Meet local authors at book signing and pop-up shop

Being a self-publisher has its advantages – your book gets published when you want and you have the final say in the look, feel and actual wording. The downside is you don’t get help in the marketing department. Two groups of Ballard authors have formed this holiday season to market their books – one will be holding a book signing tonight, the other is opening a pop-up shop.

Ballard Authors Collective: The Ballard Authors Collective is a group of 17 local authors (author list here) who are joining the trend of small writing groups that are popping up around the country. Some are self-published, others are not. Joshua McNichols, author of The Urban Farm Handbook, is part of the group. He says that this group allows them get out and meet the people buying their books. “These groups manage to do something large publishing houses fail to do: speak authentically from a real, face-to-face community,” he says. “Ask any book marketer – they’re struggling to infuse their marketing with that kind of authenticity.”

Secret Garden Books (2214 NW Market St), longtime supporters of local authors, is hosting a book signing by the Ballard Authors Collective tonight from 7 to 8 p.m.

Vanity Book Fair pop-up shop: The Vanity Book Fair pop-up shop and art installation will open this Saturday from 1 to 9 p.m. in the lower level of the Kress Building (2220 NW Market St), next to Bop Street Records. Along with the authors below, sip hot apple cider and nosh on savory snacks provided by Patty Pan.

Local self-published authors include:

Devra Gartenstein, blogger at QuirkyGourmet.com, will be on hand to sign her latest book, Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and share the history, politics and sociology of food for feasting and fetishizing. Her first book The Accidental Vegan emerged from her experiences as a farmer’s market vendor.

Iconoclastic filmmaker Karl Krogstad will showcase selections from his 65 films and have on hand signed copies of his book, Shot to Death: How and Why Karl Krogstad Makes Films. Art in Karl’s hands is a living animal: evasive, feral, wild and free.

Jostelyn Younger’s The Blue Dress Conspiracy: Tea Party Rules is the best lil’ civics lesson in Texas, or thereabouts. When President Jedediah Bouche is unleashed in the year 2020, all bets are off on whether this fascist futuristic fantasy is a dystopia or a utopia, but the hilarity of the romp through recent political history is unanimous.

Michael Matewauk is fixated on finding the facts about Mark Twain, and makes a modern pilgrimage, exposing deep conspiracy (or creating it on the fly) in his literary debut, My Summer of Magnified English*: A Serio-tragic Odyssey Into the Heart of Celebrations Commemorating the Centennial of Mark Twain’s Death — *Against the Background of a Wamongo-sized Oil Spill.

The pop-up shop will be open on the weekends through January from 1 to 8 p.m. They will be closed on Christmas day.