Monthly Archives: May 2015

As I went through the weekend, I realized I wanted to be involved, not just attending. But how?  Who would want me on a panel?  What did I have to share after years doing pro journals, science docs, educational texts, and nonfic?  Sure I’d kept up by always being in genre writing groups, learning and mentoring, but that was just writer’s groups…right?

That was the little devil inside me, jabbing his pitchfork in my thoughts.  But the little angel was there, too.  “You know a lot about writing,” the angel said. “You know you do.”  The groups, the jobs, they were all about how to write to achieve goals in the best way possible.

So at one of the panels, I raised my hand and I asked, “How do I get on a panel.”

The answer was surprisingly simple—volunteer.

Wow. Mind-blowing.  You mean just contact a con and ask?  Yep.  Best advice I got at that con.  Take that first step in your journey of a thousand steps. It is the most important thing you can do.  Ask.  But I have a few more hints to help ensure the con chooses you over the next guy.

Find out which cons have writers workshops.  Email the event coordinator and ask if you can be on it.  Usually you have to have some publications to be one of the pros in the workshop, but a short story or two will qualify you in most cases.  If you don’t have that (and I don’t), volunteer to moderate.  That’s how I started in con writers’ workshops.  They needed a moderator, and the guy running it asked me to help him out (I was an editor on his magazine).

The second thing you can do to increase your chances is to suggest panel ideas and offer to moderate them.  Last year at one of the cons, I was on a villains panel, and very much looking forward to it.  I was bummed when it was canceled because the person who had suggested it and was to be moderator had dropped out.  I said, “I’ll moderate.”  But no, still no go.  She told me they like to have the person who suggested it, moderate it.  I don’t know if this is across the board, but I have moderated every panel I have suggested.

Both of these suggestions hinge on being a moderator.  That scares some people.  Good news is moderating isn’t necessarily hard.  Do a little research on the Web.  Pay attention at cons you go to and see who moderates well and how they do it. Some moderators only moderate, not participating in the discussion themselves.  This means you don’t have to be a subject matter expert, just interested, though I like to participate myself.  One of the reasons I’m doing this is to get myself out there.

To get ideas on what you can suggest, look at the catalogs and see what areas are covered this year so you can suggest some for next year.  Jot down things that interest you. If they interest you, they likely will interest someone else.  Look around the internet.  What are the controversies?  What attracts your attention and interest?  Cons cover a very wide range of topics.  I’m interested in the writing and publishing, but you can find panels on costuming, music, television shows, anima, comics, and fandom covering science fiction, fantasy, and horror, either together or individually.  The con has something for you…that is why you are there in the first place, right?

Remember also, the community has more than one con.  Just because this con doesn’t pick you doesn’t mean the next one won’t.  Do a little research and find more than one con to try.

Follow up.  If you don’t hear, email and ask.  Don’t pester, but sometimes this will put you in the right place at the right time.  Also, if your first submission went astray, this will be a second chance for it to get through.

Don’t be a diva.  These operations are run by volunteers who have day jobs and lives.  If they don’t choose you or don’t get back to you this year, don’t take it personally.  You don’t know why they didn’t.  Could be your ideas didn’t fit with the theme. Could be your emails or application got lost in the shuffle (I’m pretty sure this happens a lot).  Could be they had limits on quotas. Just take it in stride and try again next year.

Finally, be nice to the events’ coordinator when they do accept you into the program.  I had a snafu one year that a very nice events’ coordinator bent over backward to help me fix.  She didn’t have to.  So I took her out for a drink when I got to the con.  Not only did I have a lovely time getting to know her better, but I got invited back the next year without contacting the con first.  Moral of the story? Some drinks or candy or chocolate chip cookies can go a long way.

Nine Steps to Participate in a Con

1. Research and pick several cons to try
2. Keep a log of ideas throughout the year.
3. Join the writers’ workshop
4. Contact the con and volunteer
5. Submit panel ideas
6. Follow up at a reasonable time
7. Be nice to the events’ coordinator
8. Be professional and polite where you don’t get the invitation you wanted.
9. Rinse and repeat: try again next year.

The Strengths. As many have noted, Ralph Kern has paid attention to the science in his science fiction. The science he portrays, as he explains in the afterword, is a projection of the science being posited today. This imparts a very real and solid feel to the story. His writing style is clean and crisp—very easy to read.  Finally the story that ultimately unfolds is interesting and compelling. I was sorry to reach the end.

