I’m not sure I’ve ever been this busy before. At least as far as writing is concerned. I have a major deadline coming up in about 6 weeks and I’ve got the nose to the grindstone, working every waking hour, to get this book done on schedule. It’s fun, but it’s hard. There are distractions. I have to get the taxes done. There are TV shows I’d like to watch and books I’d like to read. All of that goes onto the back burner until April 1.

However, things arise that require my attention. Such as a recent advisory at the HWA message board that a site was hosting pirated copies of work. I checked out the site and yes, indeed, something of mine was there.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had people giving away (or, in this case, selling access to) copies of my work. I’m not an obvious target, but apparently these pirates cast a wide net. I filed a DMCA notice with the site (they provided a helpful template to do so) and within about 48 hours the offending content was gone. Just mine, mind you—the site still offers scads of books by names you would certainly recognize. [Addendum: after  I wrote this article, I found a site containing two pirated anthologies featuring my work. DMCA notices filed. In this instance the response was that it would be "difficult" to remove the file, but they would try. Hmm.]

It’s a little like playing whack-a-mole, though. You bop it down in one place and it pops back up again in another. Thanks to sites like the now defunct MegaUpload, people have plausible deniability. They can upload the content anonymously and provide a link to it from some other equally anonymous site. When challenged, they can claim that they are just providing a link, not hosting the content. I’ve dealt with this before. I usually focus my efforts on the hosting site, since all the links in the world don’t mean a hill of beans if there’s nothing at the end of them. Every once in a while, one of the link providers will provide a shame-faced apology when challenged.

I’m sure there are people who are saying, “What’s the big deal?” This instance doesn’t represent a big financial hit for me. The work was originally offered as a give-away chapbook, for which I was paid in advance. It’s now available only as an eBook, and I do get royalties from this, though they won’t buy me a fancy dinner most months.

However, it’s the principle of the matter. This work belongs to me. If I want to give copies of it away, that would be up to me (and the publisher, of course). No one else has the right to do so. The situation isn’t the same as with a physical book, where a person can buy a copy and then do with it what they want—short of selling photocopies of it or scanning it in and giving away (or selling) the scans. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to resell your paperback or hardcover copy of a work. It is not acceptable to distribute an eBook. In effect, when you purchase an eBook, you are licensing it in much the same way that you license software. There are terms of agreement that you enter into with the author and the publisher.

I’m not going to get into the whole “piracy can be good for your career” argument touted by some authors. I don’t believe it anymore than I believe  that leaving the jewelry store unlocked at night is good for business.  Letting unauthorized people control the distribution of your intellectual property just isn’t right, regardless of any perceived “benefits.”

Writers are facing the same situation that musicians did a decade or more ago when file sharing services started robbing them of the royalties they relied on to make a living. There is a general belief that this situation has shaken itself out for musicians, that entities like iTunes and Pandora have legitimized online music distribution. All you have to do is hit Google, though, to see that there is a lot of music being illegally distributed on the internet. And now books, as well.

All we can do is go after the sites that are illegally distributing our works, one at a time. Whack that mole and wait for the next one to appear. I recommend putting Google Alerts to use so that you can find out when your name or a particular title shows up on the internet. That’s the main way I find pirated copies of my work. I’m too busy to go trolling cyberspace all the time, but when cyberspace comes to me, I act.

One sad fact, though, is that some of these sites are beyond my reach. If they dig in their heels and the server is located in some distant land, there’s little I can do about it. Hell, there’s little anyone can do about it—even the big authors with deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we should just throw our hands in the air and give up. We pick them off one at a time. People will always steal—and some offenders don’t even consider this theft, more the pity—but this is a kind of theft that we can stop some of the time, at least. Intellectual property is real property, with real value. And I have the royalty statements to prove it.

– by Bev Vincent

Most of what I’ve written about here at Storytellers Unplugged has been about writing. However, writers are also voracious readers. It’s hard to imagine a writer who doesn’t consume books at an impressive pace.

I started young, a preschooler reading road signs on family vacations, much to my parents’ chagrin. A few years later, I picked up copies of The Jungle Book and Tales of Mystery and Imagination in a discount bin on one of those trips. The former I must have read, but the latter had a profound impact. Poe’s short stories loom large in my memory—they seem almost as long as novellas in my recollection, and I’m always astonished when I go back to reread one and discover again how brief they were.

