of people. If that is your entire audience, then don't listen to me. Do what you know that cluster of people is going to be attracted to. But for my part, let me just speak about epic fantasy, right? So I do my epic fantasy banner, and I told my artist, and this is my big 8x8 banner that, and I've got three 8x8 banners at this point, but the one 8x8 banner that I take with me no matter where I go is my "Tower of the Four" banner, which I told my artists, I'm like, "Okay, I want this to scream epic fantasy."
Which means we need a dude with a sword, somebody with a sword's got to be on that banner. We need a dragon, right? And we need somebody working magic. If you're trying to capture the people who like that fantasy-esque feel of this exotic place full of beauty and danger, then a good-looking female protagonist on the banner, not a bad idea either. So that was everything that my banner had, right? Had to do with the sword, had a fierce female mage working magic, and it had a dragon, right?
So this image from a distance, you can see it from a hundred feet away. You can see the dragon. You can't really see the characters. Maybe you can see the guy drawing the sword, but you're definitely going to see this dragon that is crouching in over the whole thing. And I've had people come up to me and say, "Man, that thing caught my eye from way up the aisle, and I had to come over and see what this was about." Boom.
And I've seen other people do banners where, and this is to give advice to writers who are doing this. We want people to understand our work as a writer. I get that, right? But understand that we can't make somebody who's walking by a booth understand all of the nuance and all of the character development and the world-building and the originality of our work in five seconds. We can't do it. Nobody can do that, right? So, what we have to do is give them almost this, and this is going to sound horrible to some of the authors out there, this cheating illusion for a moment, right?
That it's just not what the book is about, but it sort of talks about the tropes, right? You just want to create a funnel, right? All I want is people that are vaguely interested in dudes with swords, girl working magic, and a big dragon, right? That's all I need to funnel the audience this way. Once I get them closer, then there are next steps. But for that first one, I don't want to make it complicated. Like I said, image over text. So, I've seen some banners where it's, "Oh, I want to make sure all of my books are shown," because part of us as writers is like, we want to feel worthy to be writers. Every writer I've ever met has imposter syndrome. Every single one. The successful ones and the non-successful ones alike, or the newbies and the successful ones alike. Everybody's got it. We wonder if we're really worthy to put stories out into the world that people are going to want to read, right? So, we want to prove to them our credibility.
I think this works really well in non-fiction books, but for fiction books, it's more important to get them pulled in based on what genre they like, based on the kinds of things that they're going to be interested in, right? When they get closer, then, like I said, you can start pouring on the layers. But for the image, don't put all your books up on a big 8x8 banner. It is, in my opinion, a waste of an 8x8 banner. You've got all this real estate, and you've put four images on. Guess what you just did? You just shrank your images a quarter of the size that they could be, and you put four of them up. So now, people aren't really looking at anything. They're looking at four books, you know? That's what they see from a distance is, "Oh, there are four books over there," as opposed to, "Whoa, dragon and magic," you know? I mean, that's what I want them to think when they're walking up to my booth.
[00:16:19] Matty: Yeah, I was inspired by your talk to get two banners of my own. I made them on Canva and then I ordered them through Canva, and there was only one retractable banner size. I decided I wanted to make them plain for all the reasons that you're describing and also so they wouldn't get outdated because if I put all my book covers on them, then the next time I put a book out, suddenly they're outdated. I didn't want them to get outdated because I doubt this is much in comparison to the 8x8 thing, but they were like 150 bucks apiece, so I wanted to make sure I was going to be getting my money's worth out of them. So one of them has, I have one for my nonfiction, one for my fiction, the one for my nonfiction just has my logo, my name, the writing craft, and the publishing voyage. That's everything that's on one.
[00:17:06] Matty: And then, the other one has my name and the two series titles. I have my name separating the middle, and I have the series title and the cover background of one at the top and the series title and the cover background of the other at the bottom. They turned out to be so big that, being 5'4, I'm not tall enough to hook them at the top of the little...
[00:17:29] Todd: Are they three feet by seven feet banners?
[00:17:31] Matty: I think they must be. But that was fun, and it does attract attention. Also, the other tip that I came up with was not putting anything too low that you want to make sure people see because if it's behind your table, then people are going to miss that, yeah. But it does make a nice backdrop.
