I had a small Christmas Bazaar at the local Masonic Hall a week or so ago. One of the helper girls, maybe 13 or 15 (it’s hard for me to tell now that my own kids are grown up) kept coming back and looking at Fairies and Fireflies, and finally bought it. Everytime I saw her that she wasn’t working, she was reading it. Finally, just before closing, she came back with more money to buy Dragons and Dreams. I told her I was really glad she was enjoying my books. She said “I never read” and went skipping happily off with her new books. When I offered to sign them for her, she just glowed.
What was even nicer was when her mother found me the following Saturday at another small bazaar in the same town, and purchased my other books for her daughter.
It’s for reasons like that that I do even the small festivals and bazaars. That kind of feedback is gold. If I hadn’t sold anything else (and, given the size of the bazaar, we did pretty well – better than I anticipated), the whole day would have been worth it just for that one girl.