Sumie Kawakami joined us at Wordstock to sign copies of her new book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly.

This was the first time Chin Music had a stand-alone booth at a book fair. Now that we have four titles, it makes sense, and it makes it a lot easier to get into conversations about the vision of the company as well as the stories inside each book.

The weekend was a success, not just because we sold a lot of books, but because Sumie was able to talk to potential readers, and because we were able to finally display the four gorgeous covers by Craig on one table. We were inundated with "how beautiful" all weekend. It was exciting for us to see how those four covers lured people to our booth. Brother Dave, manning our booth at the New Orleans Bookfair, echoed our thoughts. A few of the comments we heard give a sense of the reaction to Craig's work:

"This is exactly what the Internet can't do."

"I don't normally judge a book by its cover, but in this case ..."

"You should charge people to pet these books."

"I'm not even interested in the topic of this book, but I want to buy it just to have on my shelf."

But Jay Gatsby we're not. Our books are both beautiful and worth reading. The conversations Sumie was having with women at the festival were intense and earnest. Not once, I slinked away to go bother Eli Horowitz at the McSweeney's booth, who was just behind the curtain from us, or go talk to the very good folks at Two Dollar Radio.