Catching up. First stop, Left Coast Crime

I did a lot of stuff in March, not the least of which was attend Left Coast Crime in Portland, Oregon. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of conventions. LCC is for mystery lovers, both writers and readers. There's never enough writerly kinds of information for me at a convention, and there are a number of potential readers milling about that I don't really know how to meet without sounding like I'm some ego-driven madwoman, so the whole experience leaves me anxious.

The only reason I attended this LCC is because my buddy, LJ Sellers, was in charge of it, and since it was in Portland, it was a chance to visit with my hubby's brother and family. This made the trip worth it:

Rain. Beautiful, glorious rain. This southern California gal can't get enough of it.

LJ did a bang-up job with the event. Lots of panels, lots of people to meet, and great hotel accommodations. Only $129 a night, plus complimentary parking and Wi-Fi. No one's ever gotten us free parking before! Although this diagram of where to go in case of emergency worried me. 

Stairs are on the key, but they're nowhere on the diagram!

Other highlights? The Sisters in Crime breakfast. Even though it started at 7:00 a.m. (that's when I'd like to be getting UP, thanks), I got to hear the lovely Catriona McPherson talk about all the fun things SinC National is doing. She even plugged our chapter's fall event, Ladies of Intrigue, where she will be one of our main speakers.

I also got to spend a lot of time with my buddies. Lunches, dinners, and drinks were all spent with author-friends. It seemed like every time I stepped into the hallway to decide on which panel to attend, Lisa Brackmann was there with an invitation.

"Hey, Gayle, want to go wine tasting?"

(Hint: you don't have to ask me twice.)

Lisa's on the right.

"Hey, Gayle, want to walk down to the pub for a beer?"

Sure. Even if it's raining and I left my coat in my room and the pub is a mile and a half away. I'm game.

I did miss my tiara when I saw Tim Hallinan in his.

I was on one panel, Sunday morning. Sunday is usually the day everyone is trying to leave, so I wasn't certain if we'd have an audience, but we did. Our topic was "California Dreaming." Four of us took the stage to talk about setting our stories in California. The easy answer why is that we live there, but the better answers are contained in why we live there. The shiny, hopeful, I'm-gonna-be-a-STAR quality of the state beckons to so many. 

We're a little fuzzy and askew - appropriate for a Sunday morning.

Even though I'm not enamored of conventions, I had a great time at this one. And since we had driven to Portland to attend, we got to stop on our way home to visit some friends in the south part of the state. 

Next stop: Michael and Chrissie's place.

Off to Monterey!

I didn't win it in a card game, and I'm not Miami bound, but...




Can anyone think of a rhyme for Monterey?
See ya next week!

Conferences and Conventions - what's a writer to do?

I'm going to Left Coast Crime next week. Their website defines it as "an annual mystery convention sponsored by mystery fans for mystery fans. It is held during the first quarter of the calendar year in Western North America, as defined by the Mountain Time Zone and all time zones westward to Hawaii."

Notice anything missing in the title or definition? Writers. Authors. This is not a convention for writers. And yet, it is. It is a place for authors and their readers to meet and mingle.

Writers conferences are for writers, period. They are for anyone who is even thinking they might want to write. You-The-Writer are there to learn something about writing, selling your writing, or marketing your writing. You will most likely meet people who talk and think a lot like you. They will be your tribe members and you will be able to discuss your writing with them because they get it. They get you.

At a convention, You-The-Writer are there to meet readers. There aren't a lot of writing workshops. There are few, if any, panels discussing the business aspects of being an author. It's all geared toward giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at your novels. You will meet mystery lovers who want to read more mysteries, like yours. With any luck, they will become your fans and you will be able to share your stories with them because they enjoy mysteries.

When I went to my first mystery convention (Bouchercon, Indianapolis, 2009), FREEZER BURN had just been released. As far as I knew, I had no fans, except my publisher who was hoping to turn me loose in Indianapolis and watch me reel them in. I didn't know a thing about conventions, didn't know they differed from conferences, and probably missed tons of opportunities due to my cluelessness. The best thing that happened to me was meeting LJ Sellers. She has become a great friend.

For a few years after, I didn't go to conventions. I had no minions, no large flock of adoring fans. What was the point?

In 2012, I was convinced to go to Sacramento for Left Coast Crime. Somehow, I got put on a panel to talk about private investigators. This frightened the crap out of me, because I thought everyone on the panel would have actual P.I. experience and all my answers would be, "I don't know, I make it all up." Turns out, no one had experience, the moderator had read all our books and asked great questions, and it was lots of fun. I hung out with LJ again, met Maggie Sefton, and had a running joke with Elle Lothlorien because every time she and I were in a room with Alex Sokoloff, Alex kept saying, "Gayle, have you met my friend, Elle?"

