So, books first, as per the usual. I’m starting up Husks Book 2 tomorrow. Or the day after. Look, I can’t be expected to keep track of this sort of shit. Toni, the cover artist, is busy with comic stuff until June, so that’s when the book will be coming out. The current plan is to do Husks Book 2 now, then start planning for my next book after that. We’ll see how it works out. Every time I start writing one of these blog posts, I lose interest after about three minutes. That probably says something pretty important about my enthusiasm for talking to myself in text form, but let’s leave that behind. That’s the book stuff talked about. You’re all updated. Congratulations.
Norwescon 40 talkin’ time. I guess it’s almost more of an overview of my considerations on cons in general as a marketing effort. I’ve done three cons in the past month and I’ve got very, very little to show for any of it. Total sales of around 200 books, but hotels mean I’m still in the hole on the overall. I very much enjoy meeting the people at conventions. It’s great and it’s a fantastic way to talk to people in person, though I like to think I’m pretty available online. I’m going to add a Discord server as well. I’m rambling.
Anyway, Norwescon was slow. It was slow and gave me the impression that sci-fi/fantasy cons are, for a lot of the people there, more about the community immediately surrounding sci-fi/fantasy cons than the genre of creative output. I’ve never really liked communities. They just aren’t really for me, so that aspect doesn’t really appeal so much. Foot traffic the first two days was pretty junk. Compared to attendance, maybe I did okay. Hard to say. But it was the usual few hours of downtime between anyone doing anything but glancing. I managed to get a sign directing people to Writer’s Row put up on the second day. Foot traffic picked up, but sales were the same as the anemic Friday that had basically no foot traffic. It is what it is, but I have to imagine there’s a convention out there where three or more hours of down time between people stopping at all isn’t the norm. But hey, I’ll likely never find out.
Lest this come off as negative, again, the people I talked to were all great. Sold some books to fantastic people, talked to some nice people, but the carry over from that is that I spent about $500 on a hotel room to get ~$450 in sales. So I hope, genuinely, that the people who bought the books like them and remember to review them. Either way, conventions are going to have to become a back-seat concern. The loss is way too heavy to justify them. Not to mention they interrupt my writing pretty hardcore in a few different ways. I still have a few commitments this year, they’re on the events page, but I’m likely only going to do local stuff around Portland next year.
That’s all, I think. Back to work. I’ve got like… three or four more books to try to get out this year. More if I can manage it.