I moved on to the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie, went through my science fiction and fantasy stage when I started university, switched to horror in my early twenties, but always went back to my first love, which is crime fiction. Anyone who follows my book reviews on Onyx Reviews will probably know that the majority of what I read falls into that genre.

As an adolescent, I was the guy who always had a paperback in his back pocket, even at school dances. During a two-year period when I lived abroad, I read nearly 200 books. The walls of our house are lined with bookshelves, and my to-be-read pile has evolved into to-be-read shelves and is now almost a to-be-read wall. I can read anywhere, and can easily put a book down in the middle of a chapter, paragraph or even a sentence if the situation demands.

As writers, we spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. We usually read and revise our own drafts that way. Our colleagues and friends send us electronic copies of their works, which we often read from the screen as well. As a group, we’re probably more likely to read at length on a computer than a general audience. We may gripe and complain about it, but we do it as a matter of course.

Two weeks ago, I received a Kindle 2 as a gift. It was my idea, however, having seen someone using one in the airport on a recent trip. I never travel without at least two or three books, since I can often read an entire novel on one leg of a journey. Books weigh a lot, and they take up space. The Kindle is light and even smaller than I imagined. Less than 1 cm thick, it can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500-2000 books. If you run out of things to read, you can go online with it and buy a new book and have it in your hands within a minute (so long as you’re in the US—the wireless network doesn’t work anywhere else, at present).

My main trepidation was the reading experience. I’m not a big fan of reading from the computer screen, despite what I wrote above. I often print out documents longer than a dozen or so pages so I can read them in comfort away from my desk. However, the Kindle affords me that possibility. I can read from it in bed, on the couch, in the car, in the back yard—hell, even in the hot tub if I’m careful.

The screen is a bit smaller than a standard paperback page, but the text is very legible and you can increase the text size if you need to. If you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can just move the cursor over it and the definition pops up at the bottom of the page, because there’s a built-in dictionary. If you’re really curious, you can enable the free wireless and look something up on Google or Wikipedia. It’s not blazingly fast as a browser, and you have to do a fair amount of paging around, but it satisfies my innate curiosity. I’m always looking stuff up, and now I can do it right from my book. You can create bookmarks, search for specific text, and add notes to any document. The clunkiest thing about the Kindle is the process of scanning back a few pages to pick up a detail you think you might have missed—you have to go one page at a time, one click at a time. Not a big deal, but not as easy as flipping a few “real” pages.

I’ve become a rapid convert. I suspect I’ll do the bulk of my reading from the Kindle in the future. Amazon has a mechanism where you shoot them an e-mail with an attached html file or Word doc (PDF is also supported, but it is still experimental owing to the rigid formatting of PDF files) and they return a file in the right format for the Kindle, which you can then transfer over by USB (for free) or they will send it to the Kindle by wireless (for 15 cents). I transferred the manuscript of my most recent novel to it so I’ll have it on hand when I talk to my agent. I also had a friend send me an electronic ARC of her upcoming book. If I could convince publishers to send me review copies this way, I’d be a happy camper.

There was a time when I thought I’d reread books but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that such a privilege will be reserved for only a special subset of books. There are simply too many new books to read to spend precious time with ones I’ve already read. My recent trend has been to buy a book, read it and sell it while it still has some resale value. With NY Times bestsellers costing less than $10 for the Kindle, the net cost is about the same. I may also be inspired to tackle some of the classic novels I’ve always wanted to read—many of which are free for Kindle.

I still love physical books, the smell of the paper, the whisper of the pages turning, the texture of the rough edges and the embossed covers. But in the end it’s more about the words than the package and I’m perfectly willing to give up the pleasure of holding many books in physical form. The environment will thank me for it, I suppose, since I have probably clear cut a small forest over the course of my life due to the vast number of books I’ve purchased.

Besides, I don’t want to have to build an extension to the house just to house the next decade’s worth of books.

– by Bev Vincent

The acquiring editor is the person most writers—and, perhaps, readers—are familiar with, at least in general. We submit stories to them, they accept (or reject) our work, and changes to the overall flow, structure, and content of the material originates with them. I think of them as conceptual or big-picture editors. A while back I wrote about what a good editor can do for a writer.

