Search for advice on attending AWP and you will find plenty of it. There are guides for graduate students on how to network, guides for poets on how to survive the crowds, guides for anyone on how to carry fewer books home than they arrived with. What you will not find, if you search for it the way we did before our first year exhibiting, is much of anything written for the small press standing behind the table rather than walking past it. That gap is real, and it is strange, given how many small and nonprofit presses exhibit every year. This is our attempt to fill part of it, based on what we have learned running an exhibitor table as a two person operation with a nonprofit budget.
The AWP Conference and Bookfair is the largest literary gathering in North America, with more than six hundred exhibitors and thousands of attendees moving through the bookfair floor over four days. The 2027 conference will be held March 17 through 20 in Chicago, at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, marking AWP's sixtieth anniversary. For a press our size, that scale is both the opportunity and the problem. You are one table among hundreds, run by people who mostly have day jobs, competing for attention against university presses with paid staff and established houses with marketing budgets we will never have. None of that means the investment is not worth it. It means the investment has to be made deliberately, which is the entire point of this guide.
Book Your Table Early
Every year, exhibitor space and early registration pricing open long before most small presses start thinking seriously about the conference. Early bird pricing for a table typically runs through the fall before the March conference, and the difference between early and standard pricing is significant enough to matter for a budget our size. Treat this the way you would treat a grant deadline, not a soft suggestion. Put the date on your calendar the moment the prior year's conference ends, because by the time flyers and social posts remind you, the discount window has usually closed.
Booking early also gives you first pick of table placement, which matters more than most first time exhibitors expect. A table near a high traffic aisle, an entrance, or a well known anchor press can meaningfully change how much foot traffic finds you across four days. If your press has a specific niche, whether that is regional writing, a particular form, or work in translation, it is worth reaching out to the bookfair organizers directly to ask whether tables are grouped thematically that year. A few minutes of email can save you from being tucked into a corner of the floor that nobody walks through until the final hour on the last day.
A Booth That Doesn't Look Corporate
Most exhibitors at AWP use the same folding table, the same tablecloth, and the same single sign propped against a stack of books. It works, in the sense that nothing about it actively drives people away, but it also means nothing about it draws anyone in. A small press has one real advantage over a large one at a bookfair: you can make your table look and feel like an actual place, not a franchise outpost. Bring something that signals craft before anyone reads a single title. A fine art edition displayed open under a small light. A single framed print of a cover. Anything that tells a browsing attendee, in under three seconds, that what happens at this table is different from what happens at the tables on either side of it.
Signage should do more work than a logo and a list of titles. State plainly what kind of press you are and what you are looking for, whether that is submissions, sales, or both. A line as simple as open reading, year round tells a poet standing three feet away exactly what to do next, which is more useful to you than a beautifully designed logo they will forget within the hour.
Bring something that tells a browsing attendee, in under three seconds, that this table is different from the ones on either side of it.
Decide What to Actually Bring
Shipping books to a conference is expensive, and shipping unsold books home again is worse. Bring fewer titles than you think you need, and bring more copies of your strongest one or two than you think you need. Attendees at AWP are far more likely to buy a book they can flip through and feel drawn into on the spot than to remember a title from a table they passed on day one and come back for it on day three. Concentrate your inventory on the books that photograph well, read well from a random opened page, and represent your press's identity most clearly.
If you produce fine art or limited editions, as many small presses do, bring one to display and none to sell off the table. These objects exist to be seen and discussed, not moved in volume at a bookfair, and treating them as a display piece rather than inventory both protects them physically and reframes the conversation you have with anyone who stops to look. It becomes a conversation about the press's values rather than a transaction, and those conversations are frequently the ones that lead to submissions, donations, or partnerships later.
Build a Realistic Staffing Plan
Four days on a bookfair floor is physically harder than it sounds, and running a table alone for that entire stretch is not sustainable if you also want to attend any panels, meet with authors, or have a single real conversation that is not interrupted by someone needing change for a twenty. If your press is a one or two person operation, recruit help. Board members, volunteer readers, and authors whose books you are actively selling are all reasonable people to ask, and most will say yes if you ask early and are specific about the hours you need covered.
Build a shift schedule before you arrive, not once you are already there. Two hour blocks are usually manageable even for a single volunteer, and having a schedule means everyone knows in advance when they are free to walk the floor themselves, which matters for morale over four long days. It also means the table is never left unattended during peak hours, which happens more often than exhibitors like to admit.
Schedule Signings on Purpose
If any of your authors are attending, plan signings and short readings at your table well in advance, and promote them the same way you would promote any other event. A scheduled fifteen minute signing gives you a reason to post on social media beforehand, gives the author a reason to bring their own network to your table, and gives passersby a specific moment to plan around rather than a vague sense that something might be happening if they linger. Coordinate timing with any official readings or panels your authors are part of elsewhere at the conference, so you are not competing with your own author's other commitment for the same hour.
Where possible, pair a signing with a small, specific incentive: a discount that only applies during that window, or a limited number of copies signed and numbered on the spot. None of this needs a budget. It needs a plan made two months out rather than a sign taped to the table that morning.
Budget Like a Nonprofit
Exhibiting at AWP is a real expense for a small press: the table fee, travel, lodging in a conference city for four or five nights, shipping books both directions, and the printing costs of anything new you produce for the occasion. Build a realistic budget well before early bird pricing closes, and treat book sales at the table as a partial offset rather than the point of the trip. Very few small presses break even on sales alone once travel and lodging are counted honestly. The actual return on an AWP table is usually in submissions, relationships with booksellers and other presses, and visibility that pays off over the following year, not in cash recovered on site.
Organizations like the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Independent Book Publishers Association sometimes offer shared exhibitor spaces, cooperative tables, or discounted group rates for member presses, which can meaningfully reduce the cost of a first year at the conference. It is worth checking both well before you commit to a solo table, particularly if your list is still small enough that a full table of your own titles would look sparse.
The Follow Up That Matters Most
The actual value of AWP is rarely visible while you are standing at the table. It shows up afterward, in the submissions that arrive over the following months from poets who picked up a flyer, in the bookseller who remembered your table and orders a title for their shelves, in the other small press editor you traded contact information with while both your tables were quiet at the same slow hour. None of that value materializes on its own. It requires follow up, done quickly, while the conversation is still fresh in the other person's memory rather than buried under a hundred other business cards.
Set aside a specific afternoon within a week of returning home to send every promised follow up: submission guidelines to poets who asked, ordering information to booksellers who expressed interest, and a short note to anyone you want to stay in touch with. This is unglamorous work compared to designing a booth or planning a signing, but it is very often the difference between a conference that generated real relationships and one that generated four exhausting days and a stack of unsold books. If you are a poet reading this rather than a publisher, our guide to submitting your work covers the other side of exactly this conversation, and our open reading runs year round, conference or no conference.
None of this is complicated, and none of it requires a budget larger than the one most small presses already have. What it requires is treating an AWP table the way you would treat any other significant investment of a nonprofit's limited time and money: with a plan made months in advance, rather than a scramble made the week before. We wrote down what worked for us because we could not find anyone else who had written it down first. If your press learns something different at your own table, we would genuinely like to hear it, because the next version of this guide should reflect more than one press's four days on one bookfair floor.
