Today LSU played Alabama. At LSU.

Today was also the day that I was scheduled to do a signing at the LSU bookstore.

Oh. My. God. Can you say "fucking mob?"

Somehow, through some bizarre combination of miracles and my oh-so-sparkling personality, I managed to actually sell 7 books. For the first half of the signing I had the insanely long register line snaking right in front of my table, which made it pretty impossible to get much traffic past the table. You would think that having a captive audience of people who were forced to stand in front of you would make it easier to pitch the book, but it just didn't work that way at all. First off, whenever I gave my little, "Hey, do you like SF?" pitch, the next six people in line could hear it too, so it was pretty darn silly to try to repeat it to the next person in line whenever the line inched forward. Moreover, most people gave me the perfunctory nod and smile (this is the south, so most people won't snub you outright), but then would turn their attention forcibly Elsewhere. At least three times people turned away and actually perched their butts on the edge of my table. Gee, thanks, guys.

About halfway through, the manager came up and asked me if I wanted to move to the front of the store, since the person who was doing a signing up there had left. I leaped on the opportunity and gladly moved, but discovered that instead of people being stuck in front of the table, instead I had a mob of people pouring into the store, with little desire to stop and browse. Sigh. Oh well.

To be honest, this was really a very poor audience for this sort of book (and the manager agreed with me on this.) This was a football crowd, and if the book had had "Writers of the Future of LSU football" on the cover, I'd have sold fifty copies. It's actually a very nice bookstore, and when the time comes that I have a book of my own I'll definitely set up a signing there.

But it sure as hell won't be on a game day, that's for sure.