This past weekend, I was off at Lunacon, along with Jabberwocky VP Eddie Schneider and two of our clients, the Author Guest of Honor Tanya Huff and fantasy author Peter V. Brett.
There's history to Lunacon, which like most of the major sf conventions in the Northeast has been held for fifty or sixty years, with roots dating back to the dawn of sf fandom. The convention has been held in Westchester in recent years. It has a decent attendance, a decent dealer's room, maybe too many program tracks. It didn't seem this year to have a lot of aspiring authors. Neither Eddie nor I passed out many business cards. Old-fashioned authors can sometimes get lost in the cross-platform Long Island convention I-Con that is upcoming this weekend where the media guests are more central, but that's also a much larger convention that does seem to have more people with interest in JABberwocky wares. I've historically gone to I-Con which is further away but an easy one-seat ride on the LIRR. So that's ahead this weekend, and we'll see how the two compare.
As to Lunacon, I was on six panels. I added at the con to one on financial planning for writers and creative professionals, did a panel on contracts that was good experience for an upcoming workshop I'll be doing at Dallas Ft. Worth Writer's Conference, Tanya and I spoke on the author/agent relationship, something on Marvel/comics in a post-Disney age, romance and sf, and a Blood Ties/vampire panel. Attendance ranged from a handful of people to 35 people for the vampire panel.
The hotel is a little desolately located in corporate Westchester, though you can get to downtown Port Chester in a few minutes by car or a half hour walk. It's called the Escher hotel not entirely inaccurately because the various wings from various add-ons join in some interesting ways. I hate eating hotel meals, and not much choice at this con. There was a $24 dinner buffet that wasn't bad, interesting that on Friday when likely to have fewer people than on Saturday there were some creative maybe not so cheap dishes like a lamb stew and coconut rice with pigeon peas, then Saturday's it's very cafeteria chicken, mac 'n' cheese etc. Tasted OK, but you can tell they're keeping an eye out for the profit margin.
3 comments:
You might have more interested novelists if you accepted queries more than six weeks every six months. Just sayin'.
Talking about Cons bums me out right now. I love them, but I'm done until I have some actual writing income. Doesn't matter where they are, it's too expensive to get there from Alaska if I can't honestly treat them as a business expense.
Don't worry about a lack of aspiring authors at the DFW Writers' Conference. You'll have plenty of opportunities to pass out your business cards. The conference has sold out, and there is a waiting list of people hoping someone will cancel.
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