How does a convention play into your career as an author? How might you expect to be participating in programming? How, in short, do you get to be on panels?
Deirdre Saoirse Moen, who organizes fan-run literary cons and schedules programs for them, joins us to talk about programming from the convention’s point of view. Conventions want to create engaging programs, and want authors to be able to participate in that. Authors, of course, want to do things that ultimately result in selling more books. These goals are not incompatible, but there’s a trick to getting them to mesh well.
We also talk about what you should do when you find yourself on a panel — things to expect, things you can do to prepare, and some things to take care to not do.
By the way, registration is open for the 2015 Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat. We talked about that mid-week, and appended that bit of audio to the end of this episode. If you’d like to discuss the event, here’s the place to do so. That’ll keep all the questions and answers in the same place!
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Write your bio in four lengths — one each at 25, 50, 100, and up to 500 words.
The Saint: The Original Sinners Book 5, by Tiffany Reisz, narrated by Elizabeth Hart
[CONTENT WARNING: Explicit about all the things.]
Did you know that there’s going to be a book signing at lunchtime? Yeah, really!
And in the meantime, here’s a transcript for your reading pleasure.
http://wetranscripts.livejournal.com/94205.html
Also in the archives, naturally!
Loved hearing this glimpse at Literary Cons. Truth be told- I’ve heard a lot about them, but I’ve never actually been to one. In fact, I have no idea how to find a Literary Con near me. Here I am with the internet at my fingertips and I’m finding the problem is too much information that is not applicable!
So- how does a newbie to this world of writing find out about and connect with Literary Cons?
@Regina:
This site (http://www.upcomingcons.com/literature-conventions) is pretty handy. Dates and locations for cons of pretty much any sort, with a nice rundown about each one.
Just to point out: if you are going to use Trigger or Content Warnings, you should use ones a bit more helpful than “explicit about all the things”.
Thanks Chris! :)
At FogCon, where I had the pleasure to briefly meet Ms. Moen, I believe the name cards for panelists had, on the backside, the name of the panel itself, and perhaps tiny bit more info about the topic. If there are any literary cons that aren’t doing this yet, I recommend it as a technique for steering the conversation in the direction it is intended to go.
Thank you for the list Chris, but are there any Literary Cons in Europe that you know of? Does anyone else have somewhere I can look?
@Sara,
I’m afraid I know far less about any European conventions. I did find these two sites, which are more specifically focused on science fiction and fantasy cons–but there will probably be plenty of literary discussion at most of them.
http://www.concatenation.org/conls.html
http://esfs.info/
Good luck!
Thank you! That was extremely helpful!