The Weaknesses.  Three weaknesses have been brought up more than once in the reviews.  First, the characterization had been criticized.  I will grant that the characterization is a lighter element, but not a weakness.  The characters convey the story well, and I grew to care about them.  I did ask Ralph to insert a few lines here and there to aid with this issue, but overall, the novel is story-driven, not character-driven, and it worked well.  I say this as a person who usually prefers character-driven recreational reading.  Second, Ralph’s regional habits of grammar and word use (and we all have those) have been dinged as intrusive.  Ralph worked hard with me on smoothing these over.  I don’t expect this is a problem anymore.  Third and finally, the editing has been a touchstone of complaint.  Two editors have now reviewed it, so I expect the editing will no longer interfere with the read.

All in all, I really feel that Ralph has captured some of the flavor of the heyday of SF and the midcentury greats, then modernized it for today’s audiences.  This is true hard science fiction, driven by story and science, and one very enjoyable read.

Ralph Kern’s ebook may be ordered at Amazon.

• A-to-Z Publishing demanded that I work as hard to market myself as if I were a self-published author. Yet they denied me all control over the launch schedule, the choice of editor, and the cover design—contrary to my expectations of a boutique small press.
• Their brand label had no commitment to quality. The books they produced ahead of mine showed sloppy editing riddled with grammatical errors. They used what were clearly cut-and-paste stock images on their cover art.
• Their projected sales goals aspired to those of major commercial publishers, but A-to-Z lacked the capital to build a platform to help me achieve those goals.
• They would never contact any reviewers or bloggers on my behalf nor did they establish any relationships with such as contacts for their authors. Instead, I would be in line with countless self-pubbed authors begging to bloggers for attention. Forget about a review in Publisher’s Weekly or Locus or being featured in the books section of my Sunday newspaper.
• A-to-Z would never get me distributed into any brick-and-mortar bookstore, even the small independent ones. In fact, they discouraged me from arranging any personal appearances in a bookstore on the premise that bookstores were “boring” relics headed for the dust bin of history. Perhaps it’s different in other parts of the country, but where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, bookstores are not dead!

What advantages did they really offer to be earning a hefty cut of my profits? None.

Even so, it was very hard to let go of my dream. Like the workhorse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I kept trying harder and harder. Believe me, none of the authors in A-to-Z’s catalog put in more hours and more effort with so little results. Or, as the marketing folks say, ROI—return on investment. I studied Guy Kawasaki’s marketing books. I watched YouTube videos. I read a bunch of blogs. I learned about SEOs, Google analytics, the algorithms that Facebook uses to filter the news feed, the difference between outbound (spam) and inbound marketing, and the application of psychology techniques in advertising. Overthinking it? Perhaps. I realized that sales and marketing folks think about these things a lot. They get really excited to blog about metrics, clicks and sticky views, conversions from leads, tracking sales spikes correlated to their activity on social media, and so on. God bless ’em, but this stuff bores me.

Ironically, one of the lessons in A-to-Z’s seminar had us take a look at what other successful authors do and analyze how they got there. George R. R. Martin (Game of Thrones) started as a script writer in Hollywood over thirty years ago and has worked his way up the food chain. Brandon Sanderson is an up-and-coming fantasy author with a background in missionary work. In other words, he knows how to knock on doors and talk to people. Aha! Light bulb moment. Like any professional career, successful authors put time and effort into networking in their field. Clearly, it takes years of diligent effort and marketing savvy to build up a fan base. There are no shortcuts, no magic wand, no fast track to success.

I asked to be released from my contract. At first, they said no. “We have been honoring our side of the contract, and I cannot release the book to you after investing this much in you.” My mother’s fighting spirit flared to life in my gut. I pushed back, citing that the contract obligated A-to-Z to publish my book within eighteen months of receiving the complete manuscript. That deadline had passed. They stonewalled me until I threatened legal action. Thankfully, I never had to go to court—but I was ready to fight.

I’m fortunate that, with some perseverance, I recovered all the rights to my manuscript.  I am free to self-publish or send out queries once more. Back to square one. Except that I no longer feel so desperate and hopeless that I’ll sign anything just for the chance of seeing my name in print. If I grow old and die without ever seeing a novel commercially published in a SFWA qualifying market, I am okay with that. Now I have the confidence to walk away from a bad deal, and thanks to this experience, I’ve learned how to spot one.

So what’s a poor struggling first-time author to do?  Arm yourself!  You spent a long time writing your book, so spend a little extra researching where to find a good home for it. Here are some places to start.

The Peril of Author Mills: Victoria Strauss discusses the siren allure of the author mills that lure in inexperienced first time writers and reveals the nightmare they can become.

The Writer’s Dig:  Editor Robert Lee Brewer of the Writer’s Digest discusses the small press as a publishing option.  

Writer Beware—Contests and Awards:  SFWA blog discussing the pros and cons of contests and awards.

Writer Beware—Small Presses: SFWA blog discussing issues to consider when submitting to a small press.