[00:17:48] Todd: Absolutely. And here's another sort of hack that you can do. You can get a plastic bench at Costco or Walmart or wherever, and you can jack those banners up another foot and a half because those little legs on them, you can turn them so that they're at an angle and they'll still stay up. If you get a stiff breeze in there, they might fall over, but I mean, come on, you're in a con setting; probably there's not going to be any breezes going by. So yeah, you can do that also. I've done that before, where I have like a bench, and I jack up those 3x7 banners. So, that works too, to get a little extra visibility.
[00:18:22] Matty: Yeah. Another pro tip.
Finding the Opportunities
[00:18:24] Matty: So, there were other things about setup that I wanted to talk about, but I realized that we really haven't talked yet about finding the opportunity. Is finding the opportunity something you should be looking at first, or do you already have your setup, and then you look for opportunities?
Don't Knock the Small Events
[00:18:41] Todd: Yeah, so for me, it happened really organically. Like I said, I got invited to do this Christmas thing. And my advice to somebody who's just starting out in this is: Don't knock the small events.
I mean, the small events are where you can cut your teeth on your pitch and things like that, and there's not a lot of investment. At this point, I'm paying as much as $1,700 for a booth in certain areas. You don't want any piece of that unless you know you're going to make $2,000, $3,000 from that con. You'll never earn your money back.
But some of these local holiday fairs, like I started at, that I still go to—I still go to that same holiday fair; I've got my own booth now—but I mean, I still go to that holiday fair. It's one of the more expensive booths that I pay for, but it's totally worth it.
If you start small, you could go to a local farmer's market or something like that, get a booth for 50 bucks, and then you're not on the hook to sell 100 books. All you’ve got to do is sell 10, and you can go home saying, "Hey, I paid my booth cost back, and I got a little extra change on top of it, and I met some new superfans." My assistant actually just got a new book out, and she's starting to build her, in-person sales in Utah. She's setting up at this little atrium off of the symphony—people get out of the symphony, and they come out and they're buying books and things like that.
There are so many different places to sell books, and she's getting her pitch in shape, right? Because it only cost her so much money, and she's not on the hook to make a whole ton of money, so she gets to play around with the pitch. You talk, you know, you do a pitch to this one person, and they're like, "Ew," and they walk away like they smelled something bad, and you're like, "Okay, I need to adjust that pitch." So you get to try on the next person, and there's not a whole lot of pressure on you to really perform.
That's what I would recommend to start. So, any city's community calendar is going to have these types of local sales opportunities. And then, of course, there's the con circuit, the comic con circuit. For somebody who sells science fiction or fantasy, it's great for that. For somebody who sells mystery, it could work.
I mean, I've never sold mystery books, so I really couldn't tell you firsthand, but I know that the fans coming to a comic con are not completely plugged into that, though I'm sure there are plenty of them that would buy a mystery. So I'm not saying don't do it, but you make the call based on what you think is going to work best.
Know Your Numbers
[00:21:16] Matty: Setting aside the size of the event, any types of events, like I think you mentioned in Vegas that craft fairs turn out to be a surprisingly successful approach because it's not wall-to-wall books.
[00:21:30] Todd: Yeah! Yeah! So, I mean, you’ve got to kind of do the math on it. You go to, say, FanX, and FanX has 70,000 people showing up as attendees, but it also has, you know, probably 100 authors there, all in Artist Alley trying to sell their books, right? So let's say, you know, 10,000 of those 70,000 are people that are going to buy books, right?
And then, you know, so you divide that by, let's say there's 100 authors there. I'm not big on math, so if I screw this up, you got it, but I figure if I'm working with 10,000 and 100, I should be able to figure that out. So that's like 1,000 people per—is that right? I've already screwed it up. Anyways, you get my point.
There's a certain amount of people that you can expect will buy your book, you know, if they haven't already bought somebody else's. If you're at a small event, right, and there's a thousand people at this event, and you're the only author, and ten percent of that thousand people are going to buy books, they're all coming to your booth.
So you're going to make as much money there as you might at Comic Con, and it's going to be way cheaper for you to get into that booth, right? So that's something to think about. Just, I mean, I'm always looking at the numbers, despite the fact that I'm mathematically challenged. I use spreadsheets to help me out with that, right?
Because you have to know the numbers. You have to know them. If you're going to a con and you sold 300 books, and you're like, "Wow! I am making so much money!" But the costs to drive there, to put you up at a hotel, to eat food there, to get the booth, and that sort of thing, not to mention the cost of the books, you could be underwater.