I brought paperbacks to sell, but nothing sold so I had to schlep them back to my car. Here's the thing: I sold a bunch of ebooks that weekend. While I never met anyone who clambored up to me to tell me how much they love my ebooks, I still apparently met people who wanted to buy my ebooks.

LCC was in Colorado Springs in 2013. That's a long way from California, involving plane travel, which I hate. Still, THE HOT MESS had just been released. I needed to meet readers. So I got on the plane. This time, I got to hang with a lot more authors, although not a lot more readers. I'm going to blame this on the way the hotel was laid out and how difficult it was to meet up with anyone. I did get to brainstorm with people I don't see often. I didn't bring tree-books this time. I saw a spike in my ebooks, not as much as Sacramento, but more than usual and I'll take what I can get.

The point I'm trying to make here is that, with each attendance at each convention, I am gathering more readers and becoming more of a fixture in the mystery community. This year, in Monterey, I'm on two panels, and I'm volunteering to help on a couple more. I am bringing books this year, plenty of bookmarks/business cards, and I'll probably offer a special on one of my ebooks. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

If you are a writer, trying to find your tribe, I recommend writers conferences.

If you are an author, trying to find your readers, I recommend conventions.

And yes, I plan to attend Bouchercon this year. It's in Long Beach!

A qualified yes

I went to Left Coast Crime last weekend. LCC is a fan convention for readers who live west of the Rockies. Or the Mississippi, perhaps, I don't know. Last year it was in Sacramento and I went for the first time. I was on a panel discussing private investigators. I remember feeling insecure about it, because I've never been a PI and I thought my every answer would be, "I don't know. I make stuff up."

But it was a really good panel and I got to talk about Peri and not act like I'm a goofball who makes it all up. I hung out with a few authors, and met a lot of readers, and my ebook sales for that weekend SOARED. I mean, like higher than ever. I paid for the weekend with my ebook mysteries.

At the time, I saw that LCC would be in Colorado Springs this year and thought I wouldn't go. I mean, it's too far to drive. I hate flying. Flying costs money, then I have to get to the hotel, which also costs money, and eventually I'm just spending lots of money.

But The Hot Mess came out this year, and I felt I had no choice. I wasn't going to get to the other big convention, Bouchercon, because not only is it the same weekend as the Southern California Writers' Conference in Newport Beach, it's in freakin' Albany. That's New York, kids. Not just in another time zone. In another dimension.

I made all the reservations, packed all the necessary clothes, and hopped on Frontier Airlines to Denver.

"Gee, Gayle, how was it?"

Mostly like this outside.

We were a captive audience.

And like this inside.

Me and Michele

Our Crime Fiction Collective blog panel, Truth is more violent than Fiction - or is it?

 

The convention seemed smaller, and there seemed to be more writers than readers. There were a lot of new readers, which was great, but they didn't really know how to get the most from the convention. I realize I was having a lot of fun with my friends, but I wanted to meet readers and even though we were all trapped in the same snowy locale, I couldn't get to them, somehow.

As a result, my sales are not soaring. They are not sinking, of course. Floating. I'd describe them as floating along with the current. I came home feeling like I'd spent a lot of money without seeing a lot of return on my investment.

Dale asked me how the weekend went, and my first response was disappointment about my sales. Then I told him about spending an hour with a writer who has done a lot of successful things to sell her ebooks. I took tons o' notes and plan to implement quite a few of these. I also spent an evening with Michele Scott, whose YA horse-centric book is being released around the same time as the Snoopy memoir. We schemed about cross-promotional ideas and committed to a few things.

On Sunday, I went to the LCC board meeting to tell them that if they had the convention in San Diego, I could write to Dean Koontz and see if he'd attend as our special guest. By the time I walked out, I had agreed to submit a bid to host LCC in San Diego for either 2016 or 2017.

"I dunno," I said at last, still checking my numbers on Kindle. "It was enormously expensive and I just don't know if it was worth it."

"Of course it was worth it," my darling hubby told me. "Look at all the stuff you got done." One more reason for me to love that guy. He pointed out that success isn't always just about the dollar sign.

And when I got home, this was waiting for me.

A standup banner for Snoopy's memoir - sweet!

How do you measure success, or define disappointment?

What price e-books?

