Author Fair

I was part of an author fair in Doylestown, Pa., on Saturday with 100+ other authors published in various genres and formats. It was my first time at one of these events. Fortunately, I was stationed next to a veteran, an author of Irish historical novels who runs a creative writing program at a local college. She was an excellent guide to making the most of my experience. The best approach is to meet and greet, she told me. I took her advice and roamed around to authors’ tables, where I saw a lot of creativity. One author in the corner displayed arresting floor-to-ceiling banners of her covers. Another positioned her books in a suitcase. Many had printed up cool bookmarks and/or stickers as leave-behinds.

I enjoyed learning about authors’ creative processes, and their fiction and nonfiction works, from fantasy to thriller to education to cooking to children’s books. I handed out my business cards to stay connected. I also honed my pitch about my women’s fiction novels “The Moral Tango” and my sophomore follow-up “The Style Whisperer,” available online. And I shared some of my nonfiction writing work, including a new survey on how Americans are feeling poorly about the state of the country but positively about their own lives. In this little corner of Bucks County, Pa., people were feeling pretty well.