You could have made $3,000 at that con, and you're $1,000 in the hole, you know, as opposed to this little con where you made $500 and you only spent $150, you made $350. Your net is higher at that small event where you only sold 30 books than this other event where you sold 300. I mean, you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise, your business is going to go down by the head.
[00:23:16] Matty: Yeah, I'm definitely not at a point where I'm planning on going anywhere that requires me to stay overnight unless I'm there anyway, you know, for other reasons, and there's an opportunity to sell books, but.
Tips for Displaying Your Books
[00:23:30] Matty: You had also talked about the setup of the actual books on the table. Can you talk about that a little?
[00:23:35] Todd: Yes. Okay, so everybody's got their way of looking at this, and some people really, like some readers, some customers, really like the idea of walking into a library, right? That's kind of what draws them, right? And so that's definitely an effective way of doing it. I've seen, you know, Barnes and Noble setups or tatter cover setups, where essentially they create a little library. You walk in, and you've got all the books lined up, or rather I should say a bookstore. You know, you've got the sort of typical racks and that sort of thing with the books facing out and that sort of thing, and some people really like that.
In an individual table, the way I like to go is clean and sparse, 25 books. I don't want a stack of books, every single one of my books, with a book on top of it. It's just so busy, right? I want one book on display, laid out in the series set. I've got several different series, and that is part of my selling structure as well. I separate the series, use little table banners behind them, and make it as clean as possible because with 25 books, it's hard to make it clean anyway, right? One book in the middle of the table looks lonely. Three books on a four-foot table looks clean. For two eight-foot tables, with 25 books, it's still getting kind of crowded, but it's definitely more crowded if you're just piling books on top of books, right?
Some setups I've seen, I just shake my head. Somebody has one book, and they've got 500 copies of their book on this table, with maybe two of them faced out. It looks like you can't sell books unless there's a line up to your table, and people are just buying that book and moving along. It looks like you can't sell books, and you don't want that impression. You want something clean and simple where people can come up and look and say, "Ooh, I like this cover" or "I like that cover." I can't tell you how many times, even at my table where I'm trying to make it as clean and simple as possible, people say, "I really want something with dragons," and they're looking at one of my series that doesn't have a dragon on the cover. Literally, 12 inches away is a cover that has a dragon on it. I'm like, "What about this one?" They're like, "Oh, ooh," like they just discovered it. They didn't see it because there's so much stimuli at a con like that, where there are images everywhere, and they tunnel vision on something. They're really doing everything they can not to look at everything else at that moment.
Even if you have it laid out simple, the odds are against you of somebody looking at exactly what you want them to look at. So, helping them also sometimes is good.
[00:26:13] Matty: I'm taking it you have one copy of each of your books out, and then somebody looks at, finds the one with the dragon, then do you have a little stash behind the table where you take out a different book, a separate copy of that book so you're not handing them the one on the stand and say, "You know, take a look, read the back cover or page through."
[00:26:34] Todd: Oh, of course. I mean, I go to something like FanX, or Planet Comic Con, or Fan Expo Denver, these are some of my heavy hitters that I go to, and I can barely belly up to the table for all the boxes of books that I have underneath the table. It's an issue. Some of them I have to sell a bunch one day and then bring in more the next day because I just don't have enough space underneath the table to fit all the boxes of books that I want. And yes, I always take out a fresh copy. I shouldn't say always. That is my method, but sometimes you get a reader who comes up, they pick up a copy, and they're literally clutching it to their chest. I'm like, "Well, I'm not going to take it away from them. That's the one they bonded with. They can buy it. I'll just put another one on the rack. It's fine."
A Low-Impact Approach When Sales Are Not Your Main Goal
[00:27:24] Matty: So, I had a little bit of a tangent, but I'm going to a conference this summer where I'm a speaker, and there's this opportunity to have a book sales table that's part of the conference setup. And I really don't want to go with any book. The idea I had was I'm not going to be able to bring my fancy banners or anything like that. It's basically what can I put in a knapsack or something like that. So I have ten novels now, and I don't even think I'm going to bring stands, but have the 10 books out, have one copy of each book, and then I was going to have cards with QR codes that would take the reader to either where they could buy the print book either from me or from a major online retailer, same for the ebook, which I realized isn't optimal from a sales point of view, but it's the best I can come up with in terms of meeting this requirement that I don't want to have any extra luggage or boxes or anything like that when I go to the conference. Can you talk about if that's worth it?
