Musings of a Restless Mind

I just returned from FenCon XXI this morning. Yes, it was chaos, but to me and all those with whom I interacted, it didn’t matter. The chaos was the result of death, disease, pestilence, etc. among those good souls who volunteer their time and effort for the pleasure of the rest of us, and hopefully they get pleasure from it themselves. May God’s grace always shine on them.

Yes, my request to be included in the program activities got lost for a couple of months because it was stuck in the spam filter. Yes, the program only arrived a week before the Con, and yes, it was never printed, but, heck, we all have cell phones, and, if not, there’s word of mouth to tell you where you were supposed to be.

I didn’t get to do a reading, but I got an hour at an autograph table and was on 3 panels. I must have said some things of interest to some people since I had a few request a repeat of or additional information about what I said when they ran into me later. We writers are cats. We like nothing better than to lift our heads and have our chins skritched. (Stroke that ego, yes, yes…, right there! Purr, purr.) I gave out lots of cards, and I have hopes that some folks will click on the QR-codes and investigate my work.

I got to meet R. J. Hanson, Fred Hughes, Justin Watson, Rob Howell, Amanda White, Tracy Morris, and Ken Ruffin among others, all well worth meeting and getting to know. I also finally got to meet Cedar Sanderson in person, and I got to hang out with Julie Frost long into the evening as we made friends with Bartender Moe while we enjoyed our shared Christian and literary worldview and enthusiastically loaded each other up on movies we each must see and books we each must read. Then we traded our own novels with each other. I’m sure she’ll check up to make sure I read/watched those things by the time we meet again at LibertyCon. She also tried to interest me in birding and NASCAR, but with minimal success. I got to throw around lots of my ancient-fan personal stories of Ray Bradbury, Ted Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert and others, enough to get people tired of my old-man stories.

I also met interesting people in the dealers’ room. I had brought several printouts of stories to potentially do live readings from. After talking for a long time with Holly who was hawking the novel by her brother-in-law, I gave her the copy of my, as yet unpublished, mystery story, and she told me the next day how much she enjoyed it. I also met two brothers who were selling Stephanie Osborne’s books and bond with them over our, in this country, obscure religion because they recognized my cross. I confessed I’ve read one of hers, but I know it’s buried under the hundred books I’ve bought and read since, so I may or may not find it. I put John Van Stry in that list although I also got to hear him at panel(s). It was in the dealers’ room that we talked extensively. He’s got quite the catalog of books out and noted that he had systematized turning his manuscripts into multiple formats. I’m looking forward to seeing his video, since converting two books to paperbacks took me about a day each.

Why do I go to Cons? Ask most writers and they’ll tell you it’s about marketing, but, unless the Con is in your own backyard or you are a guest of honor and get your hotel room comped, you’re really not likely to make money selling books. You’re not even likely to break even. Between the hotel and the airfare, FenCon cost me over $1,000. To break even with an estimated profit of $5/book, I’d have to sell 200 books to have any hope of covering my expenses. Of course then I’d have to figure out how to transport hundreds of books, driving my expenses even higher.

Another reason is branding. As long as you’re able to reasonably present yourself and can promulgate some good ideas, you can, in fact, get people interested in exploring your work, and that isn’t done at one appearance. It helps to have a brand that sticks in people’s minds. One author I know comes dressed as one of her characters. For me, branding began when I had my business cards made up with my name, email address, and QR-codes to my website and my Amazon author’s page. I added a picture of me, wearing my black cowboy hat (which, maybe not so coincidentally, covers my balding hair). Whenever I showed people the card, their immediate response was, “Nice hat!” So now I wear the hat indoors when I’m at a Con. At FenCon I added a black shirt and my black jeans to complete the man-in-black look. We’ll see how it goes.

For me, there are two reasons I go to Cons. The first is I get to meet, hear from, and talk to intelligent, interesting people who share some of my interests. At every Con I come away with something, at least some ideas for stories, like a horror story about a perpetually open elevator that tries to lure unsuspecting prey inside, tricking them into some, as yet undetermined, evil fate, or the other elevator that, instead of flashing the floor number, flashes seemingly random numbers that are actually some alien form of communication calling for help from deep space or another dimension. In addition to that, I almost always learn something useful about the business, like John Van Stry’s simple method to quickly and easily turn my manuscripts into paperbacks as well as ebooks, or tips on creating audio books.

Some cons like this one, I get a new idea about branding. That started with random compliments about my deep, resonant voice. I’ve heard that on occasion over the years, but never with such seeming consistency. When, at the dead dog party that fizzled because everyone had gathered in the hotel’s restaurant instead, one person said, “I want to hear Frank say, ‘In a world….” It took me a moment to realize he was baiting me with the classic phrase of the famous Hollywood narrator of movie previews. I did say it, but realized afterword that I should have added, “In a world where shadows haunt the streets, one man stands for the light….” So now I’m thinking about how to somehow incorporate my voice into my branding just as Sarah Hoyt is famously taunted into saying, “moose and squirrel,” in her mild Portuguese accent that I and many other Americans seem to hear as a Russian accent. So now con-goers beware as I contemplate how to put a new weapon into branding arsenal. Bwahaha!