This morning I’m thinking about selling books.

I’m going to be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend, March 2nd and 3rd, in a booth with my friend Lisa Watson. We call ourselves the Pirate and the Poet. (I’m the pirate. Did I mention that I wrote a book? Here it is.) I’m going to be trying to sell my book, in person, to random passersby.

I have no idea how to do that.

I know how to write. I know how to talk about writing.  I know how to describe the book quickly — it’s about an Irish pirate who travels through time from the 1600s to 2011, and ends up in Florida —  and how to do it more extensively. I have some comparable authors for my writing style, and some comparable books and movies for the themes and ideas of it.

But I don’t know how to sell it.

This is an ongoing problem, and I know it’s not just my problem. I’ve written four novels, and tried to get all of them published, tried to get all of them picked up by agents, and it’s never worked. I’ve never been able to sell my own stories well enough to get disinterested people to want them. Oh, I can sell books to people who know me; that’s always been my audience. But I can’t make the jump from friends  and family, to general public. I’ve been trying for fifteen years, and so far, pretty much nothin’.

So this weekend, I’m going to try again. I’ve got a booth, I’ve got a big sign, I’ve got bookmarks with my name and the book title printed on them. I’ve got 30 copies of my book ready to go. I’ve got a Square for my phone so I can take credit cards, and I’ve applied for both a sales tax reporting code and a business license (which it turns out I didn’t need– but I applied for it anyway!). I’ve even got a pirate hat and a decent pirate accent that I’m going to bust out for the people who come up to the booth and say, “Where’s the pirate?”

I am looking forward to this. My wife and my friends have told me that the worst that could happen is I spend time at a book festival, with my friends, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who love books. They’re right, and I want to do that  — though the introvert in me wants to hide, hates the thought of spending my whole weekend out among people, wants to prepare every possible convenience to take with me so I have almost all of the comforts of home. But they’re also wrong, because the worst that could happen is that nothing even remotely hopeful comes of this: that nobody stops at my booth, that nobody asks about the book, that nobody buys it (other than my students, whom I appreciate for their support, but they’re still in my regular audience of “People who buy my books because they know me.), that this is yet another dead end in a career of them.

I don’t think that’s likely. But I can’t say it’s not possible.

Wish me luck.