My back really started hurting on Friday as the last of the muscle relaxants I took for the flight left my system. So Gene did more selling than I. I spend a significant part of the day curled up on the floor in a corner of the exhibit hall reading an Advanced Reader's Edition of Apathy and other small victories by Paul Neilan, which had me giggling maniacally in way that occasionally disturbed passers by. I also walked around the hall a bit, and ended up having an impromptu meeting with our rep from Diamond. Lots of interesting stuff happening there which I can't report on quite yet.

When I was at the booth business was strong. Jennifer Ross, a friend of a friend, came by to help with the final few hours, and Maurice stopped by at the end. With their help I got through the last hour without Gene, who left to catch his plane.

I'm not sure what lessons to take away from PLA. Our sales broke all our conference records. Partly that's the people at this conference - public librarians are some large percentage of our readership. Partly it's because we brought a very wide selection of our merchandise - everything we sell actually - and so we maximized our appeal to everyone who walked by the booth. We had an aggressive conference pricing structure which encouraged people to buy multiple items, and I saw this upsell strategy work again and again, turning a single t-shirt sale into two shirts and a book. And of course we just have a bigger audience now, which means more direct sales to readers, and more readers sending their friends over to see what the fuss is all about.

Whatever the reasons, we are grateful for all the folks who stopped by to lend encouragement, buy stuff, and tell us funny and disturbing library stories. We had a great time.