The Beautiful Disaster of Book Events

I love book events.

I need to establish that immediately because everything I’m about to say is going to make it sound like I would rather chew glass than attend another signing, and that isn’t true. I genuinely love being a signing author. There is something surreal about sitting behind a table covered in books that once existed only inside your head and watching actual human beings walk toward you because they read them. I love hugging readers. I love talking about characters as if they’re mutual friends with questionable decision-making skills. I love seeing author friends I normally only communicate with through screens and chaotic group chats. I especially love the repeat readers who have become some of my favorite people to see at events. (Hi, Mom Pat. Hi, Kara. Hi, Alfalfa, my favorite signing pup and arguably the most important attendee at any event we both happen to be at.)

I love all of that.

Book events are also fucking exhausting.

There is a version of author signings that exists primarily on social media. You see the finished table, the giant banner, the books lined up beautifully, the coordinated decorations, the author looking suspiciously well-rested, and a smiling reader holding her signed paperback. Everything is pretty. Everything is branded. Everyone appears to be having a wonderful time.

What you don't see is the author twelve hours earlier on the floor of a hotel room surrounded by boxes, tape, tangled chargers, books, clothes, signage, snacks she will forget to eat, and one fuck-ass retractable banner that has decided today is the day it will finally kill her.

If you have never fought with an author banner, congratulations on your peaceful life. Those things were designed by Satan.

They eat fingers. They lean when they are supposed to stand. They refuse to retract when you want them to retract and violently retract when your hand is somewhere it should not be. You can use the same banner perfectly at six events and then arrive at number seven to discover it has developed free will. Meanwhile, you’re supposed to be making your table look effortless while threatening an inanimate object under your breath.

That is usually somewhere around the point my husband begins questioning every decision that led him here. Luckily, I am not above bribery.

Sometimes you bring an assistant. Sometimes you pay the assistant. Sometimes you pay for another hotel room. Sometimes your husband comes with you and discovers that “supporting my author career” apparently includes hauling several hundred pounds of fictional depravity through a convention center while I promise increasingly creative marital compensation when we get home.

Listen. Marriage is about compromise. He carries the boxes. I have written plenty of instructional material. Everybody wins.

Except nobody has won yet because we still have to set up the table, and that is where my brain enters the chat. I wish I could tell you I am Type A. God, I would love to be Type A.

Sometimes I absolutely am. I have lists. I have spreadsheets. I have planners. I have packing lists for the packing lists. I know how many copies of each title I brought, how many preorders I have, what goes where on the table, which decorations need to be packed together, and exactly what I want the finished setup to look like. Planning an event scratches a very specific part of my brain because I get to take all of the ridiculous ideas floating around inside it and make them tangible.

Unfortunately, there is another version of me who is very much Type B. She is chaos.

She forgets things. She gets distracted halfway through packing because she found something that gave her an idea for a future event. She leaves something important sitting directly beside the suitcase because technically it was not in the suitcase. She decides at the last possible moment that the entire display would look better if we changed one tiny thing that requires reorganizing half the table.

Type A Lila and Type B Lila should not be allowed to work together. Yet every signing requires them to co-manage a temporary bookstore.

Add ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and a truly unreasonable level of perfectionism to that arrangement and you begin to understand why an event that looks fun from the outside can feel like my nervous system has been plugged directly into an electrical outlet.

There are parts of event anxiety that almost nobody sees. People see me at the table once everything is finished. They don't see me crying while I pack because I am convinced I forgot something important. They don't see the panic when the schedule changes or something I ordered doesn't arrive or the hotel situation isn't what I expected. They don't see me checking and rechecking the same thing because my brain has decided disaster is imminent unless I personally verify it for the seventeenth time.

They definitely don't hear the whispered argument with my husband during setup because a book is approximately a quarter of an inch away from where I envisioned it.

He will look at me like I have completely lost my mind because, objectively, the book is on the table. It is upright. The cover is facing forward. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

But it is wrong. It is a quarter inch wrong. This is apparently an emergency.

In that moment, I know I'm being ridiculous. That's one of the frustrating parts. There is usually a tiny rational person somewhere in my brain calmly explaining that no reader is going to approach my table, inspect the placement of paperback number four, and leave because my husband put it slightly too far to the right.

Unfortunately, she does not have control of the microphone.

Perfectionism at an event can be brutal because there are so many things I cannot control, and my brain responds to a lack of control by desperately trying to perfect the things I can. The books can be straight. The display can be balanced. The tablecloth can be smooth. The signage can be exactly where I planned. If those things are right, maybe everything else will be right too.

Except events are inherently unpredictable.