This month I would like to introduce you to copy editors, the unsung heroes of the publishing process. After the editor and the author have ironed out the major issues with a project, the manuscript then goes before the sharp eyes of the copy editor.

The first thing she does is to build a style sheet for the project to guarantee continuity from the first page to the last. The publishing house probably has a style manual that it uses as its Bible, but there will inevitably be things that aren’t addressed by the style manual, so the copy editor makes a decision about how such things will be handled, adds rules to the style sheet, and sweeps through the manuscript to make sure the rules are obeyed. How will times be represented: a.m. or AM? What numbers will use digits and which ones will be spelled out? Will essay titles in the text be italicized or put in quotes. Will certain words be hyphenated or represented as compound words? Will the serial comma be used? These are just some of the decisions the copy editor makes and enforces.

The copy editor also flags grammatical errors and catches errors in fact. She looks for overused terms or duplication of words in close proximity. In a work of fiction, a good copy editor will make sure that Jane, who has blue eyes on page 17, doesn’t turn into Jean with green eyes on page 317. In a non-fiction work, she will notice that an author has referred to a publisher as Everett House throughout when, in fact, the company is Everest House. The copy editor makes sure that trademarked names are correctly spelled. She catches vague references and ambiguities.

When I was working on The Road to the Dark Tower with Penguin several years ago, once the hardcopy manuscript went to the copy editor, it was “locked.” All subsequent changes were made on that printed version of the manuscript. The copy editor sent the manuscript back to the author with her notes in the margins and the author addressed the comments and suggestions in the margins using a different color of ink. For complicated or lengthy changes, the author could insert pages into the manuscript, but that version was sacrosanct. I often wondered what would happen if it were lost in transit. To be honest, I was surprised that a major publisher still did all that work in pen on paper—it meant that someone had to sort out the stets from the deles, interpret the handwritten insertions, and key them into the electronic master. It all worked out in the long run, but it seemed like an unnecessary step in the electronic era.

For my current project, the copyediting phase was done electronically. I received a version of my Word manuscript by e-mail with changes tracked and notes inserted where clarification was required. The style sheet came as a separate attachment. I went through the manuscript, again with changes tracked, and responded to comments and questions with my own comments and responses, accepted certain changes, rejected others—providing my reasons for doing so—and reworded passages that required clarification.

Copyeditors, in my experience, seem to be deferential people. They know that it isn’t their job to rewrite what the author has created, only to improve it. Often, alterations that were made to my manuscript were accompanied by queries that asked, “Change okay?”

After the author addresses the changes,the first pass of the book’s layout can be created. This is the point where proofreaders come into play—and the author is to be counted among this group. That’s the point I’m at with my current project. The first pass is on its way to me as I write, and I will have a week to go through it. In general, all I would need to do is proofread, but since this is a profusely illustrated book, I’ll also be seeing proposed design elements for the first time, and I’ll have to write captions. It’s been a fascinating project to work on, let me tell you.

I have the utmost respect and undying gratitude for the copy editor who caught all my silly mistakes and will make the finished product (and me) look better.

– Bev Vincent

Recently, a representative of a book packager contacted me with a proposal for a project they wanted me to consider. 

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. That’s the sound of my brakes squealing across the pavement. Book packagers? What’s that? Sounds kind of dodgy. Some sort of scam, mayhaps? 

Before committing to anything—or indeed, even responding to the unsolicited e-mail—I had to educate myself on what this book-packaging thing was all about. Book packagers are exactly like publishers. They produce books. They have researchers and editors and marketers and foreign rights departments, and all the other things that you might expect a publisher to have. They have artists and illustrators, book designers, the whole nine yards. They even have their own organization: The American Book Producers Association. 

What they do is bring together all these creative people to assemble a “package,” which is just another word for a book. This book idea either originates with another publisher—perhaps even one of the big, famous, New York publishers—or the proposal is shopped around. That’s right—the book packager also acts as a literary agent for the project. 

Why do they exist? Because publishers don’t always have all the resources necessary to produce labor-intensive books—ones that have a lot of photographs or illustrations, require a lot of research or involve the acquisition of rights and licensing. That’s the stock-in-trade for a book packager. The volumes they produce would look right at home on your coffee table. Big, lavish volumes with photographs. Every page illustrated and intricately designed. Book packagers (also known as independent book producers) make complicated books easy for a publisher to publish. 

