I'd been standing at the table for over an hour, and so far only two people had bought my book. One was a an old lady with an oil stain on her coat lapel and dirt underneath her fingernails and a somewhat ill, over-the-counter-medicated expression. (I hoped I didn't get the flu—I touched her hand by accident when she handed me her ball-point pen so I could write a small dedication on the book. That's another thing—she refused my elegant, old-fashioned fountain pen.) Not that I was complaining. After all, she did buy my book. This being my first book signing, I should have bowed to her, kissed the floor she walked on. I wrote:

Standing next to me was an author from a mid-size publisher. This was a group book signing event and the bookstore had mixed us all up—PODs, small presses, mid-size presses—to help the less fortunate authors like myself. There were about fifteen authors, with two or three on each table. Out of my own pocket, I had acquired an eye-catching, full-color poster displaying the cover of my novel. From the results I was getting, it seemed people were color blind.

The author next to me, clad in a bookish suit and bow-tie, kept throwing me furtive glances and condescending smiles, yet refused to talk to me. What was his problem? Did he think the POD condition was infectious? If I had kept the right count (and of course I had), he had already sold seven copies. Not much by a long run, definitely not enough to justify his 'My book has national distribution' superior expression. I silently prayed he wouldn't sell more copies—or at least not while standing next to me. Though I realized this was improbable. I was stuck with him for the afternoon.

I decided to ignore him. I sighed. Only two copies sold. Two more hours to go. My feet hurt. Of all the promotion books I had read, none had mentioned avoiding high heels and wearing comfortable shoes.

A middle-aged couple with a kid approached my table. The kid looked as if he had been forced to be here by his parents. The mom smiled at me and started examining my book. I flashed her one of my best toothpaste-commercial smiles. The father didn't seem in a too-good mood either. Most probably he had been dragged here by his wife as well.

“I love the cover,” the mom said. She had a strong Southern accent. “What is it about?”

I relished the fact that the people were looking (or being forced to look) at my book and not at the one on the other side of the table—yes, yes, the one with 'national distribution.' However, I'd always dreaded that question: What is your book about? No matter whether or not I had memorized an answer, it always made me feel anxious and awkward.

“Well, um, you see, it's about a young woman detective whose scientist brother disappears in Amsterdam and the woman goes abroad to find him. There's a little of everything—mystery, adventure, um, excuse me, could you stop that please?” The boy had begun to give little kicks to the leg of the table, which by itself was not such a big deal, except he was smiling at the same time.

“Stop it, Michael!” the mom said, flushed.

The boy threw me a sullen look. Sweet boy. He reminded me of Damien. And I was being generous. The dad had suddenly adopted a detached demeanour, as if he weren't related to the woman and the boy. This seemed common in dads. I had seen it many times. It should be studied by psychologists.

“As I was saying,” I said, smiling, trying to stretch my toes inside my pointed high-heeled boots, “there's mystery and adventure, and also romance.”

“Hmm.” The mom skimmed through the pages of my book. I'd noticed almost all the prospective buyers doing this at the other tables. Why did people do this—to check the type and size of the font, the layout? Obviously not to get a feel for the writing; they passed the pages too quickly to be able to read anything. Book lovers were a strange sort.

The mom turned to her husband. “We should get this for Martha. Her birthday is coming and she loves stuff like this.”

Stuff?

The dad shrugged, smiling at me yet avoiding my eyes. “Sure.”

“How is it rated, honey?” she asked me.

“Rated?”

She winked at me. “Is there anything offending in it? This being a birthday gift, I wouldn't want to get something, well, you know…”

“Oh. Sure. I would say it's a PG-13. It's romantic mystery, so there are some love scenes. Written in good taste, though.”

“I'm sure it is,” she said. “Okay, we'll take it. Could you write a dedication? Martha will be thrilled to have an autographed copy.”

“Martha is almost blind, Mom,” the boy suddenly said. He had not stopped moving since his arrival.

“Nonsense, she loves to read. She has glasses.”

“She's like a hundred years old,” the boy said.

“Shhh. She's not even sixty. Stay still.”

