AWP 2026
The Broken River crew descended upon Baltimore at the beginning of the month to table up, sell some books, and perform at the readings that dominate the AWP nightlife.
Some of you reading this now met us there, so I needn’t get too much into what AWP is, but for those who don’t know: AWP is a big publishing conference that happens in a different city each year. It’s primarily run by university presses, MFA programs, and so on, but a lot of independent presses also show up. Many of those presses are founded by people with an academic background or at least an MFA.
Broken River stands apart in this way, I suppose, since none of us have a degree in writing, let alone a graduate degree in one. While we’ve been in the writing game for a long, long time (J David Osborne’s first novel came out in 2010 and my first novel came out in 2012), our jobs are all unrelated to literature.
So we stick out a bit at AWP.
I do think this is a secret to our success there.
Broken River at AWP, a history
The last time we went to AWP was in 2023. We all shared a single hotel room in the absolute shittiest hotel you could ever imagine. It was, truly, one of the funniest situations I’ve had in years. Kelby and I shot two short movies in the hotel. Rios and I stayed up all night talking about the show Community while everyone else tried to sleep.
We didn’t go to a single reading or offsite event. Didn’t care. Didn’t really go there to meet people or hangout with other writers. We went to Kansas City in 2023 for one single purpose:
To sell books.
I told the rest of the Broken River crew that we should aim to sell 100 books per day. I personally brought 150 copies of my books.
That number likely means little to you so let me tell you a story.
Selling at AWP
The first time I went to AWP was in 2012. This was quite the adventure for me since I had just gotten back from a year in Korea. I had no formal writing education. Didn’t even know many people in the writing game. Had never met any of them in person, even. But I tabled with a few presses that now, sadly, no longer even exist, and I watched as they sold probably forty books the entire three day conference. That is a generous estimation, mind. I honestly would not be surprised to learn that we had only sold ten books.
Why was that?
Well, to put it all quite simply, it’s because we sat behind our table and waited for people to show interest in us, in our books. Since these were two small, indie presses, very few people had heard of them. And the ones who had didn’t really spend money because many writers are not there to spend money but to shop their manuscript to potential indie presses, even ones they’ve never heard of.
Despite paying for a table and paying to have books printed and paying to travel sometimes across the country to be at AWP, I never witnessed anyone at AWP who was really trying to sell books. Because of this, I would guess that none of the presses there even sell 100 books over the course of the whole weekend. I believe Eraserhead Press sold about 130 books one year that I was at AWP and I was absolutely shocked by that.
130 books! What an inconceivable number! Every other press I tabled at struggled to sell ten books in a day.
What AWP really was, I learned, was a networking opportunity. A place for people who knew one another online to come together in a real place and have some fun. And it was fun!
I went back in 2013 (where I met JDO and Rios de la Luz), 2014, and 2015 but only because it was in Minneapolis, where I live. For me, AWP stopped being worth the expense and this was also around the time I abandoned social media for several years.
Back to AWP 2023
Because AWP is mostly geared towards MFA programs and academic publishers, many of the attendees wandering the convention are looking for a certain kind of book. Poetry, short story collections, creative nonfiction, memoirs, and novels. For all of these, the genre they’re looking for is Literary.
That’s not us.
So why did I think we could sell 100 books per day?
I’d done the Twin Cities Book Festival a few times by then, and I sold 50-70 books by myself during the course of a single day. I knew that if one of the other writers was at the table with me, we’d have sold even more.
And because AWP is so geared towards a certain kind of book, this actually gives us an advantage.
When you go somewhere with 400 vendors and everyone is selling a variation of the same product, it all washes together. You stop even being able to process all the things you looked at, all the books you thought about buying, but then someone shouts something at you to break you out of this haze.
Do you like weird books?
Your eyes open wide for a moment and you laugh. You turn to see my goofy face waving you over to our table where I show you cyberpunk vampire hunting, crime cosmic horror, water witches at the US/Mexico border, Walmart Noir, cannibal horror, and our table is just full of books stretching from the literary to the absolutely bonkers.
In this way, you remember us. You remember our table. And because we talk to you, pull you out of that stream of human bodies, you’re more likely to open your wallet.
After all, you came to AWP to find new books, to stretch your literary horizons.
And so we did sell 100 books per day, totaling to 309 books in Kansas City. We sold out of a bunch of books and I personally sold 100 of my own books.
Was good. Made the significant expense of going to Kansas with a car full of books worth the trip.
We didn’t go to AWP in LA because the cost to go there was too high. No chance of breaking even, let alone turning a profit on the trip. And since we weren’t going to AWP to network, we decided to just stay home.
But then AWP was announced in David Simmons’ backyard and we had to go to Baltimore.
Baltimore
I told everyone that I wanted us to sell 400 books this time. I knew we could get there because what’s 100 more books, yeah? But this time we also had our hometown hero David Simmons with us.
David picked me up from the airport that Wednesday morning and drove me to his house in West Baltimore. Along the way, he showed me certain neighborhoods around Baltimore, told me some of the history.
Over the course of the long weekend, I do feel I got a nice flavor of Baltimore. Got a brisket sandwich at an old school deli, some tacos at a nice little spot, and so on. Got to taste some different neighborhoods and parts of the city, which I really appreciated. This is the benefit of going places with locals.
When I was at AWP in Boston and Seattle, I didn’t learn shit! Just bounced from the convention to readings to bars on repeat until I went home.
I have a few takeaways about the people of Baltimore:
Baltimoreans are among the most bizarre drivers I’ve ever seen
The people of Baltimore are real nice!
Anyway, back to the convention. We set up and prepared to rock the next day, but first we went to a reading that night to witness David Simmons knock the crowd out with his reading. Ran into a few fellas I’ve known for a long time too, which is always nice.
The nights repeated this way. Every reading David did was the best reading of the night, somehow topping himself each time. This is significant because if you’ve ever been to a literary reading you know that they are almost uniformly dogshit and boring as hell.
David, on the other hand, understands something that only a few others seem to, which is that a reading is a performance. And my man just burns up there on stage, making people in the crowd squirm or cackle and sometimes both at the same time.
Big shoutout to Mark Wadley from Bruiser Magazine who put on some great events.
During the days, we hocked our wares until I lost my voice, which happened earlier and earlier each day. The first day, we sold about 130 books, but then hit a bit of a lull the second day and only sold 90 or so. By this point, I’d already sold out of one of my books, though I’d also brought about 150 books in total.
We had a long way to go for the final day, but that’s also the day they open the convention to the public. And here we started a frenzy. Within minutes of opening for the day, we sold ten books, and the rest of the day was a blur of me carnival barking people to the table until we sold out of Kelby’s books and then Grant’s and then some of David’s books.
And by the end of the day, we crept past 400 and I sold about 110 of my own books.
Was quite an exciting AWP! There were a few people who came back to our table multiple times. I believe someone ended up buying six or seven of our books, which has to be some kind of record. We had people return to tell us they’d already read half of our book, ready for more.
Where Next?
We have several events coming up with possibly many more to come.
April 18-19, I’ll be at the Rewind Book Fair in St Paul, MN
April 26th, J David Osborne and Rios de la Luz will be at the Tulsa LitFest in Tulsa, OK
May 2nd, I’ll be at the Lakefly Book Fair in Oshoksh, WI
July 11th, I’ll be at the Inbound Bookfair for Adults in St Paul, MN
October 3rd, I’ll be at the Deep Valley Book Festival in Mankato, MN
Expect more book events to be announced and with other members of the Broken River crew!