So much for that, I guess

On November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy19 Comments

tumblr_inline_n04m1jSVXI1rxlkcn So as part of my list of Morning Things that I was going to do today, I planned on paying at least the 30% deposit for my booth at C2E2 this March. Now, they want $912 for the booth, so even the deposit is just south of $300.

Shit shoulda taken five minutes, and only taken that long because I would have needed that extra three-digit number from the back of the card and so I’d have had to go find it.

It is now an hour and a half later, and I’ve invented some swear words in the meantime. These people simply do not want my money. I want to pay that bill with a credit card, because … well, fuck you, you don’t actually need a reason, I want to pay for it with a credit card because it’s 20goddamn15 and you can pay for everything with fucking credit cards.

They want either a paper “company check” sent to them (I don’t know what the difference between a “company check” and a “personal check” is, and my Prostetnic account doesn’t have a checkbook anyway) or a wire transfer or for me to give them a forty dollar convenience fee to use a credit card.

To do a wire transfer would be possible but it appears that I would have to open a checking account on my Bank of America card, which isn’t the account I wanted to use anyway, and then I’d have to pay them a fee. I am not opening any additional accounts with anyone and I am not paying any third parties, particularly Bank of Fucking America, any sort of fee in order to pay Reed Exhibitions some money that they apparently don’t want from me anyway. And I’ll offer my body as a masturbatory aid for horses before I pay any fucker $40 to use a credit card in 2015.

Irate emails have been sent; I doubt they will get me anywhere, which means Reed Exhibitions doesn’t want my money and I will therefore not be attending the convention after all. Given that I was almost certain to lose money on the effort anyway I am sure as shined shit going to spend money so that I can send them money.

Fuckit.

This has eaten my entire morning, by the way, and I’m way too pissed off to transition straight into writing right now, so I’m going to take a shower and eat lunch and then hopefully have an insanely productive goddamn afternoon. I should send these fuckers a bill; my time is worth money and they have wasted a hell of a lot of it this morning with this nonsense.

More on yesterday’s announcement

On November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

c2e2_6

C2E2 had seventy thousand attendees last year, guys, a number that puts me firmly into what is this I don’t even mode. I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out, but right now I don’t even have a sense of how to order books for an event of that size. I’ve basically spent no money at all other than the hotel and the actual registration for Starbase Indy because I (deliberately) overordered so much for InConJunction. But… hell, if I sell a book to one percent of the visitors at C2E2 that’s seven hundred books, which is thousands of dollars to print and get to me. My conversion rate for InConJunction, despite how poorly most of us thought that con went, was way more than 1%. Then again, InConJunction wasn’t that big, and I could count on damn near every person at that con walking past me at some point. That’s not going to be the case at C2E2, and I don’t really have much of a way to estimate how many of those folks I even have a theoretical chance to sell books to.

I need folks with con experience. I know I have one Zen master of Zen floating around in my online circle, but if any of the rest of you have any experience with selling things at large conventions and have any particular advice you’d like to give me, I’d love to hear it. Particularly since I don’t have a huge cash reserve floating around right now, so whatever books I do buy are going to have to be put on a credit card, which hopefully will be then paid off with funds from the con. Which, obviously, is going to have an effect on how many I feel comfortable ordering.

So. Yeah. Anybody’s got a way to help me get a handle on how to manage this, feel free to drop me a line.

An entertainment and an announcement

On November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

augustus_primaporta First, a bonus story for those of you who have read Searching for Malumba, particularly those of you who have gotten to the chapter called “A Long Day, Pt. 2.”

Out of nowhere, my Bruce Banner Facebook account just got a friend request from Caesar, of all people. I haven’t heard from Caesar since the last day of the Washington DC trip I took him on when he was in 7th grade. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to do that, because he had transferred out of our school earlier in the year, but the adults involved basically looked around and went hell, he’s a good kid, let’s just not tell anybody, and it ended up working out fine anyway.

Caesar, and this will only be funny to those of you who have read Malumba, is a politician now, as in “he is actually running for state office in 2016,” and he has a Facebook page full of pictures of himself in a nicer suit than any of the ones I own, standing next to important politicians, including one former President and at least three people currently running for office.

I approved the request immediately. This is one of the ones I have wanted to be able to keep an eye on. 🙂

And now, the announcement, and this one’s a big one: I have just received confirmation that I will have a Small Press booth at C2E2 2016, running from March 18th-20th of next year. This means that I have three convention appearances currently planned out and official: Starbase Indy later this month, C2E2 in March, and IndyPopCon in June. I’m still trying to get into one more in August that I’ve not been to before (and which will also be a really big deal), and I’m thinking about going to next year’s InConJunction, which was the one I want to last summer. If Starbase Indy is fun and profitable, I’ll seriously consider doing that again next year too, but we’ll see how the first one goes.

That’s a big deal. That’s tens of thousands of people who I’ll have access to next year in person and not through my blog or Twitter. 2016 could be a very, very big deal for Luther Siler.

I’m excited already. 🙂