This coming weekend the next stop in my never-ending quest to sell a book 😀 is Dragonflight (http://www.dragonflight.org/) in Bellevue, Washington.
I will have my normal vendor booth and will be giving both of my speeches; “How to turn GM into $” (Sat 7PM) AND “The Painful Joy of Self Publishing” (Fri 7PM)
Hope to see some of you locals up at the con enjoying some games and lovely book buying :D.
Dateline Nampa, Idaho. Tom Gondolfi reporting
I want to start by saying that I’ve attended hundreds of conventions and I can’t remember any convention running as smoothly as Fandemonium. Con staff were helpful and friendly. Events started on time and with the proper requested equipment. The Con staff even mingled among us offering help and encouragement. While all were excellent I have to single out one young woman, Honore’ (con moniker), as being the most exceptional of a stellar crew! She circulated regularly offering help loading, fetching drinks, finding answers to our serious but unusual suggestions, and offering friendly inquiries as how things were going!
I’m alw
ays a bit leery of a new convention, so I was pleasantly pleased with how this con was run! WAY TO GO FANDEMONIUM.
All this being said, sales were slightly below my personal expectations at Fandemonium but still very respectable. Probably the oddest thing about Fandemonium, from a vendor perspective, was the flow. Who does their most business on the opening half day of a con and almost none the last full day? Never seen it. Never even HEARD of it. But that is what happened for us and from watching other vendors there the same happened for them.
My first-time talks “How to turn GM into $” and “The Painful Joy of Self-Publishing” were very well received. When I created them I hadn’t spent a great deal of time matching the timing of each to the 1 hour I had available but rather tried to get all of the things out there I wanted to share. Each landed within 5 minutes of the hour (gratz me!) From one con goer (thanks Ryan!) came the quote “Your talks were the highlight of the convention.” Considering 
the events and cosplay costumes for the contests that I witnessed this seems very high praise indeed.
Now to justify the “My Cousin Vinny” portion of the post title. I’ve never been so sleep deprived at a con ever. Considering that I’ve attended the 24hr/day Origins and GenCon many times this is saying something. Let me share.
Day one we were at the CENSORED chain hotel. I admit I chose it for being an inexpensive option for this nascent business. The place was the most filthy hotel I’ve ever stayed at, even compared to a couple of places I’ve stayed at that normally rented by the hour (don’t ask). Makeup on the pillows, mildewed shower curtain, a gummy bear on the carpet (that I stepped on late at night on my way to the toilet), torn towels and worst of all, my partner in crime being bitten multiple times by some unknown insect (in covered places).
As someone who has been a motel manager in the past, I was incensed. When I went down to complain, there was no staff at the desk for the better part of half an hour. The only thing they would do is say, “Sorry”.
After another half an hour on the phone with Hotels.com, I finally got a new hotel (at a much higher rate) and a refund of ONLY the unused nights! The corporate heads of this chain WILL hear about this.
So, we moved to the new hotel, a much more upscale chain thinking “WOHOOO! Sleep!” Wrong. Epic Fail. Night 2 of our trip we found ourselves next door to a small family with an infant that couldn’t have been 2 months old. We were woken 3 times during the night as the child squalled for 15-20 minutes before the parents actually got it quieted down. As a parent myself, I understand the realities of this but it didn’t make me any less grumpy or tired the next day.
“What was that incredibly loud whistle thing”
“That’s the steam whistle telling everyone its time to get up”
Night 3 vied for the worst night. After a long day in the dealer room, we retired to our hotel to order a pizza and recoup only to have the piercing fire alarm go off, at the volume of a small corporate jet engine, even before the pizza arrived. Traipsing down the stairs we sought refuge from the heat in my car as we watched no fewer than 5 (!) fire trucks respond to the call. Our pizza arrived just as Nampa’s finest cleared the building with NO fire. Ok, better safe than sorry. We returned to our room and our repast. Every two hours (give or take) until 5am, the alarm went off in all the rooms of the hotel. It never lasted more than 5 seconds, but when someone fires off an air horn (at about 40 decibels louder than would cause damage to a rock) at 2:45 am (I looked at the clock), you WAKE UP (no saving throw allowed). Almost worse, you can’t really go back to sleep not knowing if it would happen again.
