My weird book launch party

Thomas once said that an author’s book launch party should be weird (unique to you and your book.) I knew I wanted to host an in-person party, but it took me a while to figure out how to make it unique. I thought I’d share what I did in case it gives other people ideas.

Location - The book is a sci fi novel with a desert setting. Since I live nowhere near the desert, location was an initial challenge. I didn’t just want to hold it at my house. I searched venue rentals in my area and found a photography studio/gathering place that was easy to customize (I used peerspace.com, and it worked well.) Then I used my own decorations and ambient music to match it to the theme. The studio even had these cool rolling walls, so one of them doubled as a photo backdrop. It worked great!

Activity - I wanted something for my guests to do besides buy books, so I set up a sand art table. There’s a fantasy mineral in the book, so I made a display describing the different types of this mineral and the properties of each. This let me bring some of my world-building into the party and made a better tie-in to the sand art than just the desert theme.

Refreshments - I wanted to keep these to a minimum, but I made a tea recipe inspired by one I learned overseas, and labeled it as one of the fictional teas from the book. This was a good option for people who weren’t into sand art. The tea table, craft, and book table worked really well, because people were either making sand art or hanging out drinking fantasy tea while others were at the book table talking to me. I didn’t have to be engaging with everybody at once.

Overall I was really happy with how it turned out. My only regret is that I would’ve like to plan it earlier because I could’ve invited more people, but my timing was affected by needing to order multiple rounds of proofs before the print books were ready. In the future I’ll give myself more buffer.

Added some pictures below: