o/t: Princeton Children’s Book Festival 2016 — a proud author modestly demonstrates his triumph

 

Yup — we sold out about an hour and a half before closing time. Frustrating, of course, but as my neighbor, the excellent children’s author/illustrator Ross Burach (There’s a Giraffe in My Soup), pointed out, it was a nice problem to have.

We had a great day out — it was a constant joy to see kids enthusing over books, staggering around under the weight of the stacks of books they wanted, instructing their luckless parents that I WANT THIS BOOK AND YOU ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT . . . Fellow Zest author Jeff Campbell had brought his sweetheart daughter along (she told me she’d refused the job of standing in front of her dad’s table looking at one of his books and saying “THIS IS REALLY INTERESTING!!!” very loudly), and the stash of books she finally bought must have dented not just Jeff’s earnings for the day but his mortgage.

Because Eureka! is a YA book, many of the kids I chatted to were teens, but it was an especial joy to see how many younger kids — maybe as young as eight or nine, some of them — grabbed the book and immediately demanded that they be allowed to buy it. One such, a fabulously bright little girl, was told by her dad that “we’ll come back later”; I practically wept when, much later, they did indeed come back and all the copies were gone. (If you’re reading this, kid or dad, leave a comment anywhere on the site and I’ll email you to see if we can sort something out.)

Many thanks to the Princeton Public Library for organizing the event (and for inviting me!) and for the bookseller/toyshop JazAms for managing the sales side of it all — and for throwing a great party afterwards!

Next stop . . . the Milford Readers and Writers Festival, where I’m a Special Guest (gasp!) for the science fiction strand; Milford PA became internationally famous for the annual SF Writers’ Conference held there under the auspices of Virginia Kidd, Damon Knight et al.; I was a regular for a few years at the UK branch of Milford, as founded by James and Judy Blish. This promises to be, once more, a great deal of fun.