When I went down to the lobby in my jammies to find out WTF was going on, I was told that they’d been on the phone with the alarm company and nothing they seemed to do would solve the problem and that a technician was incoming. Why wasn’t this done the FIRST time?
“Does that train come through here every night at 3AM?”
“No sir. That’s very unusual.”
Needless to say Sunday we didn’t need makeup to play zombies.
Our food experiences also didn’t measure up including a very bad meal at the upscale Darby’s (/Avoid)
Summary: Great Con, Great People, LOUSY Hotels and food experiences.
Over 100 authors in 50 different booths festooned the 5th Annual NW Book Festival. The location of Pioneer Courthouse Square seems to have been perfect with a number of attendees stumbling upon the Festival only by chance as Pioneer square is a transit center for the heavily used public transportation of Portland. The coordinators of the event clearly have done an exceptional job. We certainly will return next year.
Don Quixote, the main character from Toy Wars, was the darling of the show. We had scores of people get pulled in to our booth by his presence, even those who had no interest in science fiction. More than one vendor said that they would need to get a bear to compete.
We had more than one offers to buy Don, but how can we part with a member of the family.
We want to let you know that we do listen, especially to some of the more colorful folks. We have also positively taken the feedback to provide a Young Adult or Near Adult novels in our offerings. Our hope this will be covered with an offering that we are already negotiating with our author Bruce Graw.
We were very pleased with the turnout and the response of the public to our offerings. TANSTAAFL Press wants to thank all of the people who visited our booth for their opinions, stories and purchases.
Special shout-outs to Bird, Mark, and Scott.
We have made all of our books available now on Barnes and Noble for all you Nook readers. We are having small difficulties with offering the print version through B&N that hopefully we will resolve soon.
A word of advice for those looking for the books. Please use both the name and the author’s name when doing a search. We’ve seen times when the name alone doesn’t do the job.
Thank you again for your support!
We are being added to the list of exhibitors at the West Hollywood Book Fair on the 29th of September and hope to see all of the folks that helped critique Toy Wars as well as anyone else in the city of Angles. As a former Long Beacher I’m looking forward to seeing my old stomping grounds not to mention sharing our new projects.
In conjunction with the trip for the South Dakota Festival of Books, I’ve been asked to speak at my alma mater, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology on career management. I’ve not added this to my appearances schedule as it is not open to the public. Perhaps in the future.
On a sadder note, we’ve had to remove Orycon in Portland from this year’s book tour. While we would love to attend, we are needed to support Blooming Artichoke Herbary at the American Herbalist Guild Symposium that very same weekend.
Tony Foti has done it again. Here is the illustration that will be the basis of the cover of Demon Ascendant, the sequel to Demon Holiday, which will be out in Fall of this year!
The Fall book tour is shaping up to be an intense one with appearances every between July 27th through most of August. We’ve added South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood, SD to the list as well as Dragonflight outside of Seattle, WA Fandemonium just outside of Boise, ID. Portland, OR may get a trio. Wordstock and NW Book Festival are both committed and we are actively working to get a place in Orycon. We’ve been offered space in the Kansas Book Festival this year but other commitments prevent our attending this year.
In addition we’ve added the “Demon Holiday” Book Launch Event, which will be held in Dayton, OH. Anyone interested in tickets should contact us for details.
We hope to see you at as many of these events as you can attend!
Well folks, it has been some time in coming but Demon Holiday is finally here and available for purchase. Please ignore the minor problem with the DH image in the shopping cart. We will have this rectified very soon.
An Eighty Percent Solution was given the opportunity to be spotlight blog post on Critique Circle recently. You can read this post for yourself at http://www.critiquecircle.com/blog.asp?blogID=55
To burgeoning writers out there, I can’t say enough good things about Critique Circle. I wish they would have been around when I first wrote Toy Wars, 15 years ago. Having people in your own genre to critique your work is invaluable. Please visit them and if you have the writing bug, take advantage of it!
Tom Gondolfi