Impromptu Signing in Waterstones

On Saturday I was mooching around the city centre, fine-tuning arrangements for the SketchCrawl, and I popped into Waterstones. I was amazed to see the shelves stacked with dozens of my books - normally I have to hunt out the odd copy here and there, generally well hidden, and buried beneath great piles of The Gruffalo!.

Turns out, they ordered loads of stock ready for my Christmas storytelling event but, because of the snow, most of it didn't arrive until afterwards.

My first thought was 'how lovely!', followed a millisecond later by 'I must get these all signed fast, so they stay put!'

If you're not in the book business yourself, you might not realise that getting your books stocked in shops is a very tricky business and, if a title doesn't

fly off the shelves, it generally gets returned to the publisher pretty smartish. However, signed books can't be returned (sneaky eh?)

Actually, signing the stock is great for the store too, especially if you draw pictures in, as it adds value, which makes the book extra special for the buyer as well - everyone's a winner! The manager of the children's dept in Sheffield Waterstones in really nice. He fetched me a table, chair and a Sharpie, and I did an impromptu signing session.

As browsing customers noticed me, I gave them a beaming smile, engaged their children in conversation and often managed to sell them a book (John says I'm shameless).

When I was done, Waterstones emptied a bookshelf and made a special display of all my signed books - Yahoo! Now all I need is for all you lovely people to get over there and buy them: oh, go on...