Seasonal Hope and Cheer (Cecilia Peartree)

 

In this post I bring you a little taste of hope, and an example of the joys of working as a team. In case you are wondering where I’ve gone and who has hi-jacked my blog, I must confess to having watched a few seasonal movies, mostly terrible ones, in my efforts to stay awake long enough to complete the blanket I’ve been knitting since last February. So some of the spirit of Christmas might have infected me despite my long years of resisting it.

I’m writing this 5^th December post on the 4^th, which goes against my earlier resolution not to leave it to the last minute in future after being out of action at the exact time when I had intended to write the April one. This month I planned it like this, because I wanted to report back on the Christmas Fair that took place at our local community centre over last weekend. Of course, I had half-expected things to go wildly wrong at that event, and to have a tale of disaster and mayhem to tell here.

However, not only did things not go wrong but I actually enjoyed the event, and I believe the three fellow authors I had persuaded to share a stall with me did so too. None of us sold out of our books, which would have been the icing on the cake, but amongst us we sold a few books, talked to lots of friendly people, enjoyed the jolly atmosphere with the many and varied craft stalls, the members of the youth club working hard at selling coffee and raffle tickets, and the fact that the route to go and pet the alpacas went right past our stall.

My only regret is that I didn’t have the chance to pet the alpacas myself.

Some things that worked particularly well for us at the fair were: engaging people in casual conversation that sometimes led gradually round to books, and sometimes didn’t; handing leaflets to anyone who showed even the remotest interest in reading – I was very pleased with my leaflets as I had managed to cram information about most of my output into the inside pages, and an image with all 27 of the novels in my main series on the front; selling books that might be thought to be of local interest; and best of all, handing out chocolates to delay people who unwittingly paused in front of the stall. Oddly, trying to convince people to buy books set vaguely in the City of Edinburgh didn’t really work, though we had quite a few among our offerings, but I actually sold out of a novel that’s set in Cramond, one of many former villages that now form part of the city, which is only a couple of miles from the event venue.

Something that didn’t work at all was my card-reader, which refused to connect to my phone, but that turned out not to matter as everyone seemed to have brought cash with them.

There’s no doubt that having 4 of us there (group name 'Capital Writers') was the key to at least some of the enjoyment – not only was there plenty of moral support, but one of our number turned out to be a born saleswoman, and also we didn’t all have to stay there all the time but could go and have coffee and cake, or pop out for a quck lunch, and browse round the other stalls.