I promised you all a report of what Left Coast Crime was like, but truthfully, I'm still sorting it out and I'll get to it eventually. It was, as Jean Jenkins told me, very casual and relaxed, and I met a lot of very fun writers who wanted to talk about their books and my books and the future of publishing. And I met some engaging readers who wanted to talk about everything. I'm a little afraid that if I start naming names, I'll miss someone and they'll get their nose out of joint, but you know how it is when you're running through a weekend at warp speed, right?

What I've been mulling over today is a conversation a group of us had at lunch on Friday. Seven or eight of us sat around a table at PF Chang's and we were talking about the prices of e-books and the lawsuit against Apple and all the publishers who are "suspected of colluding to raise e-book prices."

As a former engineer, I made my usual whine about how e-books are uploaded once by the publisher and then sold over and over and over without any more cost to the publisher's wallet. Not to mention the fact that e-books are not actually "sold" - you are sold a license to have them on your device. You don't own your Kindle books, or your Nook books, or your name-your-reader books.

(Didn't you know that? It's all well and good until the publisher starts a fight with the e-reader company and forces them to remove their books from the site and the book you've "bought" disappears. Yes, you get credited the money - I think - but still.)

At any rate, one of the authors says, "But you're paying for the intellectual property rights." I admit, this sounded like a So What argument to me. But it planted a seed.

Days later, I begin thinking about the way we who embrace e-readers compare their advent to the changes in the way our music is delivered. "The content is the same. It's just the delivery method that changed."

When I was young, I bought vinyl records. If I recall, in the late 60's you could get a 45-rpm for about 80 cents and an album (33 1/3-rpm) for less than 5 bucks. I know this because my weekly allowance was $5 and I could get the latest Monkees album with it. I nearly died of shock the day I went into to Sears to get their latest album and the price had risen to $6.99.

8-tracks were cool.

As the years passed, album prices rose. At their peak, most of them were, I think, around $15. Then the media changed and everyone was going to either cassette or 8-track tapes. It seems that 8-tracks came first and didn't last. The prices stayed about the same for vinyl or tape and we accepted this, because there were still materials and labor involved in pressing a record or winding a strip of magnetic tape.

Then Compact Discs came along. They were priced about the same, which is shocking when you consider how much time had passed without inflating the price of music. There were still materials and labor to produce a CD, so it was still worth the $15.

Enter MP3 World. The iPod and other players let us have instant access to music from our computer. I did a little recon in iTunes and found that most albums go for anywhere between $9.99 and $15.99. The song/album is downloaded to the store once, where it is sold over and over and over. There are no more materials involved.

We are all okay with this. Not only are we okay with it, some of us have bought the same album in each format as it comes out.

I'm slowly beginning to change my mind about the price of e-books, although I haven't quite reached the point of some publishers, who think they should be priced higher than the paperback. I started out thinking that everything should just be 99 cents, because you're selling the same damn thing over and over.

Now I'm in a struggle - I've raised the price of my books a little (I kept my short story at 99 cents), but not nearly as much as others. It's hard to know what to do, since there is really no model to follow. Traditional books can't be used as a reference, because the publishers are using a standard that includes the cost of their doing business. Self-published books can't be used because they're just all over the map and there's plenty of swill out there I don't want to compare myself to.

So what is my intellectual property worth? Does it come with mineral rights? And can I install a jacuzzi?

A few thoughts while I'm semi-conscious

I just returned home from a weekend at Left Coast Crime (a mystery lovers convention) in Sacramento. I drove up and back, which is exactly 416 miles. Each way. This is what I can tell you about the road trip:

FIRST
Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and Stockton is two lanes.

The speed limit is 70 mph.

It is impossible to drive 70 miles per hour in either lane.

This is because the right lane is occupied by large trucks that go 60-65 miles per hour. The left lane is occupied by everyone else who is driving about 80 miles per hour. Any attempt to drive 70 in this lane results in more tailgating than a Superbowl party.

SECOND
Sometimes a large truck going 64 miles per hour wants to pass a large truck going 63 mph. This backs up traffic in both lanes while the truck passes... eventually.

THIRD
There is no way to plan ahead for an accident in the Gorman Pass through the mountains. It is amusing, however, to watch a single car leap from non-moving lane to non-moving lane in an attempt to actually move.

FOURTH
Nothing focuses you while driving through Los Angeles traffic on a Sunday evening like trying to see the road through a bug-smeared windshield and a foggy-cataract right eye. It also helps to avoid thinking of your vehicle, and all the vehicles around you, as metal-and-plastic projectile missiles that could crash and explode around any corner.

FIFTH
Thank God for my iPod.

Later in the week I'll be actually talking about the convention.