Erotica By Helen E. H. Madden

I went to Fantasci 6 this past weekend. I had meant to mention something before I went, but everybody in this house has been sick and my truly significant other was away on business all week, so I kind of had my hands full. Anyway, here's the skinny on the con.

The convention was held in the very roomy, very nice Hampton Roads Conference Center. It's a very nice place with all the amenities you could want for a con. Unfortunately, the con didn't get as many attendees as they would have liked, so the place seemed somewhat empty. However, things were well organized when I arrived on Saturday morning. My fan table for EPIC was all set up and waiting for me and my fifty billion boxes of promo materials. Kathryn Lively from Phaze Books joined me and together we chatted with everybody who passed by our table about the wonders of e-books. "Do you like to read? Would you like to be able to carry an entire library in your pocket? Let me show you some stuff on e-books..." We did slow but steady business and met plenty of interesting folks.

I had a lot of fun chatting with the other authors and guests there. The fan tables were lined up on opposite sides of the hallway, which was pretty wide. We came up with some interesting hand signals to communicate back and forth. I'm not sure, but I think the guy across from me was signally that he was either really hungry for lunch, or maybe he was having a gas attack. Who knows?

After spending all day handing out bags of bookmarks and postcards and such, I went home (the HRCC is just right down the road from where I live) and discovered that the kids hadn't yet killed my husband although they were working on it. We got the little terrors to bed in time for Torchwood, and then collapsed in bed ourselves. I had no idea how exhausting it would be to man a fan table all day.

The next day, Sunday, Pamela Kinney (a.k.a. Sapphire Phelan) joined me at the table. Most of the stuff I had left out the night before was gone, which was nice because I didn't want to have to haul everything back. We set up shop again and talked to a few more people. Kathryn Lively joined us a little later and around 2 PM, Kathryn and Pam went off to do a panel on e-publishing. Unfortunately, only a couple of people showed up for the panel, but it's our first outing so we're hoping that at upcoming conventions we'll be able to drum up more interest.

Other points of note, I talked with Marscon staff about doing panels on e-publishing and maybe some adult panels on erotica and sci-fi. I'll be working on that over the next few months. Also, those of us who were working the table discussed the possibility of getting fan tables or dealer tables at other upcoming conventions. It's looking like 2008 could be a very busy year convention-wise.

So, Fantasci 6 turned out to be small, but I think it was a great opportunity for me to learn how to run a fan table, do some one-on-one promo, and make a few good connections at the con.

Best of all, the crazy right-wing religious nuts never showed up with their pitch forks and torches to burn me at the stake ;)

Labels: Conventions And Appearances, Zealots

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Fantasci 6 - Post-convention Report