Just for the heck of it, I posted a list of the comics I bought this week over at Sourcerer. Go check it out and let me know if anything else came out today I should buy.
More on yesterday’s announcement
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
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. 🙂
A few announcements of less than staggering importance
FIRST! That upon careful consideration of the known elements of the story, the in-progress sequel to Skylights, formerly known as Starlight, has been renamed to Sunlight. While I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo– in other words, you won’t be able to find an account for me on the site anywhere– I expect to be caught up on a 5oK words in November pace by the end of the evening tonight. I hope to have Sunlight‘s first draft finished before winter break, or at least before what would be winter break if I was currently working at a school. The progress bar is over there to your right, and you can expect that to be updated frequently as the month rolls on. The name of the third book remains the same, and also remains a secret, because I like pretending I am important and keeping secrets from people.
SECOND! The Sanctum of the Sphere still remains free, and will stay as such through the end of the night tonight. Its performance provides me with further evidence that the best sign of how good a free book is going to do on any given day is how busy Amazon in general is– the book is higher ranked than Skylights was the last time I made it free, or at least close to it, but Skylights had an even hundred copies downloaded over the course of the day and Sanctum is currently sitting at twelve. That’s ebb and flow at Amazon and there’s nothing I can do about it. Go download it anyway!
THIRD! Which is MORE THAN TWO, but SO WHAT! I keep forgetting what the third announcement is supposed to be. Oh, right! I currently have my next three books planned out, which is vaguely ridiculous. I expect Sunlight to be out in or around April of 2016, then the next Benevolence Archives book in fall of 2016, which will be a novel-length short story collection, and then in April of 2017 a stand-alone science fiction novel called The Imorah Protocol. I am considering moving Imorah into 2016 and pushing back the next BA book a bit. I don’t know who will care about this, but I’m telling you anyway!
Actually, I probably have my next five books planned out, because after whatever’s in early 2017 would be the third and final Skylights book, and then my fantasy novel that I have no idea for yet but I really want to write. That means I’m set until late 2018! That’s completely ridiculous!
That is all.
Oh, by the way
Skylights is free today, in case you haven’t picked it up yet. Go. GO NOW!
August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history.
February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost.
2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: “Mars.” Ezekiel ben Zahav isn’t talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something– and he’s dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.
SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.
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