Fandom Fest Show report

by john | Jul 3, 2012 | Uncategorized

This will be a weak-ass show report, largely because I was mostly focused on living the show and not a whole lot on taking a ton of pictures and recording stuff. I don’t do very well at striking a balance, I either veer to one side or the other. So I either have an awesome post-show report and didn’t really get much done at the con besides take pictures, or I have a great time, get a lot accomplished and don’t have shit for photos.

This con I got a LOT done. There will be two new episodes of Literate Liquors to come out of the con, one featuring the lovely Janice Hardy, who happened to wander through the break room at the Galt House during a shooting and I roped her into the interview. The other is the awesome Richard Kadrey, who I actually scheduled an interview with. Richard is the author of the Sandman Slim series of urban fantasy books, and if you haven’t read those, then for God’s sake get yourself to a bookstore post haste and buy that shit. It’s completely amazing and I’m only proud of myself for managing to be not too much of a fanboy while discussing the books and booze with Richard.

But I had a great time at Fandom Fest/Fright Night Film Fest. As I said on Facebook in a group for us writer types, this is rapidly becoming a con where I get business done. I sell a few books, sure, but the biggest deals were cut at dinner and at bars, and there were quite a few deals struck that I can’t talk about yet because we’re working out the details, but let it suffice to say that after the conversations I had this weekend I plan to be working with my current publisher for at least the next five years on at least two different projects, and I have five projects of varying sizes percolating within the next eighteen months with a completely different publisher. So I got a lot of work accomplished.

I was programmed pretty heavily, which I love. I was on two panels with Deb Dixon, my editor and the publisher at Bell Bridge Books. People like to put the self-pub guy who’s transitioning to trad pub on panels with his publisher just to see if he gets in trouble. So far I’ve been good. Deb and I don’t always agree on every point about the publishing business, but we do see eye-to-eye on most points, and we both can present our arguments relatively cleanly and without getting grumpy, so it’s always good to be on a panel with her.

I also continued my streak of panel-crashing when I suddenly appeared on the Humor in Speculative Fiction Panel. I saw a panel I’d be good on, populated by a host of authors whose work I respect, and moderated by someone I adore, so I crashed.

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS. It is bad form, and I made a point to get permission from the moderator of the panel AND the lit track organizer before I did it, so it wasn’t really crashing. Unlike ConCarolians, where I really did crash.

But I saw a chance to get on a panel with Laura Resnick, John Scalzi, Jim Hines and Ernest Cline, moderated by Lee Martindale. So I took it. And we had a lot of fun, and I got to meet most of the awesome Guests of Honor at one fell swoop, so it was some good networking. And funny for the audience, too, I believe.

But NOTHING compared to the audience we got for the Book Tasting/Literate Liquor Live! Event. We packed the room and developed some awesome book/tea/booze combos. Jackie Gamber did an amazing job with her tea pairings for the books, including one with Hitchhiker’s Guide that tasted and smelled like gummy bears. Then I broke out the booze and we all got hammered. But for the record, the cinnamon tea that Jackie likes with her books Redheart and Sela, tastes AMAZING with a splash of Disaronno in it. There are pictures on my Facebook. It was a blast, we’ll do it again sometime.

I also met some awesome folks and reconnected with some old friends. I spent the weekend sharing a room with my buddy Sean Taylor, and it’s always great to hang with him. I shared a table with the always-lovely Kalayna Price (she has a new book out TODAY – buy it!), and I shared a lot of meals with my long-lost brother James R. Tuck. I also met some awesome new folks like JH Glaze, with whom I share a couple of initials. It was great getting to know him a bit, along with the beautiful Delilah Dawson, who I’m signing books with on Saturday in Columbia.

As always, there were too many people I spent time with to mention, but there’s always room for Jell-O, and you can’t do a post-show recap in the Mid-South without mentioning Allan Gilbreath. The man with the devious laugh is always great to spend time with, and he’s got a business brain that doesn’t quit. So if you do cons in Tennessee or Kentucky and don’t know Allan, fix that ASAP.

So yeah, I had a great time, made some more good connections, solidified some others, sealed a few deals and started the process on some others. So it was a great con, and I missed the wreck on I-65 South that stranded a bunch of my friends on their way home for six hours, so that was a win for me even if all the hotels in West Virginia were booked and I had to make the whole drive home instead of splitting it up like originally planned.

This post will cost you a little cash

by john | Jul 2, 2012 | Uncategorized

But it will be money well spent, I promise.

I have two friends with book releases this week, and I’d like all y’all to go out today (or this week) and buy their books. I’m going to go a little deeper than some of you will like about the publishing business, but that’ll come later in the post. For the first little bit, I’m just going to talk about the books and why you should get your happy ass down to YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE and buy them this week.

Yeah, I make a lot of money off Amazon, but if you’re going to buy print books, go to a bookstore and support a locally owned business. That shit’s important. I’ll be heading out to Park Road Books tomorrow afternoon to pick up a couple of these titles myself.

First off we have Kalayna Price’s Grave Memory. This is the third in the Alex Craft series, and to say I enjoy these books is a huge understatement. This is one of my top 5 urban fantasy series of the last few years. There are some must-buys in my reading life, and Kalayna’s books are definitely among them. They’re witty, with awesome characters that are totally relatable, believable magic systems and world-building, and awesome plots. I don’t have enough good things to say about them, except to say get your ass out there and buy the books!

And if you want to buy them direct from the author, come to Columbia, SC this Saturday and join Kalayna, me, James R. Tuck, Rachel Aaron, Delilah Dawson and A.J. Hartley for the second annual Fantastical Mystery Tour. DB won’t be with us, but he’ll be rolling through the Carolinas in two weeks, so you can get your books signed then. Once again, I am the smallest fish on the lineup, and am so flattered to be with these awesome writers.

DB Jackson’s new book is called Thieftaker and is the first book in its series. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking very much forward to it, because DB is also awesome fantasy author David B. Coe, whose work I really enjoy. This is a new venture for him, branching out into Historical Urban Fantasy and giving his advanced degree in history a workout. You can hear more about this in the video below.

Now that you’ve had a giggle, here’s why it’s important to buy these books THIS WEEK. For mid list authors, which is the vast majority of the writers you read about here, and most of my friends, there’s pretty much a two-week window to make a list. And by “make a list” I mean get a book onto the New York Times or USA Today bestseller list. And this means a lot to a writer. Not just because it feels great (I assume, since I have never made a list) to see your name up there in print where you grew up reading the names of your writerly heroes, but because there are some serious economic things behind making a list.

You make a list, you get a little better promotion from your publisher. You make a list consistently, you can negotiate a little better contract next time around. You make a list, your next two or three books will get picked up by that publisher. You make a list, and it becomes easier to make a living as a traditionally published author. It never becomes easy, but making a list helps. And in the way books are sold and marketed in today’s world, the vast majority of lists are hit in the first or second week of release. And if a book doesn’t hit when it first releases, it never will.

So this post is asking you to go out and spend about $35. DB’s book is a hardcover, and lists for $24.99. Maybe your bookstore discounts, maybe it doesn’t. But buy local. And Kalayna’s book is a mass market paperback, an absolute steal at $7.99. It’ll be the best $35 you spend this week. These are incredible writers, and they deserve your support. And if you want to buy for the Kindle, that’s cool, too.

Here’s the Kindle link for Thieftaker.

Here’s the Kindle link for Grave Memory. 

And if you want to buy some of my shit while you’re buying, that’s cool, too. But these books come with my 100% stamp of approval. Check them out, and let me know if you love them.