As was the case with the project I was offered, another publisher often comes up with a concept, perhaps prepares an outline or some guidelines, and then hires the book packager to produce the finished volume. 

So, what’s the deal? As with any other publishing relationship, the sky is the limit. It’s difficult to generalize. The conventional wisdom is that the writer’s end of the deal with a book packager is much like “work for hire.” That means, you get a flat fee for your words—which, after all, are just part of the package—no royalties. And, sometimes, not even name credit on the book or a transfer of copyright to the book packager. It’s like being a ghostwriter. Those terms may be deal breakers for some people. 

However, everything is negotiable, and not all deals are the same. The book packager in this instance offered both royalties and name credit. Though the boilerplate contract stipulated a transfer of copyright, my agent successfully negotiated copyright in my name. During negotiations, he told me he enjoyed working on this deal because it was a different type of contract from the usual ones he was used to seeing. Different kinds of clauses and concerns. 

There was something else to consider—though I will get a royalty on every copy sold, the royalty is based on the sale price to the publisher who initiated the project, not on the cover price. That’s not the way things normally work—it’s more like the terms of a normal contract for “deeply discounted” copies, except in this case, every copy is deeply discounted. 

On the other side of the equation, though, the books are sold to the publisher on a no-return basis. I will get a royalty for every copy printed. None of that nasty “reserve against returns” that appears on typical royalty statements—money held back by the publisher in anticipation of a certain percentage of returned books from stores. 

There’s another dimension to this project: I’m essentially a servant to two masters. I have an editor I’m working with at the book packagers, and another editor downstream with the publisher who solicited the project whose name I don’t even know. It is possible that I will “finalize” the manuscript with one editor only to find out that more work will be required at the behest of the second editor. So far, the second editor has been agreeable with everything we’ve done, but it’s something to keep in mind should you find yourself considering a deal with a book packager. 

Things tend to move very fast in the world of packaging. The editor first contacted me at the end of November 2008. After a few rounds of discussion, both by e-mail and phone, I was intrigued enough to get my agent involved. He went off and did his thing with them while I prepared a detailed outline for the project, which I submitted in early January. 

After the outline was approved, I got straight to work. Because of the accelerated timeframe, I had 1/3 and 2/3 point deliverable deadlines—both to keep me on track and to provide the photo researchers with material to work from. 

The editor has been a delight to work with, as enthusiastic about the project as I am and very supportive of the work I’ve done to date. Exactly the kind of environment every writer hopes to have while working on a book. 

Now, less than three months after the initial contact, I have an executed contract and a completed manuscript. Because these books are so lavishly illustrated, the word count tends to be fairly low. In this case, 20-30,000 words was the contracted text. 

In parallel, the photo researcher and documents experts have been gathering material for the book. I don’t have any involvement in that, though I have been able to facilitate access to certain materials. The book will be published this fall—about a year after initial contact. It’s hard to match that in “mainstream” publishing. 

So, that’s what I’ve been up to during 2009 to date. I had the first draft finished at the end of January and I spent the first couple of weeks of February revising and polishing the manuscript and I turned it in last week—two weeks early. 

The advance is probably more than I would get for a first novel from a paperback house and for much less work—and there’s the possibility of further revenue if the book is popular, or if side deals are executed for subsidiary rights. All in all, a very pleasant process. Especially in this economic climate, and with the fairly dire state of affairs in publishing, it was a welcome surprise to have something like this drop into my lap.

And, at the end of the year, I’m going to have copies of this beautiful book in stores across the country. Guess what all my friends and family are getting for Christmas this year?

– Bev Vincent

(With apologies to Lawrence Block for co-opting and modifying the title of his most excellent book about writing fiction)

Much of what we write about at Storytellers Unplugged has to do with the world of fiction: short stories, novels, screenplays, video games, etc. Today I’d like to spend a little time discussing how everything you know about marketing fiction is the exact opposite of the way things are usually done in the non-fiction world.

Can you imagine the response you’d get if you sent a query letter to an editor that said, in effect: I have a great idea for a short story that I’d like to sell to you. Here  is what the story will be about. Would you buy this idea so I can start writing the story?

If you received any response at all to this query, it probably wouldn’t be very encouraging—and perhaps not printable in this blog. With fiction you write, then you sell. For non-fiction, you sell, then you write.