[00:28:30] Todd: Yeah, I've done that before. I've actually done that before because sometimes you sell out, right? And then people still want more books, and then you've got to figure out a way to sell them those books. So there's different ways to do it. One, the QR code that takes them to your Amazon page, or your website page, or your Nook page, whatever it is that you want to send people to. That works really well. I've got a lot of cards of those myself. Something else I do is if they want hard copies, for example, when I've sold out and have no more hard copies or in this case where you've only brought one of each and can't sell them hard copies but they want a hard copy, I will take their information. Usually, I work in tandem at the big ones. I'll ask my assistant to take down their information, say we want an email address, a phone number, we want your address so that because I had once where I took somebody's address, and that's all I took, and there was something wrong with the address, and I never could get them the book. You know, I kept waiting for them to email me and say, "You're never sending my book, you jerk!" and I'm like, "Oh, I'm glad you reached out to me. There was something wrong with the address, and it never went out." So, I collect all the information just in case something goes wrong. And then I mail them all out when I get home, you know, and some people prefer that. I did that at 20 books to 50k just because people were like, "Ah, my suitcase is full, I don't want to carry anything." I'm like, "Oh, I got you, you know, let's ship it to you." So yes, that can work.
I will say that it has a disadvantage. If you're comparing that to actually having the book there, it's a pretty big disadvantage because people get attached to material things when they get them in their hands. So, you can definitely sell them that way, but I wouldn't do that for an entire event if it was going to be like, "Oh, I want to make a lot of money at this event," but what you're talking about where it's like, "Oh, I'm going to this thing, and there's an extra thing." It's perfect. It's perfect.
Using QR Codes
[00:30:06] Matty: I've started experimenting with QR codes, and what I found is that I think so far I only had two QR codes. One was where people can go to sign up for my email newsletter and then some other one. I forget even what the other one was. But having enough text on whatever the material is that has the QR code on it to explain what it is without it being like a novel they have to read was kind of confusing. And then I've also seen people do the QR code where they almost have a binder. And it's like pages, maybe one page per book. And so if someone says, "Oh, I'd like this one," then they get out the binder and they flip to the page that has that stuff on it. Do you have any advice about the best way to execute on the QR code approach?
[00:30:54] Todd: The QR code is hit and miss for me. I mean, that's why, like I said, I usually write down their information. I charge them right there. I take their money right there, and then I'm on the hook to deliver the products to them. Giving them just a QR code and saying hit that QR code. I've even done that where I'm like hit that QR code right here at the table. They're like, "Oh, okay, great. I'll do this later." What are you going to tell them at that point? "Okay, no, do it right here. Do it right now." I mean, that doesn't work, right? So, you're taking the control out of your hands, and if you put time and energy into trying to sell them on the story, and then essentially you cut them loose with the QR code. Roll the dice, you know, I mean, they may buy it, they may not.
My experience with people who are like, "Oh yeah, I'll buy this later," 1 in 50 maybe that follow through on that. It's not high because I'm watching, I'm like, I give them the QR code that takes them straight to my website or whatever, and then I look for that sale or even look on my Amazon reports for that sale, and nobody bought a book that day or the next day or whatever, right? So, I'm not a big fan of that. It's certainly better than nothing, but if you're trying to make money and build superfans with it, it's a backup at best, I think.
When Sales Aren't Your Primary Goal
[00:32:07] Matty: Well, I'm realizing that I almost said yes to the option of having books in this author event because more as a resume builder, because otherwise, the people who are there hearing me speak aren't going to have any concrete evidence that I actually have the experience to know what I'm talking about. So if all I get out of this is people wandering by looking at my books and chatting with me, I will have met my primary goal of that event, which is to show them that I have books. My primary goal of that event, of course, it would be nice to sell books, but it's not really what I'm looking for, as opposed to a book sales event where that is really what I'm going for.
[00:32:48] Todd: Yeah, well, I think that brings up a very interesting point that for people who are going to do in-person sales, I recommend you have an idea of what you want out of that event, right? And to, so actually, curiously, my priorities are not making money at a con. Believe it or not, even though I'm being pretty successful at doing that at this point, my goal is to meet and talk to superfans, market my books, and my tertiary concern is trying to walk away with a profit, right?
