Book Signing at Don's

Years ago, back in the 1980s, I was part of a writing group we called the Quill Club.  Back then we women wrote our stories on typewriters and felt we were pretty cool because they were electric typewriters. We all had young children and a night out with good friends was a way to sanity. 

We gave each other encouragement and that led to some of us going on to bigger things. Betty became a reporter, then a weekly newspaper editor and then a magazine editor. She is still out there freelancing. Susan had a newspaper column that is still running thirty years later.  Her two romance novels were published.  I wrote a weekly newspaper column and that led to magazine work.  Others kept at it, too, but in time the Quill Club withered away. 

Tonight Wade and I had our first book signing, bringing Black Coffee Fiction, our collection of short stories to Don's Quality Market. Colette Bezio was there with the Witches of Castle Crabapple and Susan Manzke with her two collections from all those years of newspaper columns, Words in My Pocket One and Two.  (All the books are available at Amazon.com.)  

I didn't really know how many customers we would have for these self-published books. We were originally supposed to have our signing at Sissy's Treats and Treasures, but the ceiling fell down in the tea room.  All the publicity I had written placed us in time, Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. so we couldn't change that but we could change the place to Don's Quality Market, change the posters around town and put an especially big notice on the window at Sissy's.  

We set up in the lunch room adjacent to the bakery and waited to see what would happen. In only a few minutes our customers began to arrive and most of them were our old friends from the Quill Club who bought books and more books. Wade and I started with eight books but ran out. It was only luck that he'd brought some of the books that were meant for our next book signing on Saturday. (We've ordered more for that one.) He ran out to his car and brought them in.  The others were making a lot of sales, too. 

None of our Quill Club friends left after buying their books. It turned into a reunion.  We are now talking about reviving the group and even found some possible new members among others that came to talk to us.  We'll take another look at the idea after Christmas.  

We went home with money in our pockets and the thrill of knowing our words are out there.  

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This week I joined Twitter to help spread the word about our blogs and books.  My tag there is 

Colleen Sutherland@MathomGardens  

From the electric typewriter to a word processor to the computer to the Internet to social media, I keep on expanding my horizons.