Thirty-nine vendors, most with roots in Niagara, paid for tables at a new annual book expo Sunday to reach readers who will never find their work on a shelf at Indigo or through an Amazon search.
The inaugural Niagara-on-the-Lake Book Expo ran June 7 at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Community Centre, organized by Vendors Market Canada under Uzo Kanu, who runs pop-up markets across Ontario.
About 75 per cent of vendors had a Niagara connection, said Nadine Lewis-Stewart, who co-ordinated the event. Children’s authors, historical fiction writers, poets and self-published authors filled the free-entry expo, and two vendors have already signed up for next year.
Bradley Ellis, a children’s author and former EFL/ESL teacher, said table fees, stock costs and travel expenses consume every sale, and a poor day can leave an author further behind than when they walked in.
“If you don’t go, your books stay in your house,” said Ellis. “So you have to be ready to accept the fact that every time you walk in, today could be wonderful, today could be total pig swell. There’s no way to know.”
Ellis said he cares about more than just sales, and that getting children to read matters more than which author they read.
“Every child is like a kernel of popcorn,” he said. “They all go in the same pot. Each one pops when it’s ready.”
Mark Wilkie came to the expo with his debut historical fiction novel, “Before the Guns Roar,” a five-part series tracing espionage and political tensions along the Niagara corridor from Fort Erie to Fort George in the years before the War of 1812.
Wilkie said readers in Niagara are the natural audience for a book set in their own backyard, and events like this are the only reliable way to put it in front of them.
“My thing is keeping the history alive,” said Wilkie. “A lot of kids don’t know really what happened.”
Sarah Mitchell, an attendee who purchased two local history books and a Niagara-based historical novel, said reading about a place she knows changes the experience.
“When you’ve walked those streets yourself, the book feels different,” she said.
Mitchell reads eight to 10 hours a week and believes competition for attention is pushing people toward shorter and shorter content.
“The best way to get people back into reading is to stop treating it like homework,” she said. “Let people read what they actually enjoy.”
Michael Chen, a software developer from St. Catharines who bought a poetry collection, said he would put a book back on the shelf if he found out it was heavily AI-generated.
“Part of reading is connecting with another person’s perspective,” he said. “That’s the whole point, and something about knowing its AI just can take me out of it.”
Hamilton poet Darrell Epp made the same argument from the author’s side, saying books rooted in specific human experience are the one thing corporate culture and AI cannot replicate.
“People here wrote a book for some reason, something they felt passionate about, something they wanted to share,” said Epp. “That’s like a little pocket of the human experience that AI and the billionaires can’t touch.”
Lewis-Stewart said a first-year event lives or dies on word of mouth, and for vendors, walking away with at least one good conversation is a success in itself.
“You can go to Coles, but if you’re looking for something particular, you’re gonna miss some of these folks here,” she said.
Lewis-Stewart said she plans to build a referral network from the vendor list, connecting readers with specific requests to matching authors. The expo is planned to return annually.