Non-fiction projects are typically sold via a proposal. Before I started shopping around my idea for The Road to the Dark Tower, I researched the process. At the back of Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents, I found a valuable resource:  a section titled “The Knockout Non-fiction Book Proposal.”

Armed with his advice and the template from his book, I created my own 50-page proposal, which consisted of the following. Except where noted, each item was approximately one to three pages long, double spaced.

• Title page. There was every chance that the proposed title wouldn’t survive the editorial/marketing process, but I gave the title a lot of thought just the same.
• Project overview. The overall concept, with snippets of the rest of the proposal distilled into a punchy pitch letter.
• Author bio. This wasn’t simply a CV or a list of previous publications. It was where I explained (in third person) why I was the ideal person to write this book, as opposed to someone else. What relevant resources and connections I had, along with other work that pertained to the subject matter at hand. Though I listed fiction publications at the end, the focus was on my non-fiction experience. (In response to this section, I was susequently asked to submit recent copies of my Cemetery Dance column.)
• Market analysis. Why did the book need to exist? Who was the target audience and how could I tap into it? I used the demographics and sales figures for King books to bolster my argument, for example. In general, this is also a place to list other books that covered the topic and why the proposed book was different or better, but in my case my book was going to be the first on the subject, so I emphasized that fact.
• Promotion: This section allowed me to outline any connections I had to the target audience that could be used to help promote the book. This was also where I demonstrated my enthusiasm for the project by stating clearly that I would be available for interviews, appearances or any other duty the publisher might request. In addition, I named people who had already told me they would be willing to consider providing a blurb for the book, along with other likely candidates.
• Approach: My plan for the book – for example, writing style, source of material, the use of direct quotes, interviews, sidebars, etc.
• Table of contents: Even though I hadn’t written the book yet, I provided my outline of what I thought the book would look like, including chapter titles and appendices.
• Chapter by chapter expanded outline: My outline ran fifteen pages, with approximately a page devoted to each chapter. It didn’t summarize the chapters—it couldn’t, as I hadn’t written them yet—but it detailed the purpose of each chapter.
• Sample chapter: I included the full text of the first chapter of the book, which was the only part of the project I had written at this point. Approximately 25 pages.

I started with a query, as I might for a novel, and then followed up with the proposal. Once a publisher expressed interest, I was able to acquire representation from an agent and the negotiation went on from there.

Once we had a deal in place, all that remained was to write the darned thing.

Though the above pertains to a book-length work, the same concept is relevant to shorter works such as essays, book reviews and interviews. Pitch and sell the idea, then do the work. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time working on spec projectst that never get sold. The same is true, of course, in fiction–though some writers achieve enough success to be able to sell future works on proposals–but that’s just not the way the system works at present.

– Bev Vincent

I have published something on the order of fifty short stories since I began writing seriously at the beginning of the millennium. Some of the early stories appeared in what are disparagingly referred to as “for the love” (or “4theLuv”) markets. A few were published in “royalty only” anthologies (which are but a smidgen better than 4theLuv markets in that in rare cases some of them have delivered a pittance in revenue—my current record is about $18). Most of the recent ones have appeared in professional markets, some with distribution to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers.

Every now and then, someone asks me when I’m going to release a collection. Choosing from among those fifty stories (plus the twenty or so that are currently seeking homes), I could probably put together a decent volume of my short fiction. Over the past few years, I’ve been approached by reputable small press publishers to do just that.

A couple of years ago, when I was in New York on vacation with my family, I had lunch with my literary agent. Among the topics on our agenda to discuss was a then-recent proposal to do a collection. When I broached the subject, he asked me what I thought it would do to grow my readership. In other words, who would buy this collection beyond people who already knew of my work, either by direct exposure or by reputation?

As much as I would love to see a handsome volume, artfully designed by a specialty press, with an eye-catching cover illustration and a signature page for my John Hancock, I got his point. He was looking at the big picture of a career in publishing, versus the quick and easy gratification of a limited edition.

Single-author collections are a hard sell, especially for an unknown author like me. No mainstream publisher is going to release a collection of my stories, and few people are going to splurge on a $30-$50 small press edition from someone they’ve never read before—assuming they hear about the book in the first place. The total print run would logically be something on the order of 250 copies, enough to satisfy the people already familiar with my writing and maybe a handful of others. As my agent asked, how would that expand my readership? The book might satisfy readers looking for more of my work, but what would it do for me?

