People have been asking how the launch party went, so I wanted to talk about that in some detail, and also use it to talk a little about disproportionate effect, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
But I have to start this by a bracketing note — it’s going to be really easy for people, especially friends of mine, to take this as me scolding them for not coming out, or not buying my art / books / etc., and that is NOT my goal. Please don’t feel guilty after reading this! Promise me? I still love you.
Only if you PROMISE not to feel guilty should you read further.
Okay? Okay.
***
So, here are some stats from yesterday:
- I posted approximately kazillion social media thingies promoting the event, all over the place, everywhere I could justify, repeating it as feasible, and also invited all my local friends directly; I’m sure some people saw it a dozen times, and I’m sorry for that, but that is pretty much just how publicity works these days…
- 19 people RSVP’d that they were coming, and about 70 more RSVP’d interested
- I bought 60 potato samosas, 30 chicken samosas, 30 veggie pakoras, several boxes of Pakistani sweets, and a couple dozen bottles of mango drinks and water — around $250 total
- I’m not sure how many people came — after the first hour, which was slow…
(sidenote: lord, I hate that first hour of a party, when you’re not sure if anyone’s coming; if you love me and it’s easy for you, if you’re coming to one of my parties and can come near the beginning, that would be a big help, especially if you don’t mind being put to work with last-minute things)
…I was pretty busy talking to people the rest of the night, so I wasn’t keeping a close count, and some people were definitely just random shoppers wandering into the store, rather than invited folks who’d RSVP’d, but I think we had at least 40-50 people attend over the course of 5 hours. Which was certainly enough to make it feel like a party and have the front of the store look full (which I think drew more passersby in), and enough that I had fun and wasn’t depressed at low turnout, but wasn’t as high as I could have hoped — if all the people who marked interested had come, we would’ve had over 100 instead
- I brought a dozen or so samosas and pakoras home, and some sweets, but most of the food got eaten, yay!
- it was my best sales day in the store, which I wasn’t actually expecting — my goal was just to get people into the space, not to necessarily have them buy anything. But I did a little over $500 in sales. By comparison, I did less than $200 in the whole month of January (which meant I didn’t cover my $225 booth rent, sad), and a little over $1000 in the whole month of December (Christmas, of course). So, wildly successful from that point of view.
- I put together 15 raffle baskets, which were really fun to give away, and I think people were happy with them. It’s a little hard to calculate what they cost, because while it was over $1000 in value total, that’s assuming every item in them actually sold. They could just sit on the shelf for months, or not sell at all. So, I dunno. I spent a little money on packaging, maybe $30 — all the stock, I had on hand already.
- the real value of the event, I suspect, is in publicity — lots of people who didn’t make it to the event heard about the shop, and may stop in, and some of the ones who came loved it and will come back (yay). There’s no real way to measure that effect, though!
Okay, that’s the stats portion of this. Next, the argument.
*****
I’ve been thinking a lot about disproportionate effect, the way a relatively small effort can have large results. For example:
- there were 5-7 friends of mine hanging out and talking in the front of the store for a couple of hours. That made the store look much more full, and drew people in; I think it contributed a lot to the success of the event. If those people hadn’t attended, it might’ve looked pretty empty, and so for lack of 5 people, we might end up with the lack of 50 effectively. Buzz builds interest; people want to know what other people are excited about
- that connects to things like lines to get into places — when my friend Amanda Daly was doing pop-ups for her bagel business, it was during the pandemic, and she wasn’t letting many people into the shop at a time. People were excited enough about her bagels (justifiably, they are delicious) that they queued up outside for it, even in the midst of a Chicago winter. That made for good photos, and good buzz, and I think that helped carryover to when she opened the physical shop. People knew that a Daly bagel was worth queuing up in the cold for.
- when books are published by big publishers, there’s often a very small window to convince the publisher that it’s worth supporting the book (and by supporting, I mean putting more money into publicity, whether it’s author tours or paid ads or whatever — more money in publicity will almost always result in more sales, if you target it well and if you have a good product to promote). Big publishers look at first week sales, so it makes a HUGE difference to your author friends if you buy their books during launch week. It’s sort of goofy — if you were planning to buy the book anyway, it shouldn’t matter whether you buy it on day 8 or day 1. But it does matter. (We do the same with movie premieres.). A small press will likely give a book more time to prove itself, but the big presses have ten more books coming out next month, so they tend to be ruthless about cutting support to books that aren’t performing. Which sucks, because many of the books they effectively abandon (books that may well have taken YEARS to write), never get the chance to find the audience that would otherwise love them.
- the margin for ‘success’ at a shop like mine is actually pretty tiny — if 25 people spend $10 each at my shop in a month, I make rent. Do I have 25 local friends willing to buy me a muffin and a latte once a month? Probably. But that’s unlikely to translate to sales at the store unless they go to extra effort to get down there, take time to shop, etc.
*****
All of which is to say, if you know someone with a small business you’d like to support, it actually doesn’t take much to make a really big difference to them.
- It could be showing up and being visible in the front of the store during an event.
- It could be buying something small, if your budget allows and it’s not a hardship. (I don’t EVER want someone to buy something I make if it’s a hardship. Please go get my books from the library instead, if you want to read them!).
- It could be buying something from a small indie business, even if you could get something similar for a dollar less on Amazon.
- It could be telling a friend about an event that you can’t go to yourself because you have a conflict, or you’re out of town, or you’re overwhelmed and never want to leave your home again (totally valid, I feel you)
- It could be sharing on your own social media, or even just ‘liking’ the posts about it, to push them up in the algorithms and make them more visible
- It could be leaving a review — I think it’s 50 Amazon reviews that pushes your book notably up in the visibility algorithms. And the review can be a sentence. It doesn’t take much to make a huge difference.
- if you can’t afford to buy a book, request it at your library! That’s great!
*****
There’s so much in life that’s overwhelming. People dealing with serious diseases, people dying, the planet overheating, the economy crashing, conflict in the Middle East, conflict in the Ukraine, conflict everywhere, and so much of it, it’s going to take serious, sustained effort to make a big difference. Which we should do, of course. But it’s hard.
So I guess this is a request — when a little thing comes across your desk that could make a big difference to someone, think about whether you can do it. It is totally okay to decide no, I’ve done too much this week, I need to just stay in bed with the covers over my ears.
But if it’s NOT a painful effort, if it might actually be fun, and if it’s going to likely have a disproportionately large positive result — think about it. That’s my ask.
*****
Okay, friends who didn’t make it to my launch — you got through all of this without feeling guilty, right? It’s totally fine that you didn’t make it! I miss things all the time! I am over-scheduled and exhausted and there’s too much happening and too many requests for help and it is impossible to do it all. That is totally okay. But I did want to take this opportunity, of people asking me how the launch went, to talk a little about why it went pretty well and why it could’ve gone better.
Overall, I’m happy with the event. (And tired.) But when I have the one-year anniversary party of the store, I’d like to have double the number of people attending, at least. 100 people would be good. 500 people would be fabulous. We’ll see how it goes!
(Photo from last night — snowdrops from the garden, matching the snowdrops on the cover of the Perennial reissue. Nice.)