Notes from the Internet Presence for Writers Panel

Panel description: Explore the overlap among Magical Realism and contemporary, urban, and traditional fantasy–and even horror.
Participants: Lillian Cauldwell, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Nick Mamatas, Cat Rambo, Kat Richardson (M)

I don’t know that we said too much that was insightful about the division between magic realism and fantasy, but we did arrive at a decent and interesting booklist, which I present here for your pleasure.

Ambrose Bierce – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (free on the Kindle)
Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
Paola Corso – Giovanna’s 86 Circles, The Laundress Catches Her Breath (poetry)
Andy Duncan – Beluthahatchie and Other Stories
Laura Esquival – Like Water for Chocolate
Barbara Howes – Eye of the Heart
Natsuki Ikezawa – The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili
Franz Kafka – anything (I like the stories.)
Stephen King – The Green Mile (opinions differed on whether this should be counted)
Yann Martell – Life of Pi
Haruki Murakami – anything
Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Elif Shafak – The Bastard of Istanbul, Flea Palace
Latif Tekin – Dear Shameless Death
Ngugi wa Thiongo – The Wizard of the Crow
Amos Tutuola – The Palm-Wine Drunkard
T.H. White – Mrs. Masham’s Repose
Carlos Ruiz Zafon – The Prisoner of Heaven (Cemetery of Forgotten Books), The Shadow of the Wind

Margin Magazine

I’d noticed that reserving a table at the Northwest Book Fest was around 100 bucks. So I asked some other people if they would be interested in sharing a table and enough of us clubbed in that it ended up being very reasonable. We had Brenda Cooper, Louise Marley, Vicki Saunders, Jeanine Southard, Django Wexler, and myself as well as books from Hydra House, including the new Clarion West anthology, Telling Tales, and KC Ball’s short story collection.

As far as selling goes, the first day was not particularly successful and on that day 50% of the book sold were to each other. The second day was more of the same, although we didn’t sell as many to each other. Overall, doing a group thing was definitely a good idea: it made for a table packed with attractive, professionally done books along with some table display stuff like a robot, a war-elephant, and some fantasy stuffed animals (including plushie Chtulhu). It also meant we had people to chat with and the livelier appearance of our table helped pull people in, I think. (Plus we had candy.) We might have done better on the first floor than the second, and there were some lighting issues.

I presented a workshop on podcasting, which was well attended, and I ran them through some whys and whats of recording your own podcast as well as ranting a bit about rights and not paying to publish. A number of them signed up to get advance notice of the Building an Online Presence for Writers book.

Overall, it was fun, and there was some decent networking, plus I passed out some postcards on my classes. On the other hand, did we sell many books? Not at all. However, the cost of the $100 table, split between all of us, was pretty darn reasonable, and it meant we could attend workshops. We didn’t have a formal name, so I’d put “Seattle Speculative Fiction Writers” down. So many people asked about our group the first day that Django ended up putting out a sign-up sheet for news of group activities and gathering two pages of e-mail addresses. I look forward to the first wine and chat party.

If I ran an effort like this again, I’d focus more on selling: perhaps do book bundles, make a sign letting people know the books were priced at special rates for the book festival, maybe have some lower-priced items or stocking-stuffer type trinkets, and would have a signup sheet for other mailing lists, like each author’s. However, the location was so difficult to get to that there was no foot traffic and some people had difficulty finding the place — if they do it in the same location next year, I’ll pass and spend that time writing instead, but as Brenda noted, if they move it back downtown, it might be worthwhile.