Instead of rushing into faster but lower-reaching deals to get a novel or a story collection in print, I’ve decided to be patient. I’m not young—but I’m not exactly old, either, so I have time to improve my skills and come up with something that New York wants to publish. Maybe it will be the novel my agent is currently reviewing, or maybe it won’t be until three or four more manuscripts down the line. Maybe ten—who knows?

Perhaps I have delusions of grandeur, or think more highly of my writing than reality might suggest, but I have decided, for better or for worse, to aim as high as possible for my books. Perhaps I have the luxury of doing this because I’ve already had my ego fulfilled by publishing one book through a mainstream publisher. If I never succeed at that level with my fiction, at least there’s that.

If I were to achieve some success with novels, then it might be time to think about a story collection, when it could actually appeal to a wider group of people who’ve heard my name, perhaps read things about my work, and want to test out my writing in smaller doses than committing to a novel. That could actually benefit my career. All in a best-case universe, of course. There are many hurdles to leap before that joyous day. I accept the possibility that some of these hurdles may be insurmountable.

This essay was inspired in part by a recent discussion about authors who may have published too early—writers who appear content to only publish in the small press, or who seem too impatient to try to break out at a higher level. I’ve given the subject a lot of thought over the past few years. Robert McCammon ultimately withdrew his first four books because he felt he had been published too soon, when he was still learning his craft. I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of his early novels, but I respect the high standards he has decided to set for himself.

As I said, maybe I’m deluding myself about the potential for my writing. My agent doesn’t think so, which is encouraging. Everyone in this business has different goals, different reasons for doing what they do. Different needs they want to have met. I already have a shelf full of anthologies that prove to my ego that I can be published. My goal at this point (subject to change without notice) is to continue to be published well.

–Bev Vincent

As writers, besides income tax and agent commissions, attending conventions is our biggest annual expense. Everything else pales by comparison—memberships dues in professional organizations, postage, ink cartridges, paper—and with a growing trend toward electronic submissions, some of these are decreasing. Even so, the necessity of paying for the tangible tools of our trade is self-evident.

Soon I’ll be flying halfway across the continent to NECON. Other than mosquito bites, hangovers, more calories than I normally consume during any given week, and sacrificing valuable neurons, what will I have to show for this trip? Why spend a thousand dollars to attend a convention for a few days?

The first time I ever attended a genre convention was when I was an undergrad in the early 1980s, living in Halifax. I think it was Halcyon 7 or 8. Probably fewer than a hundred people attended. I believe Jack Chalker and Spider Robinson were Guests of Honor, but that may be a false memory. I can find no evidence on the internet that this event ever took place, and I’ve misplaced the tan-colored conference t-shirt that featured a butterfly-winged nymphette.

I remember walking to the conference hotel from my dorm, wandering the dealer room on Saturday and buying a few items in a fan-art auction on Sunday morning, including a pencil sketch of a unicorn I may still have somewhere. If I attended panels, they’ve been obliterated from my memory.

Nearly a decade later, shortly after I moved to Texas, I heard that Jimmy Doohan and Marina Sirtis would be at a Star Trek convention in Houston. Growing up in eastern Canada, I’d never had the opportunity to attend a professional fan convention of this magnitude.

I went alone, and ended up standing in the registration line between a man dressed like one of the Ferengi and a young woman with purple hair, prodigious cleavage and fishnet stockings. They were engaged in an intense debate—complete with references—about exactly what Spock did between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. I only thought I was a Star Trek fan. I soon discovered I was waaaaay out of my league.

The convention was fun, but I was disillusioned to find out that the people manning the vendor tables were only there because they knew how much cash avid fans were willing to shell out for cheaply made bric-a-brac and ephemera. The vendors didn’t care about Star Trek and I overheard a few unguarded exchanges concerning their opinions of attendees, too.

Another decade passed. I found myself easing into the horror-writing community. I landed a gig as a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine, and my first column was scheduled to appear in an issue debuting at the World Horror Convention in Seattle, 2001.

I am not by nature a gregarious person, so I didn’t make lightly the decision to cast myself into the midst of hundreds of strangers for four days. However, having made the plunge, I wasn’t about to loiter among the potted plants or lurk at the back of the meeting halls. I was determined to participate. I wanted to get to know people, and give people a face to associate with my name.

