My Indie Pavilion Experience at the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books by Shirley Melis

Early Sunday afternoon I left NMBA Booth #150, pulling a wagonload of books and display signs to the Indie Pavilion for Fiction and Nonfiction Authors. (Indie authors are those who have been published by a publisher who is not one of the Big Five: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan.) Notified in December that my memoir, Banged-Up Heart, had been selected for the Pavilion, I arrived with books in hand and registered off-site on Friday, selecting my table in the Pavilion based only on the fact that the sun wouldn’t be in my eyes. Hours later, when I found the Indie Pavilion, I discovered two huge barrels of water adjacent to my table, anchoring the Pavilion tent. Thinking they might block me from the view of walkers passing by, I wished I’d selected another table.
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Fortunately, they weren’t a deterrent. Much to my surprise and delight, Ursula whom I’d met the day before while waiting in line to hear three authors discuss “The GOP’s Evolving Base,” brought a clutch of friends to meet me. Turned out it was her Tucson book club. When one of them asked if I would return to Tucson to discuss my book with them, I told her about the Sedona book club that had visited me in Santa Fe. “Let’s take a trip to Santa Fe to see Shirley and discuss her book,” she crowed. “That would be great!” I said.

“You should feel good about being in the Indie Pavilion,” Hillary, the Indie honcho said when I introduced myself. “We had 220 submissions for 100 spots. And most of them were memoir and poetry. Of course, we couldn’t have just memoir and poetry because we wanted a diverse representation of Indie authors. So, we had to make tough decisions.”

“I was surprised my book was selected because it’s seven years old,” I said.

“There was a SNAFU on our part. Every submission was supposed to have been published in the last two years but that copy got inexplicably dropped. So, Shirley, you should feel really good.”

I did, and I do. Being selected for the Indie Pavilion was an honor, not to mention an opportunity to sell a few books. I would encourage authors to keep an eye on the Tucson Festival of Books website and submit their books when submissions for 2025 open up.

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