Almost a year since the last US author-signing disaster and oops, there goes another one. The Million Lives festival looks like yet another example of what happens when well-meaning idiots team up with grifters to launch a Fabulous! Wonderful! Glamorous! event without anyone involved having given any serious thought as to how such things actually work. It’s hard not to feel pity for the poor sods shown on TikTok. wandering miserably round what looks like a disused 
school gym in their lovely outfits without any decor, fancy lighting, tablecloths or even free drinks to ease the disappointment; the organisers claimed to have sold about 500 tickets and apparently only 50 or so people bothered to show up. It seems to have been a pretty wretched experience for the attending authors.
It’s perhaps worth considering, should you be a baby author thinking about giving a few of these book signings a go, how best to avoid making this sort of expensive mistake. I’ve done some author events, (and a lot more general/adult events for traders), over about 20 years, and here are a few things I have learned to look out for.
First of all, if you’ve only got one book, forget it. At least, wait till you have two or three. If you are an absolute newbie who nobody has heard of, you are not going to sell anything like enough books to cover your costs. OK, if you have a big social media following and are famous for something else – sufficiently famous that your first book is being talked about by people other than your mum and your mates, go ahead and do what you like. But if you have just self-published your debut piece of genre fiction, it doesn’t matter how good it is: no one knows or cares who you are so you won’t sell more than a handful of copies. Go along to author events by all means, and have some flyers or postcards in your pocket, but go along as a way of learning.
If something is being touted as enormously special, a once-in-a-lifetime best-ever event, but they are open to new, unknown authors for a large pitch fee: don’t
bother. This is quadruply true if it’s a new event and marketed as sooo much better than all the boring (successful) other ones. If they are open to new, unknown authors and it’s a cheap pitch fee, along with being somewhere reasonably close to where you live (ie you won’t need a hotel room) then it’s probably worth giving it a try because it might be fun even if you don’t sell much.
Have a look at who else is going to be there: most events will announce their more enticing guests ahead of time (and, of course, most if not all indie authors will post a lot on their social media about where they are going to be) – not just to see if you have heard of them or not but to see if they write in your genre. As a smutty author, I have made the mistake of *not* checking on occasion… and found that being surrounded by people with cosy mysteries, kids’ books and recipes tended not to make for a good day in terms of sales.
Don’t ever lay out more than you can afford to lose.