Guest post: Adventures at FanExpo

So much of what happens in webfiction happens online (for rather obvious reasons) that I’m always intrigued to hear about “real” interactions, whether at drunken house parties, on the street, or at conventions. Longtime friend and lunatic author MCM ventured to one such convention, and today he talks about the conversation between authors and readers.

Weblit is a funny thing. For it to work, it needs to be free, it needs to engage and hold an audience over long stretches of time, and it should hopefully give the author some real-time feedback into how things are going. The ways it differs from print writing are obvious, but never as obvious as when you’re trying to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

At the end of August, Nancy [Brauer] and I set up an 1889 Labs booth at Toronto’s FanExpo convention in the hopes of spreading the word about what we do. We had postcards, bookmarks, samplers and print editions, ebooks and posters. We had a monitor playing book trailers, we had candy to draw people in, we had everything you could possibly imagine to make people notice us. We were ready for anything. Except how to sell ourselves.

It’s not that we didn’t know the method by which we’d sell. We knew how to pitch things, how to guide people through our catalogue. But it was distant and awkward: our titles were available for free, so why buy them? If we were selling, what were the products, and why spend money on them? It was like we were missing a piece of our logic, made worse in person, and people didn’t know how to react, and you could see it in their eyes. The online model wasn’t converting, and for a while, it looked like we’d made a horrible mistake going to the convention at all.

But then something happened, entirely by accident. A woman came to the booth, and she started looking at our book sampler for “The New Real” — about 1,000 words meant to give a taste of the story — in the usual “politely pitying browsing” way that many people had. Feeling quite defeated, I totally botched my usual sales pitch. “That’s an odd one,” I said, and she smiled a bit, getting ready to leave. “If it seems disjointed, it’s only because I was squeezing five or six random ideas into it at once.”

She looked up at that, obviously thinking I was some kind of idiot. “I don’t get it,” she said, turning the paper over like there was an answer printed on another side somewhere. “It seems pretty normal to me.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said, now having completely given up all hopes of pitching. “Sometimes I cover it up well, and sometimes it’s just a mess.”

“Cover… WHAT up?” she asked, looking for my missing antipsychotic meds on the table.

“It’s livewriting,” I said. “It’s a melting pot of crazy ideas, and sometimes the melting doesn’t quite work.”

She stared at me for a good long time, and then just as I thought she was going to leave, she did something unexpected.

“I think you need to explain that again.”

So I told her about what we do, and how we do it, and never really WHY we do it, but I think that was obvious from the get-go: we’re insane. Not just me, but pretty much all of us in weblit. We make things and do things not just because we like to write, but because we like to talk to the people at the other end, and see what they thought. Even when we don’t integrate things directly (as with livewriting), weblit is more of a conversation than a broadcast. We use our sites and Twitter and Facebook and the rest to have actual correspondence with people, not just pre-packaged sales pitches. We’re actual people, and we talk about actual things.

And that’s when it hit me: it’s not a broadcast, it’s a conversation… and what I’d been doing this whole time was broadcasting. I was ignoring the best parts of weblit, and it was breaking the bond between reader and writer. So I had to fix it.

From that moment on, I didn’t pitch anything at all. I talked about the appeal of steampunk, about some of the cooler cosplayers we’d seen recently, the philosophy of Cory Doctorow and the mechanics of asteroid piracy (as it related to Typhoon, which was a regular topic of conversation). I explained livewriting more times than I’ve ever done before, and I had a lot of fun explaining that the world of weblit is much bigger than just the things they saw on the table. I brought a little notebook I intended to use to snag email addresses or autographs of cool people, but instead, I jotted down referrals to other webseries for people to take home. I explained the significance of “stop or go”, gnomes and left socks, and had a great talk about the merits of the last Star Trek movie (or lack thereof). I had an Apple engineer giggle uncontrollably when she realized “The App” was about “a killer app.” By the end of the third day, I had talked more than I think I’ve ever talked before, and the funny thing was, it didn’t feel like I’d been standing around at a convention, selling stuff. It felt like what I normally do online, just in person.

