penguinpaperback
Hello Michael, not really a question but about 14 years ago I was working in a store where you were due to spend a couple of hours book signing. Approx 5 or 6 hours later you were still there signing books. We had never had so many people turn up for a book signing before. Other times we'd had so few people turning up to see an author we'd had to put our coats on and pretend to be the general public.
I watched The Wipers Times a few weeks ago and thought it was fabulous, incredibly moving.
Yes, it's not always been like that. I remember a signing of my Ripping Yarns book up in Stirling, in Scotland, where no one at all appeared for half an hour. At last, an elderly lady came across to where I was sitting, surrounded by piles of my books. I had my pen raised to sign when she said, "I'm bringing back this book about Second World War aeroplanes - four of the pages are stuck together. Can I have my money back?" She was very upset when she found out I was a visiting author.
It's great when there's a really good, busy signing, and for me as a author it's a valuable time to get a sense of who your audience is out there. I think a lot of us appear on television or write books, and you don't often actually know who is watching your programme or reading your work. So I like to have a quick chat with people when I do my book signing. Generally, they're friendly, but one man had a poster of me that he'd got from the window, and as he came to the table, he tore it in half and set fire to it!
The woman who organised the signing wasn't at all fazed - she just said, "he's always doing that."