Sometimes you prepare for months and barely anyone comes. That hurts.

There is no cute way to say it. Sitting behind a table full of books you paid to produce, in a hotel you paid to stay in, after traveling somewhere at your own expense, and watching an almost empty room is devastating. You start doing the math whether you want to or not. Table fee. Hotel. Travel. Food. Books. Swag. Displays. Merchandise. Shipping. Assistant. Parking. Whatever random expense appeared along the way because apparently breathing near a convention center costs seventeen dollars.

Then you look at your sales and think, Well. Fuck.

Sometimes low traffic is nobody's fault. An event simply doesn't draw the crowd everyone hoped it would. Sometimes the location isn't ideal. Sometimes another event is happening nearby. Sometimes people don't have spending money. Sometimes shit happens.

And sometimes the politics behind events are very real.

I've attended an event where speaking out against an organizer and people around her appeared to come with consequences, and I found myself tucked into an area so disconnected from the main event that traffic was almost nonexistent. Maybe someone else involved would describe the situation differently. I'm not interested in relitigating it or naming anyone. What mattered to me was the lesson: when you're an indie author spending your own money to attend something, where your table is placed and how an event is organized can materially affect whether that investment has any chance of paying off.

You remember that the next time someone sends you an event application.

Then there are the complete opposite events. Those are glorious.

Those are the days when you barely sit down. Readers are waiting. Someone is asking about one series while someone else wants another signed. You're trying to remember names and spell them correctly and talk to everybody long enough that nobody feels rushed. Someone you haven't seen since the last signing appears and you genuinely squeal. A reader tells you something your book meant to her and suddenly you're trying not to cry in public. Your table gets messier as the day goes on because books are actually leaving it, which is the one form of table imperfection my brain is delighted to tolerate.

At some point you realize you have not eaten. This is how readers occasionally meet me while I have half a sandwich crammed into my mouth like a raccoon who has recently escaped captivity.

I'm sorry. I swear I have manners at home. There is simply no elegant way to inhale six hours of missed calories in the ninety seconds between readers.

Those are the events that remind me why I keep doing this. I get to hug people who have supported my career for years. I get to put faces to usernames I have seen online a thousand times. I get to watch someone discover a book at my table and hope that maybe she will come back next year already knowing the characters. I get to exist inside the physical version of a community that usually lives in my phone.

Then the event ends, and my body sends me an invoice.

My social battery drains hard. I can love every single interaction I have and still reach a point where my brain has absolutely nothing left to give. That is something I wish people understood better about introversion, anxiety, neurodivergence, chronic illness, or whatever combination is happening inside someone. Being socially exhausted does not mean I didn't enjoy being social. I can have the best day imaginable and still need silence afterward because my brain has spent hours processing voices, faces, names, sounds, movement, lights, conversations, decisions, and the constant awareness that I am publicly representing myself and my books.

My body handles it even worse.

I have chronic illness, and I almost always end up sick as a dog after an event. During the signing, adrenaline is a magical little liar. It tells me I'm fine. I can stand. I can talk. I can keep going. I can forget to eat, forget to drink enough water, sleep badly, haul things I shouldn't be hauling, and function through a level of stimulation my body absolutely did not approve.

Then I get home. Adrenaline clocks out. My body would like to speak to management.

The crash can be miserable, and it means the real cost of an event isn't limited to the days printed on the schedule. There is preparation before it and recovery after it. A weekend signing can consume a much larger chunk of my life than the weekend itself.

Then there is the literal cost, which is honestly fucking insane. A table fee is merely the cover charge for entering the financial nightmare.

You need inventory, and inventory requires its own form of divination. How many books do you bring? Nobody knows. Bring too few and you sell out, which sounds wonderful until readers who specifically came for a book can't buy it. Bring too many and congratulations, you have paid to transport an independent bookstore across several state lines and now get to transport it home.

Books are heavy. This fact becomes increasingly offensive with every title you publish.

My catalog is not getting smaller, which means the logistics get harder every year. I have packed books in suitcases. I have used collapsible wheeled bins that confidently promised they were built for this kind of abuse and then did not survive Boston. I have spent embarrassing amounts of time researching storage systems, shipping containers, freight options, and increasingly elaborate methods of transporting books because apparently my eventual solution is going to be founding my own logistics company.

At least then I could give myself a discount.

Shipping inventory ahead should make things easier, except my anxiety immediately asks what happens if I label something wrong. What if it goes to the wrong hotel? What if it arrives after I leave? What if it disappears into the mysterious dimension where missing packages and single socks live?

That fear isn't entirely irrational because I have had luggage containing books, clothes, and event supplies disappear while traveling. That was devastating. Not inconvenient. Not “oops, airlines!” funny. Devastating.

