So I’m back after the long hol­i­day week­end. Hope every­one had a good turkey day. I know that I still feel stuffed from all the food!

Some­one asked me the other day if I was going to be doing any book sign­ings for Spider’s Bite when it comes out in late Jan­u­ary. The answer? Yes and no.

I plan on doing one sign­ing at my local comic book store. Yep, that’s right. Just the one sign­ing. Well, maybe one more at my local library, if they’re up for it. So two sign­ings, total.

Why so few? Because the truth is that book sign­ings kind of suck.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love meet­ing read­ers, and I am more than happy to sign books until my fin­gers bleed (not that my books are pop­u­lar enough for that to hap­pen, but hey, it’s some­thing to strive for).

But my pre­vi­ous sign­ings at my local chain stores have not gone all that well — I’ve never sold more than a hand­ful of books at them. At the worst sign­ing, I only sold one book — and that’s only because my high school Span­ish teacher came into the store com­pletely by chance and took pity on me. How sad is that?

Mostly, dur­ing a sign­ing at a chain book­store, it’s me sit­ting at a table for two hours as peo­ple walk on by, des­per­ately avoid­ing mak­ing eye con­tact with me. And the peo­ple who do approach me? They mostly want to know where the bath­room is. (Seri­ously, peo­ple will ask you that all the time).

Of course, it might help if I were a great sales­man, but the truth is that I’m not. I’m good at talk­ing to folks one on one, but not nec­es­sar­ily at attract­ing their atten­tion in the first place. And hon­estly, all of this kind of ties into one of my pet peeves. Because I don’t like the folks who sit out­side of the gro­cery store sell­ing dough­nuts, Girl Scout cook­ies, or what­ever to raise funds for their cause. You know the ones I’m talk­ing about, where as soon as you approach the door, the folks run over to you, get in your way, and shove their prod­uct into your face. If I wanted to buy your dough­nuts, I would come over and ask you about them. Oth­er­wise, leave me alone. I’m only here to get gro­ceries, noth­ing else. Okay, mini rant over.

The bot­tom line is that I don’t want to be that kind of per­son. I don’t want to has­sle peo­ple. I fig­ure folks can read the sign, see the books, and fig­ure out why I’m there. So I sit at my lit­tle table and leave it up to them to walk over to me (which is prob­a­bly the wrong approach, but it’s the one I’m com­fort­able with).

And then, there’s the man­ager at one of my local chain stores. A while back, I tried to set up a sign­ing for Hot Mama, and I called her four times — even speak­ing to her once or twice on the phone. She promised that she’d call me back and that we’d set some­thing up, but she never did. It was such a has­sle try­ing to pin her down that I didn’t even bother try­ing to set up a sign­ing for Jinx. I went by the store the other day and dropped off a cover flat for Spider’s Bite, along with my con­tact infor­ma­tion. And, of course, she hasn’t called me. And I know that she won’t. Sigh …

And really, it’s kind of a pain to even set up a sign­ing at a chain store in the first place. Because to sign at a Barnes & Noble, Bor­ders, or wher­ever, you’re sup­posed to have your pub­li­cist set it up. (And hav­ing a pub­li­cist is not as glam­orous as it sounds because she’s also the pub­li­cist for tons of other books that are also com­ing out that month from the pub­lisher. You are one author/book among dozens).

Last year, when I was con­sid­er­ing doing a sign­ing for Jinx, I was told by my pub­li­cist that one of the local chains wanted me to guar­an­tee that at least 40 peo­ple would show up at the sign­ing. Seri­ously — 40 peo­ple. Can you believe that? I don’t even think I know 40 peo­ple, much less have the gump­tion to ask them to inter­rupt their Sat­ur­day to come to my sign­ing and buy a book. That’s just rude.

All of this is why I really love the sign­ings at con­fer­ences like RWA and RT. Sure, they are big, mas­sive, noisy, and exhaust­ing, but peo­ple are there to meet authors and buy books. Even if I only sell a few books, I still have a good time, because there are tons of other authors and read­ers to talk to. And, you know, authors that I want to meet myself.

I also like sign­ing at my local comic book store. The owner there has been great to work with, and his cus­tomers love all kinds of fan­tasy books. I think it’s a win-win for all of us. Because even if no one buys any of my books, I still get to talk about Buffy, Chuck, and all the other lat­est, great­est fan­tasy TV shows, books, and movies.

So yeah, I’ve basi­cally decided that me sign­ing all by my lit­tle lone­some at a chain store isn’t really a good use of my time. I might sell a few books, but that’s also two hours that I could be writ­ing, read­ing, or blog­ging. But you know what? The next time I see an author at a book­store, I’m going to go over and at least say hi to them — because I know exactly how lonely those two hours can be.