Understanding your goal gives you resilience.
[00:33:18] Todd: Now, all those are humming at a pretty high level at this point for me, but it wasn't always that way. When I started, I wasn't looking to make any money. Breaking even was like, "Hey, I made back my booth cost and my gas cost to drive down to Albuquerque or whatever it was. I was feeling good about that. More importantly was I want to get my books out into the world." Going to a con, I think it's pretty important, especially for your frame of mind and your perspective while you're at the con.
Here's something my friend Katie Cross said about cons, and she's right. It's like a constant reassessment of yourself, every single moment, every single new person that comes up and either accepts or rejects you. Man, you’ve got to have resilience to pick yourself back up and go, "Okay, I'm going to put on a smile and sell to this next person after that guy just kicked me in the teeth." You really have to have that. So, knowing what your priority is helps with that.
If I don't make a sale and I'm like, "You know what? I'm here to meet superfans. If I meet two superfans at this event, it's a success." Then you relax a little bit. Your shoulders unclench, and you're like, "Okay, I'm looking for that superfan who wants what I do. That's the most important from this event." It keeps you clear, keeps you able to be resilient.
[00:34:31] Matty: Yeah. And I think that if you have a series, especially a long series or a long set of series as you do, then that makes reaching superfans all the more important because maybe you don't make your money back with the books you sell at that event. But if there are 24 more books in the series that they can go to, then you're improving your chances that over the long haul, that turns out to meet the money-making goal as well.
[00:34:55] Todd: Well, it's my take that fans and superfans, readers, it's the only thing that's important. At the end of the day, it's the only thing that's important. They hold the keys to your dreams. If you can impress, please, and put out a product that your readers love, you win. How can you not win? They're going to tell all their friends about it, and you're going to build your audience that way. I mean, that's the only thing that's important. There are lots of other things that are important, but if you had to choose one thing, it's pleasing the reader and making sure that they're going to want to come back for more.
[00:35:31] Matty: Yeah, I had sort of talked myself into getting back into the in-person events on the theory that as long as I was going to be with another author that I knew and liked and was going to enjoy spending the day with, it was going to be worth it because, in the worst possible case, the two of us or the three of us or the four of us or whatever would sit around and chat for the duration of the conference, and that would still be a good time. I think that was valuable to get me back into the mindset of doing it. But there's a trap that if that stays forefront in my mind, then I spend my energy on with my fellow authors, not on networking with the readers that come to the table. So I have to be careful about to what extent I lean on that.
[00:36:12] Todd: I completely agree. Being clear about why you're there is going to define whether or not you succeed at why you're there or not. I've seen a lot of people show up at cons, not just authors, but others, who came because they wanted to be in the atmosphere of the con and play. They got a booth, they'll sell what they can, but mostly, they'll run off to do cosplay and then come back. They'll have their friends sit at the booth, not interested in selling anything. They're there for a very different reason.
Me? I'm there for a very professional reason. I love cons and enjoy the atmosphere; it's one of my favorite places to be. But I'm not there to play. I'm there to work. I will only leave my booth for five minutes to go to the bathroom or grab a hot dog and run right back because I'm there to work. I paid the money to get in here, and I want to make sure I squeeze every ounce of what I came for from that. Honestly, authors sometimes come up to chat with me, and I will chat with them, but I'll give them a caveat. No offense, but if someone looks even vaguely interested in my booth, I will stop talking to you and go pay attention to them. That's what I'm here for, and everyone knows that about me at this point. I get real serious about social interaction when I'm at the booth. I'm as friendly as the day is long with customers, but when it comes to others wanting to hang out and have a beer, I say, "Nope, not during the con. Come see me afterwards. Let's talk when I'm done working."
[00:37:43] Matty: Yeah, that's great advice to set that expectation at the beginning of the interaction with that person.
[00:37:48] Todd: Yeah, I don't want to be rude, but that's what I'm here to do.
[00:37:52] Matty: I've found that's a benefit of being at a conference with other authors at the table because there have been times when I've rescued someone or someone has rescued me. Just tapping somebody on the shoulder who can't get away from a conversation and saying, "Oh, there's somebody over here who wants to look at your book or chat with you," and we help each other out that way.