When your suitcase contains your clothes, personal belongings, inventory, and the things you need to do your job at the place you're traveling to, losing it is not solved by handing you a toothbrush and wishing you luck. Having an airline offer a few hundred dollars for the trouble when the contents were worth significantly more made me briefly consider whether prison would interfere with my publishing schedule.

I chose peace. Mostly.

Experiences like that are why my brain now wants contingency plans for the contingency plans. Maybe I should ship inventory. Maybe I should carry it. Maybe I should divide it between luggage. Maybe I should put trackers in everything. Maybe I should rent a vehicle. Maybe I should buy seventeen Pelican cases and look like I am transporting classified government equipment instead of romance novels.

Every solution has a cost. And none of this includes what I wear.

Getting dressed for a book event should not be a philosophical crisis, yet somehow I have managed to make it one.

I want to look professional, but I also need to be comfortable for hours. I want to look like my brand, but I also want to look like myself. I want readers who took time and money to come see me to feel like I made an effort, but I do not want to spend eight hours wishing I could amputate my feet.

I have dressed up. We do not need to discuss the heeled cowboy boots. My feet remember. My feet will testify.

I have also dressed down and had someone comment on that, which was all my overthinking brain needed to turn clothing into another event metric I could potentially fail. Was I too casual? Should I dress up more next time? Do I look professional enough? Do I look author enough? What does “author enough” even look like?

Meanwhile, I have emotional-support pink Vans sitting right there.

Please stay the fuck away from my Vans. They have never betrayed me.

The funniest part of all of this is that I genuinely love planning events. Give me enough lead time and a completely unreasonable idea and I am delighted. I will make spreadsheets. I will design things. I will figure out how to turn a six-foot table into a tiny physical extension of my fictional universe. I love seeing some ridiculous concept that existed in my brain become real. I love walking into the room after setup and looking at the finished table and thinking, Holy shit. We made that.

That feeling is incredible. The process of getting there can be absolute hell on my nervous system.

That is the contradiction I have finally had to accept about book events. They are simultaneously one of my favorite parts of this career and one of the hardest things I ask my brain and body to do. Loving them does not make them easy. Being grateful for readers does not magically cure social exhaustion. Being excited about an event does not turn off anxiety. Being experienced does not make my OCD shrug when something feels wrong. Having done this before does not stop my ADHD from occasionally scattering my attention in seventeen directions.

And being an author who loves her readers does not mean I have to keep pushing myself through events until I hate them.

That's why I'm taking a break from in-person signings for a while. Not forever. I don't want forever. I want to come back to them.

But I need to recoup financially. I need to recover some of the money that disappears astonishingly quickly when you start adding travel, hotels, inventory, tables, supplies, assistants, meals, shipping, and everything else together. I need to sit down and make a better plan for how events fit into my business instead of automatically treating every exciting signing opportunity like something I have to say yes to.

I also need better fucking storage. Boston murdered my bins and I have not forgiven her.

I want to rethink how I transport inventory, what I actually need at my table, what is worth shipping, what is worth carrying, and what I have been bringing simply because at some point I decided a signing author was supposed to have it. I want fewer things that create stress without actually improving the reader experience. I want systems that work with my brain instead of relying on me to become a completely different person for three days.

Most importantly, I want to miss events.

I want enough distance from them that when I sign up for the next one, the first thing I feel is excitement instead of immediately calculating how much money, energy, anxiety, and recovery it is going to cost me.

Because I really do love them.

I love you walking toward my table holding one of my books. I love hearing which character is your favorite and why you're wrong because obviously mine is better. I love signing your battered copy that has clearly been read instead of merely displayed. I love seeing the same faces again and realizing somewhere along the way you stopped feeling like “readers” and started feeling like people I know. I love Mom Pat and Kara and Alfalfa. I love my author friends. I love the chaos when the room is packed.

I even love looking at my finished table after I have spent twenty minutes whisper-fighting with my husband over a quarter inch of paperback placement.

The anxiety doesn't cancel the joy. The joy doesn't cancel the anxiety. They exist together.

Maybe that's the best way I can explain what book events feel like inside a brain like mine. They are anticipation and dread, spreadsheets and chaos, perfectionism and improvisation, overstimulation and connection, financial anxiety and ridiculous generosity, complete exhaustion and some of my favorite memories from this entire career.

They are a fucking nightmare. They are wonderful.

And someday, after I've rested, saved some money, developed a transportation system capable of surviving Massachusetts, and sufficiently bribed my husband, I'll do it all again.

Just don't touch my pink Vans.

xoxo,
Lila