I Survived Lake County Comic Con 2022

And I have the pictures to prove it!

There was a bit of a problem when I arrived: the table they assigned was in the doorway where vendors were entering to set up, meaning *I* couldn't set up, but the convention organizer Scott found a table available where the person had relocated to another group area (some vendors work as a team at various cons).

But once I got everything set up, and the doors opened to the public, the place got busy.

Either bring a basket of candy to draw a crowd,
or make a special offer.
The offer itself didn't attract people: I had buyers
refuse the coffee mugs. Sigh.

And oh boy did I get busy.

I sold eight books this con. Personal record. Previous attendance I had many three at most, probably two books sold all day. EIGHT today. I feel like I can take on the whole Empire myself. And each of the book volumes of Strangely Funny went home with eager readers. I am now officially out of Strangely Funny Volume I.

I had so many people stop by my table - between the busy hours of 11 AM to 3 PM - that I barely had any time to circle around and get pictures.

You might remember John Crowther. He was there
promoting more of his wrestling comics, as well as a
new novel!

Not sure of this cosplay.

EVERYBODY knows Squirrel Girl!!!

The crowd seemed about the same as last year's, although not as many cosplayers this time. It was rainy weather today - a cold front blowing across central Florida, yes it DOES get cold here - so that may have affected costumers avoiding the rain.

Thanks all, those who attended, and I hope to have something new - a nice fantasy or sci-fi novel - for you for next year's con! 

Lake County Comic Con 2022: I Shall Be There

And I shall be square!

The annual Lake County Comic Con - located at the Trilogy Orlando, address 100 Falling Acorn Ave, Groveland FL, it's north of Clermont FL folks, check your GPS - will open Sunday November 20 from 10AM to 5PM, and I will be one of many vendors there offering our wares!

I will bring the latest volume of the Strangely Funny anthology series, copies of my short story collection Last of the Grapefruit Wars, and a special offer this time around.

 

For one book purchase at $10.00, you get a Witty Librarian mousepad!

For two book purchases at $20.00, you get a Witty Librarian mug!

Supplies are limited, so the deal won't last!

I might even bring my Royal Palm Literary Award for display!

Hope to see you there, drive safe. Mask up if need to, COVID is still out there, please get your booster shots. 

I Survived (I Think) Lake County Comic Con 2021!

Once, long ago, before the dark times, before the pandemic, I would make convention visits to Clermont FL for a Sunday comic con.

While the COVID situation remains fraught - even with the vaccinations and the booster shot I just got last week - it seemed safe enough to make a return trip. Except this year they weren't doing it at the Clermont center - I didn't ask but I expect the city couldn't afford yet to have it open - so it was in a meeting room at a gated community (Trilogy Orlando) north of Clermont. 

This year I brought some new items for sale: Mousepads with my "Definitions of a Witty Librarian" design. I also planned on giving away a Witty Librarian coffee mug in a raffle... except I forgot to pack the bloody coffee mug!!! (AAAAAAAAUUUGGGGHHH)

Missing from this photo: THE DAMN COFFEE MUG

And so, emotionally scarred by my failure to forget ONE THING that I always do whenever I go on these convention runs... I set up table and got to work! By... sitting there and waiting for customers to come to me, because I was working solo this Sunday.

I did have time to walk the floor once in a while (bathroom breaks)...

They had me in the corner of the room with the local chapter of the Ghostbusters! So every time the kids came by they played with the proton pack and made flushing noises (the traps disposal)...

I have to admit I also play a lot of Pokemon Go, and the thing is there's a mission requirement to get past Level 40 where you have to capture 200 Pokemon. Good news is, the Trilogy's center had three Pokestops you could load with Lures to draw in more than 200 Pokemon all day long... sooooo...

I also needed to take a picture of my Pokemon buddy at one point,
 which got photobombed by a Shinx!!!

In the good news category, I caught interest from a number of readers looking for new titles, and I made sure they left with at least bookmarks to think about buying one or more of the Strangely Funny books. Even better, two of them bought the print copies! One bought the first volume of Strangely Funny, and the other bought the last copy I have of the History and Mystery Oh My edition.

Nobody bought the mousepads though, so I have a glut at the moment. Anyone need a Witty Librarian mousepad?