I’d never met any of the other attendees. I knew a few through online interactions and others by reputation. Still, I made a concerted effort to approach people. Rich Chizmar had couriered me a defective copy of Dark Dreamers just before I left. From the contributor photo at the back, I recognized Stan Wiater and Beth Gwinn shortly after I checked into the hotel. Neither of them had seen the book yet, so I had my opening. After that, it got easier. Getting people to sign their photos in the book was a useful tactic for meeting writers I might otherwise have been too diffident to approach.

I encountered Tim Lebbon in the registration line, where I was proudly showing off the GAK cover art for an anthology containing two of my earliest short stories. I also met the anthology editor, a member of my first online critique group. I saw Barbara Roden, who, three years later, would publish one of my stories in All Hallows. I sat with Larry Santoro at the Stoker banquet. Mike Huyck and Gene O’Neil critiqued one of my short stories, and every time I saw Gene after that, he inquired about whether I’d sold it yet. I eventually did.

I attended as many panels as I could. I toured the dealer room during idle moments. I haunted the con suites. Not wanting to miss out on anything, I’d made sure my return flight wasn’t until well after the closing ceremony. That meant I could go to the “dead dog” party. I sat in the con suite helping get rid of the remaining booze and food, chatting with one of the Guests of Honor—Jay Clarke, aka Michael Slade—and thus began a friendship that continues to this day. Turns out it was his first horror convention, too, and he enjoyed the experience so much that he wrote a novel with a similar convention at its core. (I die in that book, by the way. Spectacularly.)

Initially I went to conventions to promote myself. I took postcards and book flats, propped up a copy of the latest work in front of me if I was assigned to a panel. I wrangled invitations to small press anthologies, though most of those books never materialized.

Now I take a more laid back approach. I attend fewer panels and sit in on more readings. Authors are more appreciative of faces in the audience than panelists—and nothing I’ve heard at a panel is as memorable as the time I saw Gary Braunbeck read “We Now Pause for Station Identification.”

I still spend a lot of time (and money) in the dealer room, but I now know that the most important things are to be learned at the bar. I remember an impromptu gathering in a lobby bar, featuring Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Michael Slade, Feo Amante and several others that was worth the cost of the trip alone.

I show up at the parties in the suites, but usually don’t stay long. I find them too hot, too claustrophobic, and too difficult to move around. After a certain amount of alcohol has been consumed, no one remembers what was discussed the next day anyway, myself included.

When I discovered NECON, I knew I’d found my convention. There I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in a short period of time. The “con suite” is an outdoor quad at the university campus—breezy, temperate, roomy. I can drift from one group to another without stepping on feet or pushing through a mass of sweaty bodies. I don’t have to strain to hear what the other people are saying. I may have to buy my own beer, but that’s a low price for that level of camaraderie.

With attendance limited at 200, I’m never overwhelmed. There’s a high return rate, so after five years the familiar faces now outnumber the unfamiliar. It’s networking at the most fundamental level—making and reconnecting with friends. I talk with people as much about life in general as about writing. How are the kids? How was your vacation? How’s the day job? I can play mini golf with Beth Massie, go grocery shopping with Doug Clegg, sit on a patio drinking with Peter Straub, gossip with Dave Hinchberger and watch Peter Crowther battle Rick Hautala at darts at midnight. There’s a good reason regular attendees call it “Camp NECON.”

Yes, there will be panels where we discuss the burning issues in the genre today (the panelists and the audience will likely both be hung-over and sleep-deprived, the same as at most other cons) but there will also be a talent contest or a game show where F. Paul Wilson struts his stuff in drag and Tom Monteleone tells shaggy dog stories. We laugh a lot during NECON. I like that.

Even if we don’t talk about writing all the time, and even if I don’t find out about fantastic new writing opportunities (though I have) and even if I don’t meet an editor who’s drooling to publish m
y work, I come away from the four days physically exhausted and creatively renewed. I’m reminded that there are other people toiling away the same as I am. I’m heartened by their successes and commiserate with their disappointments. I’m part of a community.

As writers, our daily lives are insular. Some are fortunate enough to live in places—Manhattan, for example—near others writers they can hook up with on a regular basis, but most of us don’t. Every now and then we need to get outside our heads and meet with people who understand what it’s like to be a writer.

That’s why I go to conferences. And it’s worth every penny.