The Four Categories of Readers
[00:38:12] Todd: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's on your roster of questions to get into my four categories of people at a con, but that's wrapped up in that.
[00:38:22] Matty: Yeah, please. I think this is a good entry to start talking about that.
[00:38:25] Todd: So, I break down the people at a con or a selling event into four categories. The first category is the one I wish all cons were comprised of. These are the people who came there for you. They know about you, want your latest thing, and make a beeline for your booth. You're their first priority. Alternatively, these are individuals who are really into what you do. They may not know specifics, but they see the dragon or the person with the sword and magic, and they're saying, "I'm buying that. I am buying that." Well, I don't care what it is; I'm buying it. They're your pre-sold customer, right? So, that's the first category.
Really, with those, I don't even pitch much. You stand back and don't get in your own way. Let them sell the book to themselves because they've already sold it in their mind. The only thing you can do is mess that up. So, I stand back. The second and third categories are what I call the bread and butter of the pitch.
The second one is people who would buy your book if they noticed you. These are the ones who say, "Oh, I saw your banner from a distance, and I had to go check this out. Maybe tell me a little bit about this. I don't know about this." They are perfect for the pitch. They're the best people to pitch to because they're going to get into what you're saying. Give them a chance.
Then there's the third category of people. They probably wouldn't buy your book. It's not really their genre, but they don't hate that genre. They just aren't really into it. Those are the ones where you're going to stretch a little bit. You're going to stretch your skills, pour on what you know about pitching your book and what you can do when you get into the excitement of your story.
Setting Boundaries and Conserving Your Energy
[00:40:07] Todd: And then there's the fourth category. It doesn't matter what you do. They don't want what you're going to sell. You're talking to a stone wall, and there have been times where they're just not going to buy a book for whatever reason. Either they don't like your genre or there are subcategories of that.
They want to tell you about their book. They're a writer who has never written a book before, but they're going to come up and take as much time as they can. As long as you'll listen to them talking about their book. Or you've got the guy who wants you to tell them every single pitch on the table, but they have no intention of buying because they have no money or aren't going to buy anything.
There are those guys that fit into that fourth category where they're not going to buy. The first subcategory of that, I will try and pitch them sometimes if I'm feeling saucy. It's okay; I know that guy's not going to buy anything, but I'm going to sharpen my skills as finely honed as I can and see if I can hook somebody like that. “Nope. I don't read fantasy.”
I'm like, "Well, do you want to start? Do you want to try?" I'll come up with some hook based on their demeanor, and sometimes they'll chuckle, and I'll be like, "Fine. Tell me." I actually had somebody buy a book that was like that. "Nope, I hate fantasy. I'm not going to read it." I'm like, "Well, do you want to start?" And he just laughed. He said, "You know what? Okay, fine. Tell me your pitch." At the end, he's like, "Okay, you convinced me. I don't usually read fantasy, but I'll give it a try."
That is, I think, pitching 2.0. You're not going to try that every single time, and in fact, a lot of times, it could be a waste of your time. One of the things I will talk about maybe later is how you've got to conserve your energy at a certain point. If you're wanting to sell a high number of books, you really have to pick and choose how much energy you're going to put into something.
But one of the things I did want to say, since we talk about people who come up and want to talk about their stuff to you, and to them, they're here to socialize and see all the cool stuff. They're sort of in the mindset that everybody's here to do that, and so they're thinking, "Well, you know, this guy's got nothing better to do than to spend 60 minutes talking to me about my book."
You want to be gentle with those people because they're the aspiring authors, right? They're the next generation. I always tell myself, "You've got a business to do here, but you also want to give a leg up to those that are coming behind you." So, I will tell myself, "Okay, five minutes. I will give myself five minutes with this person." And, in some cases, if someone has picked up a book across the table and they're looking at it like they want to buy, I'll say, "Give me just a second. Hang on. Hold on to that thought. Give me just a second." I'll go over, take care of that person because they're clearly a sale. Then come back and say, "Okay, tell me more. I'll give you two and a half more minutes. Tell me more about it." But as you said, I establish the boundaries. I'm like, "I'll give you two minutes to talk." Most people will be like, "Oh, wow. I'm sorry. I didn't realize. Yeah, you're working here." They didn't see it because they weren't thinking about it. But once they see it, they're aces.
