For Our Creative Partners

Welcome New Mexico Authors and Illustrators!

Event Guidelines

We love events! Events make our job more like a perpetual party. However, we don't love flop events. (Booooo hiss!) So here are the steps to avoid flops and make your event a party.

We select event books with the same care that we lavish on the rest of our inventory. We are a kids' bookstore, and we make effort to tie everything we do to connecting kids with books — no, it's not just a cute slogan; it's what we do. Events for books that do not fit in with our inventory simply do not do well in our store.

Here is a handy list of things we carry:

• Picture Books — fiction and non-fiction
• Leveled Readers
• Workbooks and Activity Books
• Chapter Books and Early Readers
  - fiction and non-fiction
• Middle Grade and Teen-interest Non-fiction Specialties
  • New Mexico & the West
  • History & Culture
  • Sciences, Math & Technology
  • Cooking & Gardening
  • Art, Craft & Hobbies
• Poetry
• Middle Grade and Teen-interest Fiction
  • Teen Issues / Coming of Age Fiction
  • World Literature
  • Fantasy & Supernatural
  • Science Fiction
  • Historical Fiction
  • Classics & Award-winners
  • Mystery, Adventure & Thrillers, Western Fiction

While this list is not completely inclusive (we have over 60,000 things in our store on average), it is representative. And if your book does not fit well in this list, then there are better markets for you to explore than our humble store.

You may notice that three major adult-market categories are not included in this list — Travel, Biography, and Self-help (includes such diverse topics as spirituality, business and most health books). We simply do not carry Travel and Self-help books. We have biographies of people that kids may want to research, split into their representative topical sections. We do not carry general memoirs and avoid celebrity bios.

To Schedule An Event

Typically, our calendar is booked out well over two months in advance with weekend dates filling up first. We must send out publicity information no later than 3 weeks before the event date. Thus it is best to schedule your event rather sooner than later.

We will need this information from you:

• Publisher
• Book information, at minimum an ISBN
• Your professional contact(s) and web address(es)
• A review copy of your book
• Optional, but highly recommended:
  a recent photo and a high-resolution book cover image

Once Your Event Is Scheduled

Promote! Promote! Promote! Post your book event everywhere (Facebook, websites, public information walls, light poles.). Annoy friends and family and strangers on the street with repeated invites. Supply cheap giveaways like postcards or better yet, bookmarks, with your book cover and contact information. (Pester your publicist or editor for publisher-supplied freebies. It's their job.)

If there is a way to sell up your event (in retail-ese), let us know. If there is a theme that we can exploit, we can work with you to provide food or decorations. If you have a multi-media presentation, especially for illustrated books, all the better. If you can turn your book talk into a workshop, people will come in droves.

For Self-publishers

We do not do consignment. Trust us on this one; it is a tax and inventory nightmare that can easily be avoided. We will buy your books, treating you just like our other vendors.

Simply provide us with:

• a NM CRS number or FEIN so that a resale certificate can be issued (so you don't have to collect NM gross receipts tax)
• a typical retail trade discount on your books
• returnable status on your books
• NET-30 terms
• a review copy of your book

A few basic tips on packaging:

• Make sure your book has a printed spine! Otherwise, it is invisible on our shelves.
• Hire an editor. Bad spelling, grammar, construction, plotting, whatever is simply not allowed.
• Book covers matter! If you don't have design skills, find someone who does.
• We don't sell e-books and probably never will.

We can provide event space and publicity for a book event if you choose to sell your own books direct to our customers. We will not be able to run these transactions through our registers, so you must provide credit card readers/recorders and change. Since space is at a premium in our store, we may also ask for an event coordinating fee of $100 for events of this nature.