Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 8 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
Well I didn't know what a street fair was and I didn't want to go but they dragged me out and I got some folding tables and set up a little stand . . . and sold 30 books. This was in May 1974 when the book was selling for ten dollars. So I said, "Wow! Three hundred dollars!" And I was really glad to get the money because we were kind of desperate at that time.
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So the next week they were having the Locust Blossom Festival in Kendrick and I went over there and set up my folding tables again and I sold 30 more books. I was so excited!
Then I saw a poster advertising another festival in a town 120 miles away so I drove down there and set up the tables and sold 30 more books. By then I was really hooked. I was really getting into this thing. I was turning into a carny bug.
So I asked the hot dog man and the cotton candy man, "Hey, where are you going next week?" And they'd tell me, "Well, there's this going on and that going on," because, you know, that's how they do it. They tell each other. When you're working carnivals and festivals it's just like you belonged to a big happy family.
And I joined that family—I've written extensively about my travels in the sixth edition of the Recipe Book—and I kept meeting a lot of the same people week after week after week as we all traveled around to the same fairs and other gatherings. I did rock festivals and church fairs and went just about anywhere there were people. I'd go and I'd pass out my brochures and I'd sell books.
OK. At first I just went out on Saturdays. Then I heard about the bigger fairs that lasted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So I began doing them and I was driving home and frantically freezing peas and trying to get the milk cow straightened out because she and my husband could never understand each other. And I did that almost all summer. Three days out and two days driving and the rest of the time at home trying to catch up . . . and I started to get sick. It was really getting to me because I was driving all night going out and all night coming back and I wasn't getting any sleep two nights of the week.
So Mike and I talked it over and we decided that I was just going to have to go out and stay out. Which I hated to do, so I started going out for three weeks at a time and then coming back.
This worked pretty good because I could go to a county fair and set up for five days and do $1,000 worth of business. I was really getting my money's worth out of the driving. And I was learning to use publicity to make the whole thing pay off even more.
See, when I first started to peddle the book I didn't know that radio and TV and newspapers could help me sell it. But, after a while, I found that I could tell the media I was coming and—if I was lucky—I'd get a newspaper interview or maybe a couple of spots on the radio when I got into the town that was having the festival. And that's the way it went until the end of the summer, when I ran out of county fairs.
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