Then you got the people that don't care. They're going to keep talking about what they want to talk about no matter what. Like I said, I'll give them their five minutes as well, but I don't mind being a total jerk if they're being a jerk to me. It's, "Look, I’ve got to go work now." Yeah, but there's this thing, and da da da. They want to keep talking. I'm like, "I'm going to go talk to this person over here now." Yeah, but there's, and then I'll stop talking to them. You know what? If you can't engage with me on a human level, then I got no more time for you. But, like I said, I feel that it's important to be kind.
They're there, and I would much rather inspire somebody to be the next great writer, you know, to get to the keyboard, to do their thing, than have them walk away feeling like, "Wow, he didn't care at all about what I'm doing."
But I mean, again, you got to balance that. It's just like those "say yes to everything" kind of thing. You get to a certain point where you can't say yes to everything, and you have to prioritize your time. But I do feel that it is a priority to give at least a few minutes, encourage them, and then set your boundaries and move along.
[00:43:55] Matty: Yep, that's great advice. I think that the whole thing that stands in the way of many authors doing in-person events is the idea of being too salesy. So, do you have tips you can offer that will improve your chances of actually making a sale but make it feel comfortable for people for whom that is not a natural state of being?
[00:44:17] Todd: Yeah, so there's a whole spectrum of this, and my first bit of advice, the most important bit of advice, would be to harken back to what I said at the beginning of the podcast: be a storyteller first. Find a way to get into your story and show them that. That's the baseline. There are lots of tips and tricks, kind of salesmany kind of tricks, that will heighten your ability to do that, both in terms of effect, dramatic effect, and in terms of speed and efficiency. Because if you're trying to sell 300 books over the course of a weekend, you kind of got to move it along. You can't spend 20 minutes with each person talking about a book. You've got to juice it up and move it along.
I think that if somebody doesn't ever want to do anything salesy, that's fine. That's totally their call. But you're probably only going to go so far, right? I mean, there are certain things that you, and that was a lesson that I learned in 2021. I met this guy at FanX, Lance Conrad is his name. And he fine-tuned his salesmany ability. Sometimes people were turned off by that, but man, he just jumped right back into the cycle and got the next person. It was amazing watching this guy, like watching a fisherman who knew exactly where all the fish were. He would just put his line in the water, haul out a trout, put his line in the water, haul out another one. I'm sitting here trying to pitch to people, and afterwards I walked up and I was like, "I sold 14 books today. How many did you sell?" He's like, "66." I'm like, "How did you do it? How did you do it? I'm falling on my sword here. I thought I was pretty hot to trot at this, and I'm nothing compared to what you just did. Tell me how you did it." And he was really cool, and he did.
The next day, I sold 77 copies. He came up, he's like, "How'd you do today?" I'm like, "77." He's like, "Way to go, man." I'm like, "How many did you do?" He's like, "84." I'm like, "Mother." But it was great to know. He kind of talked about how to pull them in and then how to do a pitch. I do it differently than he does at this point. I've developed my own system, but it was good to know. It was important to know that you do, at a certain point, you just, I mean, if you want to do this and never develop a thick skin, I don't know what to tell you, except that you're probably going to get your feelings hurt a lot.
One of my favorite stories about this, again, my assistant Becca, who was selling a book, there was this family, a mom and two kids, and I think the daughter was like 10, and the son was like 13. The son kind of gravitated over, and she was going into her pitch, and she got halfway into the pitch, and the little girl comes walking up and she's like, "That's enough out of you," and she grabbed the son and pulled him away. The mom said nothing. It was so, I mean, these are the kind of rejections that you're going to get. So we joke about that, "That's enough out of you."
[00:47:17] Matty: Can you share, if we're assuming the type of shopper who isn't there because they already know you and are planning on buying a book, it's that in-between person who's like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting," can you just give a sample pitch of how you would approach that person?
[00:47:32] Todd: Absolutely. Do you want me to give you a pitch from one of my actual stories?
[00:47:34] Matty: Yeah, that would be great.
[00:47:36] Todd: So, first thing I would do is be like, "Do you like fantasy? Are you a Lord of the Rings fan? Do you want to hear about a book?" Something like that. That's the hook. That's your hook phrase. And you've got to develop that hook phrase and figure out what works best for you, right? And that gets them to essentially look over at you, right, and have them say, "Yes," because you want that buy-in. You don't want to waste your time on somebody who has no interest in buying your book, right, that fourth category of people, right? You want someone that at least has a glimmer of, "Yeah, no, I will." So you want that buy-in to start, right?
