Nobody showed up to a best-selling author's book launch. She called it a 'career low point' but found out she's far from alone.

• Suzanne Young, an author who's done national tours, spent a year writing her 22nd novel.
• But nobody turned up to the launch event at the NYT-best-selling writer's local indie bookstore.

After spending a year writing her 22nd novel, Suzanne Young had planned out its launch event at her local independent bookstore in Tempe, Arizona.

Young — who writes fiction for teens, including a New York Times bestseller and has done dozens of book signings – was excited.

"The bookstore did a great job advertising it," she told Insider. "They had sent it out on their newsletter. They tweeted about it. People were commenting that they would be there."

The launch signing event for her new book, "In Nightfall," was on March 28. It's a fantasy-mystery that her publisher, Penguin Random House, describes as "'The Lost Boys' meets 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'"

Young said she had bought "little favors" for the guests — candy, postcards, and heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones featured on the book's cover.

But when the doors opened, nobody turned up.

Young was shocked, then devastated.

"It was very confusing at first because we were like, 'I think people said they were coming? Did we post the right time? Did we post the right date?'"

Young told Insider she went to the bathroom and "cried just a little bit to get it all out."

The event went ahead with no audience and the store's staff asking her questions about the book. They offered to post a picture of her online without mentioning the absent attendees.

"I think that's what most people would've done," Young said. "But I didn't — maybe I was feeling too sorry for myself."

Instead, Young tweeted a picture of the 17 empty chairs, describing the moment as a "career low point" and saying she was "crying my entire way home."

"The next morning, I woke up and I was so embarrassed. Like, I should delete that tweet before people see it and see that no one showed up to my event," she told Insider. "I definitely let my emotions get the better of me."

To her surprise, Twitter rallied behind her as other authors, musicians, and stand-up comics shared stories and pictures of their own no-show events.

Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Alex Rider series, described the experience as "a rite of passage." The "MythBusters" host Kari Byron assured her that it happened to everyone, adding a heart emoji. Charles Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, said: "Every author has had a version of this!"

Young's tweet had been seen nearly 8 million times as of Friday, according to Twitter.

Another New York Times best-seller author, Michael Northrop, replied with a picture of his event from October 2015 where no one turned up.

"Her photo was so similar to mine that, seeing it, I felt the same little gut punch all over again," he said.

He said that in his experience, bookstore launch events had been "hit or miss — some packed, some empty, most in between."

The day after his empty event, he said he visited a school where "hundreds of really enthusiastic kids" engaged with his book, which was "joyful".

"It just drove home the point that so much of it is situational and out of our control, and one event is never as make-or-break as it feels," Northrop added.

Young teaches English part time online. "That's how I wrote this book — every night, every weekend, every day off, I was working on this," she said.

Book launches are "usually a build-up of several days of events," Young said, but she wanted to do only one event for "In Nightfall," saying that the marketing and promotion required a lot of effort.

She feels the launch week of a book is the most important time because it "sets the tone of how the book will do," she said, adding: "It's hard to keep a book in bookstores — it has to sell well."

Young said she would market an event differently next time: Some of her social media followers said they hadn't seen posts about it, which Young put down to ever-changing algorithms.

"Now I know I should also be reaching out to local papers, local schools, trying to really think outside the box," she said.

She'll consider virtual events in future, saying that this was her first book launch since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her no-show tweet has given the book attention. Young said she'd had to ask the local Barnes & Noble to buy more copies for her to sign and that the book sold out on Amazon UK "within the first few hours." One British school principal has asked her to visit and give a talk.

She said she's glad her tweet exposed how common it was to hold events where no one shows up.

"That's probably the absolute best thing that could've happened," she said, adding that she hoped it made readers remember "to support the people that we want to read more from."