See, that’s the advantage of weblit, and the biggest selling point. We’re not authors in ivory towers looking down on the little people. We engage. We’re authors and readers and fanboys (even if we’re too chicken to say hi to Felicia Day) and we’re at our best when we use all the facets of our personalities to talk to the people that read us. It doesn’t matter how many books I sold at FanExpo, really. It matters how many people are going to be around for my next series, so I can use their energy to do something even cooler than before. It’s like social networking, only… like… not on Facebook. I know. Totally outrageous, right? But that’s what this is all about. It was nice to re-discover it.

MCM wears many hats—often at the same time. He’s a writer, programmer, illustrator, and the creator of the animated TV series “RollBots.” His books are the foundation of 1889 Labs. MCM has a long history in technology and is active in the Free Culture movement. His writing has been praised by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, as well as Cory Doctorow, a pioneering author in the world of science fiction.

http://www.novelr.com/2010/09/05/linked-pitching-weblit-at-fanexpo Linked: Pitching WebLit at FanExpo – Novelr – Making People Read

[...] MCM has a brilliant post on pitching WebLit at FanExpo: So I told her about what we do, and how we do it, and never really WHY we do it, but I think that was obvious from the get-go: we’re insane. Not just me, but pretty much all of us in weblit. We make things and do things not just because we like to write, but because we like to talk to the people at the other end, and see what they thought. Even when we don’t integrate things directly (as with livewriting), weblit is more of a conversation than a broadcast. We use our sites and Twitter and Facebook and the rest to have actual correspondence with people, not just pre-packaged sales pitches. We’re actual people, and we talk about actual things. [...]
http://amharte.wordpress.com anna

MCM forgot to say he was holding a gun to the woman's head, forcing her to listen.
http://1889.ca MCM

Don't be silly. It was a lightsaber.
http://twitter.com/irkdesu Erica Bercegeay

As a congoer, I hate visiting tables where people are giving me their 'pitch' and nothing else. It's canned words and it doesn't allow for a response. Like getting a call from a telemarketer, except you can't just hang up – you've got to stand there and look interested before making an excuse to move on. I don't want to be sold to at an indie artist's table, I want to talk with real people about what they're doing and the experiences they're having doing it. I can definitely vouch for the 'conversation' method – if congoers just wanted to hear a blurb before buying and leaving, they'd go to Amazon, where it's quicker (and cheaper). I go to cons to experience things I can't elsewhere.

At Stumptown Comics Fest I managed to hit Becky Driestadt's table. She's the artist for Tiny Kitten Teeth (http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/) and also Tigerbuttah, which is an homage to the old-old Golden Books art style and storytelling. (It was crowdfunded, too!) She was doing free sketches for ANYONE, and I was impressed as hell by that (as an artist I know how hard it is to quickly do art requests, not knowing what people are going to pop on you in terms of the request). I first discovered her art via a guest story she and her partner did for Penny Arcade about the Lookouts. It had a basilisk in it that I thought was awesome, and I asked for a sketch. It was ADORABLE. I ended up buying a sketchbook/art collection of hers while I was there, and it felt special.

The guy at the table next to her was the gloomiest person in the world. He also does a webcomic (which is pretty famous/high hit count) that I'm not going to name… because, well, he was sullen. I talked to him because he looked lonely, and Becky's table was getting swamped by people and his definitely wasn't. He gave me the story pitch (in a lackluster way) but was otherwise… well, sullen, and he didn't seem to have any real talk in him. I've never visited his comic afterward, not even out of pity. nn; Not only did he only sell to me instead of talking, but he didn't seem enthusiastic about his work at all and he was definitely a downer.

Which means if you're not cut out for working directly with the public, don't go to cons! It won't do you any good. You're there for those people – but they're not there for you, much as it might seem like it. (They're there for themselves, or for friends they're doing favors for.)
http://letitiacoynefiction.blogspot.com/ Letitia Coyne

Irk, so true about people and people skills.

The conversation thing works in all publishing, too. Bryce Courtenay does any media he can when each book is released, but he rarely speaks about the boook. He talks about the process of writing – which fascinates people. He talks about his childhood and his love of stories and the importance of stories in culture.

