Non-Book Events Might Be the Best Places to Sell Books

Writers know where they belong.

Bookstores. Libraries. Literary festivals. Conferences with lanyards and coffee urns and panel discussions that run ten minutes over. These are the sanctioned spaces. They are safe. They are familiar. They are, in many cases, crowded with other authors hoping to be noticed by the same small group of readers.

What we are not taught—and might feel faintly rebellious—is that books sell very well where no one expects them.

A gun show. A car show. A county fair. An antique market. These are not environments most authors would circle on a calendar with anticipation. They sound weird or at least a bit odd. What would people who came to buy spark plugs or quilts or hunting gear want with a novel?

The answer, it turns out, is simple. Readers are everywhere.

At events like these, readers are not scanning spines or comparing covers or rushing between panels. They are relaxed. They are wandering. They are open to conversation. And when they stop at a book table—often out of curiosity—the interaction begins on human terms.

“I didn’t know authors did this.”

That sentence alone is worth the price of admission.

Traditional spaces mean competition.

When fifty or a hundred authors are packed into the room, the event feels like an attention contest. Who will stand out? Who will get ten seconds of mindshare? In non-book spaces, a book table is a novelty. Novelty lowers defenses. It invites questions. It creates room for explanation. Instead of selling a book, you are explaining why you wrote one—and that distinction matters.

At a gun show—of all places—the conversation rarely started with the book itself. It started with location. With curiosity. With a spouse standing slightly behind someone who had stopped, listening quietly. Often, the buyer wasn’t the person holding the book. It was the person they were thinking about and murmuring, “My wife loves to read.”

That phrase came up again and again. Sometimes the speaker didn’t know what she liked. Sometimes he didn’t know if she would like this. That uncertainty was an opening. A free first chapter. A brief description. A story about the story. A QR code on the back. The book doesn’t have to be sold in that moment. It just has to be carried forward.

Connections are as important as sales.

The most interesting thing about non-book events is not the sales, though those can be surprisingly strong. It’s the diversity of the encounters. At a single table, you might speak to a former business owner, a young couple, a retiree, a child who wants to know how long it took you to write the book. You hear how people talk about reading when they are not surrounded by other readers. You learn which assumptions they bring with them—and which ones they don’t.

This is market research no survey can provide.

Another benefit is less pressure to perform. In a literary setting, authors often feel compelled to prove something—to sound accomplished, to justify their presence, to align themselves with a particular identity. In a non-book space, that pressure evaporates. You are simply an author who showed up. The confidence that comes from that simplicity is noticeable.

That doesn’t mean every event is a good fit. Distance matters. Cost matters. Energy matters. A two-day event that requires a hotel and barely breaks even is a different calculation than a one-day local event five minutes from home. Not every experiment should be repeated.

Experimentation itself is the point.

Authors who step outside traditional boundaries enter markets that are underexposed, underserved, and unexpectedly receptive. They also learn something else along the way: Readers have lives. They have interests aside from books, and family members who drag them along when they’d rather stay at home and read.

At non-book events, books get to speak. They are asked about, not pushed. In a culture increasingly allergic to salesmanship, that distinction may be the most valuable one an author can make.

Sometimes the best place to sell a book is the place no one thought to bring one.

And sometimes, that’s exactly why it works.