The Market Where I Found My Voice
How I Learned That Selling Books Is Really About Sharing Life
I sold my books on the road for the first time this week and quickly navigated the nuances of in-person selling.
A Holiday Market
The event was the Hearts and Hands Holiday Market at my church. Vendors from around the city and state converge in the gym and fellowship hall of Memorial Drive United Methodist Church and sell products ranging from home decor, clothes, kids’ toys and games, and hand-made jewelry. It doesn’t hurt that the pumpkin patch is right outside. Really gets the fall vibe in your eyes…as you sweat under summer-like weather conditions.
I’ve been a customer at this show for years now because it serves at a kick-start to the holiday season. About four years ago, my wife—who is a jewelry artist, lapidarist, and watercolor painter (see her art on Instagram @betojdesigns)—became a vendor. I always helped and folks would recognize me (I play in the church orchestra and usher in the contemporary service) and stop, chat, and buy something. My wife always suggested I try and sell my books at this show and I always demurred.
But this year, I shrugged and said yes. Why?
Well, why not?
Up until this year, the why-not reason was that I didn’t think I wrote any books that would catch the eyes of the clientele of this show, which is primarily women. But in 2025, I have two books that would: my new romance meet-cute collection of short stories, Lucky and Unlucky in Love, and my holiday whodunit, Have Yourself a Merry Christmas Murder. Those two books would, I thought, have the possibility of selling at a venue like Hearts and Hands. To round out the display, I took three of my favorite older books: my Harry Truman thriller, Treason at Hanford, my World War II thriller, Ulterior Objectives, and the first book featuring Calvin Carter, railroad detective, Empty Coffins.
I know we authors are not supposed to have favorites, but these five are mine. And that proved to be a key selling point.
The Initial Approach
We readers are an interesting lot. We’re quite particular in what we read, discerning with what we pick up in bookstores, and judicious when it comes to actually buying a book. Buying books is a very individualistic choice, and one I didn’t want to force.
When you are a vendor at a show like this, there’s that delicate dance between the time a potential customer slows and stops at your table and when—or if—you engage with them. I’ve seen my wife do it for decades, but I’ve never done it for my own stuff.
The show was Monday night (5-7:30pm), all day Tuesday (10am-7pm), and all day Wednesday until 3pm. Starting Monday night and halfway through Tuesday, my approach was quite basic: reader to reader. When a person picked up a book, I’d give them a few moments to look over the cover, read the back copy, and then I’d ask them a book-lover’s question: what kind of book do you like to read? It’s a great ice breaker and gets them to open up about their favorite genres of books. I mean, who is the reader who doesn’t want to talk about books they love?
Their answers would steer the conversation. If they liked whodunits, then I’d suggest my Christmas book. Thrillers and historical fiction would get me talking about those books. And the romance readers who slowed and picked up my meet-cute collection were halfway there already. The Calvin Carter western was the wild card.
This approach worked pretty well. Granted, many of the responses I received throughout all three days were a general consensus from folks who knew me from church: “I didn’t know you wrote books!” My common, joking response was that I didn’t walk about with a placard around my chest, holding a bell, announcing to all passersby that I was, in fact, A Writer!
Me talking to folks from one book lover to another worked well, but around Tuesday afternoon, something shifted.
Books as Biography
I can’t say for sure what happened for me to subtly shift how I marketed the books, but I started talking about where I was in my life during the time I wrote these five books. The Truman book was the first I wrote, back in 2005, and I told the story of how a co-worker of mine started trading chapters of our respective first books every Wednesday for nine months. It was a magical time because we each didn’t quite know what we were doing but we just held each other accountable and made it up as we went along.
The main selling point for Ulterior Objectives—my all-time favorite book from its writing in 2016 until 2025—was how its story came to be. My son, dad, and I went to a convention in Dallas and, on the drive home, I got behind the wheel, gave Dad a notepad and pen, and we hashed out the plot of the story for the four-plus hours it took to get back to Houston. The Calvin Carter books (three published; five written) had a simple metric: would my grandfather, an avid and voracious reader of westerns, like the story?
The Christmas whodunit was my take on a Hallmark Christmas movie…just with more family dysfunction and a dead body. And the meet-cute collection stemmed from a funny moment earlier this summer. An actor friend of mine in church asked if I had anything he could pass along to his filmmaking friends. I said I have a great tale, but let me re-read it to make sure it’s good. Well, after I re-read it, I questioned who the heck wrote this downer of a story? In my memory, it ended on an up note. When I mentioned this to my writer friends, their feedback was unanimous: not every meet-cute ends like a Hallmark movie. Bingo! I had my spark. I would write a series of meet-cutes that may or may not have a happy ending.
Sometime on Tuesday afternoon, I began telling the origin stories of the books and how they came to be. And, lo and behold, that resonated. In fact, I think it resonated more than me talking with people as a fellow book nerd. There was context behind the books they were in front of them. I love knowing how authors created their books. It’s one of my favorite things. Apparently, I’m not alone.
I even had one customer remark on the new author biography I wrote as well as the new tagline for my overall work (including my 17-year blog): Stories with Style. Drive by Character. Powered by Heart. That seemed to resonate.
I’m glad it did. Because I’m an open book. Everything I do, I nearly always do it in public. Here’s one of the paragraphs I particularly like: “Beyond the page, Scott is a transparent chronicler of the creative life. Through his long-running blog, he shares the real-life highs and lows of being a working writer, filled with candid reflections on routine, discipline, failure, and creative resilience.”
I’m one of those creative people who wants to read the stories written by others, especially the folks who may not be sure they can, in fact, write a story. One gentleman even did the age-old comment to me that he always wanted to write a book, and I came back to him with a simple question: do you have 15 minutes a day to write? Then I proceeded to tell him the math. A typical person can write 250 words in 15 minutes. You do that for 30 days, and you have a 7,500-word short story. You do that for a year and you have a novel. I ended by sweeping my hands at every book on my table and letting him know that everything I’ve written is basically done during 5:00 am writing sessions and lunches at the day job. His raised eyebrows is a sign that maybe, just maybe, he will try.
Conclusion
I had a blast selling my own books. I never thought I would even try, but now that I have, I think I will seek out other places to present my stories to folks who may or may not know me. Something unlocked this week. Perhaps I leveled up. I’m not sure, but one thing I learned: the best person to sell my books is me. And if I don’t believe in them, who will?