This is what's on the mousepad, if you want it, drop me a line...

So here's hoping this was a safe and healthy comic con for all attendees, and that our Thanksgiving will be one of fun with family and friends!

Lake County Comic Con Sunday November 21: Be There And Be Square!!! ...Wait is that how it works...?

 Hola and opa, faithful followers of this blog!

I will make an Author's appearance at the upcoming LAKE COUNTY COMIC CON this Sunday November 21st opening at 10:00AM! It's at Trilogy Orlando in Groveland, FL, (exact address is 100 Falling Acorn Ave, Groveland, FL 34736 so you can GPS it) with tickets going for $8 a person.

This is slightly to the northwest of Clermont (emphasis on north), where I've been to previous comic cons this time of year.

I'll be selling copies of my story anthology Last of the Grapefruit Wars as well as volumes of the Strangely Funny anthologies containing my works, especially the latest work "War of the Murder Hornets!"

This year I'm including Witty Librarian mousepads for sale, and I will be holding a raffle drawing of a Witty Librarian coffee mug!

Some lucky winner will get this official Witty mug!!!

I promise to be fully vaccinated for the event - getting a booster shot this week - masking up and socially distancing, and I hope to see you there with appropriate CDC-approved style!

Anybody Good With Zazzle?

Hola, peeps. I gave up on Cafe Press as a place to market Witty Librarian merch - the coffee mugs kept getting cracked in shipment - so I'm switching over to Zazzle to see if things are better over there.

So um, I uploaded my Witty quote banner to the site and got it attached to a coffee mug and... well, now I'm trying to figure out how to transfer that banner JPG onto other items like mousepads, t-shirts, and SUVs.

Anyone got any tips on that? The instructions all keep saying I need to transfer to a Template format but it's not giving me the ability to upload to Template. Unless I missed a step somewhere...

Updating Witty Librarian Stuff

It's been awhile since I've tried marketing meself as a Witty Librarian, working with a Cafe Press service that I haven't made sense of for the last decade or so.

I'm thinking of going to Vista Print, where I've made bookmarks and handouts for my book vendor appearances, to see about creating mousepads and signage. In the process, I discovered I needed to recreate decades-old logos done on low-resolution. So I'm redesigning the stuff I've had to this:

I used to write it as "Smart@ss" but people thought it was a bad email link. /sigh

Is the shadow drop too much?

Still doing this graphic design on my own. I worry I'm not getting the images clean enough to transfer to printing on mugs and t-shirts. We'll see.

New Logo for Witty Librarian at Cafe Press

Having received some concerns about the legibility of the text on my original design for the Witty Librarian store, I looked into creating a larger logo with slightly bigger text:

How does this look to you?  Please comment.

To The Seven People Who Read This Blog: Cafe Press For the Holidays!

If anyone's got moneys to spare, and any friends or relatives who work as librarians, I do have that Cafe Press store of Witty Librarian gear. 

I just added some Christmas ornaments, a vanity plate for cars, a few more shirts and sweaters, and ereader (Kindle and Nook) sleeve covers!  If you are looking for any fun merch for Festivus/Saturnalia/Christmas please check it out!

Witty Librarian and the CafePress of Doom

I've been meddling in the affairs of shoppers by creating more items with Witty Librarian quote-age and Logo over at the Witty Librarian Shelf of Stuff on CafePress.

So... if you know any librarians with truckloads of money to spare...  uh, lemme rephrase that.  If you know anybody with truckloads of money to spare who wants to purchase gifts to librarians, send them my way.  :-)

Short Story: Welcome To Florida

I've been keen on writing short stories for a good while.  I'd like to think I'm good at it.

So I finally went with getting a short story submitted to an epublish service.

Available on BN.com with their NookBook ereader.  "Welcome To Florida."

Yay me.

The process itself with the ereader service is quick.  You just go to the retailer's self-publish option (Barnes & Noble is PubIt! and Amazon is Kindle Direct Publishing, for example), you sign up to their contract of eternal damnation and give away your firstborn, actually you give them financial info for a direct deposit account, you upload a copy of your story/essay/novel, provide a "book cover" for it, add a description and keywords for browse/search engines, select the price for sale, preview the work to ensure text and font alignment is good, and submit.  When I did it with PubIt, it took 24 hours after submitting for the short story to appear for sale on the NookBook menu.