"Do you want to hear about a book? Yeah, I want to hear about a book. Well, let me tell you about this one. This is my Threadweaver series, and it centers around these two main characters. And I've got a poster out in front of me that's got the two main characters on it, right? This one right here. And by the way, when I say Threadweavers, I want you to think magic user, think wizard. That's what they're called in this world. And like I said, it centers around these two main characters.
Eighteen-year-old Myrilla. Now, she's just a young woman in a small town and all she wants is a normal life. But that's not going to happen for her because she's the first Threadweaver to arise in a hundred years. A hundred years ago, there were lots of these Threadweavers, and they misused their magic, and they just about destroyed the world. Essentially, they created this magical nuclear war that did three things. One, it sucked all the magic from the lands. Two, it killed all the Threadweavers. And three, it destroyed 80 percent of the world. Everybody else, okay?
Now, the magic was taken and locked in this tower far to the north, and that's where it stayed all this time. So, fast forward a hundred years. The lands are dry, they're brittle, they are dying because of this lack of magic. And people hate Threadweavers. So, if the villagers in her town find out that's what Mirela is, they're going to kill her.
Cut to the second main character and the title character of the first volume. 1400-year-old demigod and legend known as Wildmane. This guy is an immortal hero who's been fighting for us and kicking butt for 14 centuries, but something happened to him 400 years ago and since that day, Wildmane wants to die.
Now here's what happened. During one of his many epic battles, the love of his life, this immortal woman who could turn into a dragon, got caught up in a spell during the fight that took her and put her into this gemstone, and there'll be a picture of the gemstone, right, and then the gemstone locked with a riddle that only Wildmane can solve. Now, if he solves it, the gemstone will open and she'll go free. But it's been four centuries, and he has not solved this riddle. He's languishing in a castle by the sea, and he wants to die. All very well and good for him. But Mirella needs to save the world.
Because the lands are dying, the only way to save the world is to go to that fountain far in the north, destroy it, and return magic to the lands the way it's supposed to be. But over the last century, that fountain has twisted, and now it is surrounded by these evil monsters one can't even imagine.
No mortal could possibly get through that, but Wildmane could. She needs to pull him from his self-imposed exile. She needs to save the world; he has to get her there. That's "Threadweavers."
[00:50:58] Matty: Fantastic. I wish people listening to the podcast would pop over to YouTube and watch it because what I appreciated is the physicality behind that description, which can play nicely in the environment of an in-person sales table or an event.
[00:51:20] Todd: Yeah, especially when you've got images to point to. I kept referencing the images I would point to. The drama of my finger coming down, you know, It's the gemstone, dun dun dun. I actually had one woman who I think was a dancer herself. She definitely looked like it. She said, "Wow, I love this dance we get while you're telling your story." So, yeah, I mean, again, these are opportunities, and everybody's got their talents. One of my talents is I enjoy talking to people. I'm extroverted enough that I really dig that. I was a dancer in college, so the big hand gestures and the flowing movements, I mean, I wasn't even really getting into it because there's only so much space in the frame here, but at the table, sometimes I will even take a step and point to my big eight by eight banners, you know, "This is the guy I'm talking about." That's an advantage. Wearing a Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt is an advantage. Mixing up the levels of your voice when you're telling your pitch is an advantage. Shortening your pitch, making it hit all the right things is an advantage. All of these things are advantages, opportunities you can grab to use, and you don't have to use them. You could tell your story in a monotone if you wanted to, and it might come off for a certain number of people, but for another group, it's not going to come off, and it's an advantage you're kind of leaving on the table.
[00:52:41] Matty: So great. Well, Todd, I could keep talking to you all day about this, but I don't want to press on your time, as we were talking about before. Thank you so much for sharing all these tips. It was great fun to talk to you and also to watch you give your pitch. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and your books online.
[00:52:59] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. So ToddFahnestock.com. That's my website. Everything about me is there, and all my books can be purchased there. So yeah, that's the quickest one-stop-shop for everything I've got.
[00:53:16] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
[00:53:18] Todd: Yeah. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. Appreciate it.
[00:53:21] Matty: Oh, it's been fun.