And he takes the name of anyone who approaches him, no matter how inconvenient, and he will always post out a signed copy of a book to them. He gives away 2000 a year that way. People don't only love his books, they love him and feel like they know him.

L.
http://ergofiction.com Jan Oda

I feel like I've been saying this for years. Talking with people can do so much. Like when I was walking around with the Webfiction Guide Banner in the shopping street of Ghent, and nobody understood what it was al about, but because we were being silly, and taking pictures, a lot of people came to ask.

Funniest conversation was with 2 very old men who were wearing silly hats and looked a bit like vikings. They turned out to be archaeologists (which my friend and I were doing our Master year in), so we had a lot in common, and they really wanted to understand. After 15 minutes one of them says “Oh, it's on a _computer_… We don't have that. What a shame.” Somehow they had missed that Web, and online mean you need a computer for it.
But they were thrilled by the involvement part of the concept, the connection between readers and writers.
So if a conversation on the street can spark some interest with people who aren't really the target crowd, imagine what it could do with people from the target crowd.

As long as it's a conversation of course.
http://1889.ca MCM

On a purely technical front, that was one of the questions I was trying to reconcile. On the one hand, I think clarity in your offerings is very important (a big scary subject I'll write about later), but then the downside of our very elaborate set-up was that I wasn't really ACCESSIBLE to people. I scared one lady across the aisle because she thought I was a poster and not a person, and I suddenly talked to her out of nowhere. If your table is mostly empty (or relatively simple), then maybe you're more likely to communicate with people? Less artifice? But does that scare some away, because there's less room for them to browse without being pitched to? Or do you need an in-between, so they have that “plausible deniability” cruft to be distracted by, but not so much that it's like you're in your own world?

There was a traditional prinbt author there who was relatively ignored and isolated, but he was anything but sullen. He was insanely lively, possibly because he was being overlooked. So I think the conversation needs a hook of some kind. I just don't know if the hook is so easily defined.
http://1889.ca MCM

I was going to say that giving away books like that is a great idea, but then I realized that for most weblit, it's not easy to do that. You can really one-up them, in a sense, by pointing them to your website… but it's missing that personal touch. Something that says “you're special and valued.”

That was actually a big stumbling block for me in general… how do you give someone a bonus when everything you do is free and open? I must devise an answer for that somehow…
http://1889.ca MCM

I think I'd like to go around town with a WFG banner and have people ask me what the hell I'm doing. If nothing else, it'd be entertaining to see the reactions. It's the conversations that make all this worthwhile, tho, online and off.

The funny thing was that a lot of the people I talked to at FanExpo weren't prejudiced against weblit at all, so there was a lot of good conversation to be had. Online communities tend to have an instinctive opinion one way or another, so if they dislike what we do, they won't engage at all. In that way, the offline world seems like an (oddly) better fit for expansion.

Maybe we need to offer offline versions of serials. A monthly mailing to people who hate screens, for a relatively low price. Coming full circle!
http://letitiacoynefiction.blogspot.com/ Letitia Coyne

And for those who do like webfic, you could give them their own 'access code' or a url to a special page of story/artwork/vid files etc which are for con audiences only. Same as serial authors do with bonus material for subscribers.
elijames

Here's a suggestion: you give them a little card, signed with your name, that goes to a special webpage just made for people you've met a specific conference? How's that for an idea? :)
elijames

I /liked this comment! MCM! This be a good idea, no?!
http://twitter.com/WA_side Cathi Payne

I think it should link to a page where they get to suggest a question, answer or idea that you guarantee to work into an upcoming story.

Obviously, the very next stroy would be ideal, but that might not always fit. Could you set it up where their input is linked to their email/twitter/fb/etc and when you pull that input into a story (or in the planning stage, would be better) a note is sent out to them with dates, times and how-to's.

Then they are already involved, before the story even starts and thus are more likely to come back, continuing to be an active part because it isn't that scary “first base” any more. They're already heading for 2nd base.

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