We drove down for Radcon—were in cellphone communication with OSG, headed in the same direction. I read the front end of the new Bren book to Jane on the way down, and was happy it sounded good.
Radcon was, as I understand, a little less organized than usual…which is usally very good; but once you began to understand it was informal and just ‘winged it’ on the panels, it began to work. Jane and I weren’t on any panels together: we usually like at least one.
But Larry Niven was the goh—we know each other from way back, and though we didn’t get any panels together (we do a good show) we did have a good time hanging out in the intervals. The green room was good: that helped the food budget. So we’re going to be return guests at Radcon. We’ve wanted to go for the 10 years we’ve been up here, and we finally made it.
Our next trip will be Condor in another week or so, this time with the cats.
I hope it proved a good opportunity to advertise CC! Were any of the panels on self-publishing?
Well, one of the guests was a print publisher, who is not exactly thrilled with e-publishing—we’re old convention hands, so we didn’t quarrel, but we kind of skirted around each other. There was no place to hand out fliers, (unusual) but no fuss with us putting them up as posters, and we each carried a few and handed them out to interested parties. It’s odd: a LOT of the regular sf convention audience still has little info about what’s been happening in publishing, and they didn’t quite know what to make of the e-book business, but we informed them whenever we got a chance. They didn’t give us a panel, or even have us scheduled together so we could talk about CC—we had a lot more interest from other authors in the ‘green room’, and of course we are NOT taking submissions from other writers—we’re already stressed to the limit; but we are preparing a pamphlet that will tell them how to prepare their own version of CC. We hope to have a better chance at Condor, where I’m goh, and we will be handing out fliers there, too.
Kokipy, you rascal. 😉 We forgot to do anything for ourselves Valentines…we were on the road. What a nice surprise!
Larry Niven is one of my favorites. A favorite
short story of mine is by him regarding a unicorn.
There were a couple of panels shared between Boskone and Capricon this weekend with the magic of Internet videoconferencing. I suggested that they might want to link in Radcon next year.
I’m thinking some sort of alliance of e-publishing outlets might be able to cooperate to everyone’s mutual benefit. Weird that conventional publishers don’t want to organize this, but that leaves a niche for enterprising newcomers.