The dad sighed. I wondered who the famous Martha was, and why I kept picturing her with thick black-rimmed glasses, a flowery house dress, and rollers on her head. I also wondered why so many older ladies seemed to like my book, which was mostly aimed (according to publicists) at women between the ages of twenty and forty. Another topic for psychologists.

“I'm thirsty, Mom,” the boy whined, grabbing her around the waist.

I did my best to scribble a quick but sincere, heart-felt dedication.

In spite of having sold my third copy, I was glad to see the Mississippi trio go. The ADHD kid was adding to my anxiety. I also needed a cup of coffee—which would be defeating the purpose, but that was beside the point.

After tossing the author next to me a dainty smile, my thoughts trailed to home. My husband had grudgingly stayed at home to look after our kids—a boy of ten and a girl of six. The house was a mess. Long ago the two cats and two dogs had taken complete control of it. Animal hair abounded. Mountains of dirty clothes piled the laundry room. For the last two weeks I had been frantically working on the last chapter of my second romantic mystery—this was my excuse for making my husband wear dirty socks (a disastrous thing for a perfectionist, highly-competitive man who merely tolerated my no-income 'career').

Yesterday I had finally printed two copies of the manuscript and sent them off to a couple of big NY publishers. Dare to dream, Belinda. 'Dare to wait' would make a better fit.

In a sense, I was a hypocrite. How could I expect them to like my writing when not even me, the author, liked it? More and more I hated what I wrote. My censor was always on, bugging me, reminding me day and night that my sentences stank. Maybe I had split personalities. The worst thing was, I couldn't stop writing.

For the last fifteen years of my life I had made the US postal empire very rich—I had submitted countless query letters, proposals, synopsis, sample chapters, whole manuscripts. Hundreds of submissions, all including self-addressed stamped envelopes. Probably thousands of dollars over the years. I suspected the post office made its riches out of struggling writers. A romantic at heart, I could sympathize with Van Gough, who died penniless without anybody recognizing his genius until after his death. I had gotten close a few times with some big publishers, but at the end nothing had worked out.

Then the internet with its emerging ebook and print-on-demand presses had opened its doors to writers like me. Had, in fact, welcomed me with open arms. And so my first novel had been published. The feel of holding that paperback in my hands for the first time! The smell of it. The sensation had been better than anything in the world. Anything. Though my publisher used the POD method, it was a publisher in every sense of the world—being selective with submissions, doing editing and copyediting, and everything else that publishers did. Except, being POD, it didn't have a distributor with an actual sales force to present to booksellers. This, along the inability to accept returns, was an ominous thing for a small press. To big bookstore chains, the kiss of death. Besides, I also had to deal with the whole POD reputation, which was a major pain in the butt, to say the least.

In the beginning, I was surprised when the bookstore manager had refused to stock my book in the shelves, stating—in a quite unnecessary dramatic tone—that they didn't stock POD books. Mumbling about my publisher's many virtues had been a waste of time. I had walked out of the store humiliated, my cheeks flushed with an upcoming attack of hives. I felt like an innocent citizen who had been accused (also charged and convicted) of a terrible crime. Now I would feel even more awkward when people asked what it was I did for a living. (In the past, I had always hated to answer that question: 'What do you do?' I would never say, 'I am a writer.' Instead I would avoid the person's eyes and mumble, 'I, um, er, write.')

With smaller independent bookshops, however, it was different. They were flexible. They were willing to take the risk of ordering a couple of copies. They usually treated POD authors like decent human beings.

Oh well.

The next couple of hours showed an increase of activity. Standing behind the table, I felt like an insect being examined under the microscope by a series of genetic scientists. But I ended up selling three more copies. Six copies sold in all. Wow. At this rate I would be rich in a few thousand years. More than anything, I would have loved to be one of those business-like, extroverted authors. I was born an anti-social, plain and simple. Long gone were the good-ol' days where all a writer was expected to do was lock herself in a study and pound at a typewriter. These days writers had to be publicists as well.

The stuck-up author next to me had sold ten copies, not even twice as much as me, and yet he acted offended because they had put his book—a hard-boiled detective pulp thing—next to mine. Or maybe he was against romance. Who knows?