Our first day of the Book Fair

Today was the start of the Book Fair proper. In the morning, there was a Singapore Book Industry seminar entitled ‘Get Rich With Books’, which was attended by Joseph, Susan, Shin and Yek Yee. It was a good opportunity to network with distributors and Joseph was even approached by aspiring writers once they heard he was a publisher! One of the other publishers based in Singapore came over to visit our booth after the seminar and said that he was impressed with our displays and book covers and congratulated us.

At 2pm, the doors to the Book Fair opened and people started to trickle in. Ben, David, Chia, Joseph, Susan and I were officially on duty during the first shift but there were quite a few of us in our spanking new KMP ‘Dharma that Bites’ T-shirts as you can see in the photo above, which was taken at the start of the Fair!

Our booth was in the ‘Books of Special Interest’ section, near the Chinese Books area, so we deduced that many English speaking potential customers may not venture down our end. So Susan, Paris and Irene stood outside the booth and took turns wandering through the halls, distributing bookmarks and inviting people to visit our booth, while I happily stayed put and played cashier.

The crowd was expectedly quiet as it was still a working day and school holidays hadn’t started yet. Our friend, Nan, who works in PR had kindly sent out our press release on our behalf and visited our booth in the evening. Sheila, who had introduced us to Nan, also came with her mum and it was lovely to see her again after so long! She is a Hindu priestess and we had shared many long nights discussing spirituality and the meaning of life.

Bigger crowds are expected tomorrow onwards. At the end of the day, which finished at 10pm, total takings were SGD522, which was considered by all to be a fairly respectable figure. As usual, we made a dedication and prayed that the next day would bring more people to the Dharma through Rinpoche’s teachings.