And then you pray that 50,000 people see it and buy it.

The good part of the deal is, there's no hassle to getting published (as long as you don't violate community decency standards or national state secrets).  You write it, you format it, you get cover art made, you submit it.  In the old days (say, fifteen years ago), getting published meant you had to A) write a rough draft, B) find an agent, C) get the agent to convince a publisher to look at your work out of thousands of submissions, D) get signed to a book deal contingent on good sales, E) go through a massive editing process that takes months, F) go through a printing process that takes a year, G) get marketed to retailer and libraries and hope to God the book reviews are kind.

The old way was limited to about 20 to 30 new authors/books a year per publisher, pretty much.  In a competitive market, it was brutal.  The advantage to getting signed by a major book publisher, of course, was that it paid well and that the publisher handled all the marketing.  The alternative was called self-publishing.  You went to a vanity press or started your own press, and got it to crank out copies for you to sell.  You got published of course, but the disadvantages were that you A) paid out of your own pocket which most people can't afford, and B) you had to market your own book all by your lonesome: no agent or printer to make the deals or create ads for you.

About ten years ago, a new service popped up.  Thanks to the Internet, submissions and marketing could work in other ways.  Called Print-On-Demand, you still paid to get published, but it was cheaper (in some cases very cheap) than vanity presses.  The services also had fees for marketing services, but they still worked as leads in getting the word out and your book advertised.  What made the POD attractive was that the printer could keep the work on file in a professional format and easily print out more copies on short notice.  The PODs also had deals with retailers (like Amazon) to have the book available for online or special order.  They also began dabbling with ebook formats during the early 2000s, but lacking viable reader devices made that iffy.

Until Amazon came out with the Kindle.  And other book retailers followed suit with their ereaders.

The ebooks are everywhere now.  They were one of the hot items for last Christmas.  Sales for ebooks now outpace books.  And the competing devices - the handheld tablets - have apps that convert them into ereaders as well.  Getting published straight to ebook is looking very attractive.

You don't even need to publish books.  The ereaders are not limited by small file sizes (just big ones, meaning Stephen King and Tom Clancy need to start editing their books down more).  The story I submitted to PubIt for the Nook was on my word processor about 10 pages long, and that was with a cover page and Authors page.  The file itself was about 14k of memory converted to ebook.  Very small.

Publishing a short story is akin to issuing a music single compared to a whole album (in fact, most music until the 1960s were issued as singles only, with albums made as compilations afterward.  You could blame the Beatles for insisting on working album first, single second).  If you have an iPod or MP3 player, you can buy a song separately from the album.  The same can be said for the estory separately from an ebook.

The only real conflict I had with submitting "Welcome To Florida" as a story was the pricing.  I can set my own price from lowest to highest.  Most ebooks by established authors go for $7.99 to $11.99 perhaps higher depending on file size and author's ego size.  Most small-press publishers would get their ebooks at $4.99 to $6.99.  New authors or self-publishers tend to price their books however they want... but if they were smart they'd keep it under $5 to entice an audience that's looking for bargain deals.  The cheapest you can price an ebook on PubIt happens to be... $.99.  Roughly the price of an MP3 song, by the by.  I tried asking for a cheaper price than that because A) I'm new and need to attract the audience and B) I figured selling a short short for around $.65 was fair.  No, I had to set it at $.99, so I hope any buyers of the story won't feel gypped.


So, the great news is, I got a story published.  Didn't have to market it to story magazines or short story anthologies.  Didn't have to sign an agent to commission.  I published the book and set the price.

But now it's all on me to get the word out.  It's all on me to market the damn thing.  It's up to me to find at least 50,000 friends and family members with a Nook ereader (or Nook app) to spend the $.99 to buy the short story and not ask for a refund.

Good thing I'm attending a Barnes & Noble Local Authors' event this Feb. 5th 2011 in Wesley Chapel, FL at the Wire Grass Mall.  It's from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.  Please do show.

Also, I need to print up bookmarks advertising it... It's doable...