Catching-On Corner

Filling Some Seats
By David D. Horowitz

I once read at a bookstore to an audience of zero! We'll take care of promotion, the bookstore's events coordinator had assured me three months before when scheduling my reading. Yet, no one attended. Nor had any local newspaper listed my reading. Two store employees were kind enough to sit as an "audience," or I would have performed for a five-rowed semicircle of fifty wooden folding chairs. To boost attendance at my next several readings, then, I read with another local poet; designed and distributed my own promotional flyer; informed the print and electronic media; telephoned and e-mailed friends and peers; visited performance venues where I read at the open mic and mentioned when and where my next featured readings would occur; and offered some of the flyers to my co-reader and urged her to convey them to her friends and students. We earned respective audiences of ten and fifteen. We sold about five books at each reading. I had caught on: I would vigorously promote my readings or have no audience for them.

Copyright © 2002 by David D. Horowitz

David D. Horowitz founded and manages Rose Alley Press, a Seattle publishing company that primarily publishes books of formal poetry and pamphlets about writing and publishing.