Upcoming Conventions This Year (So Far)

As many of you know, the convention circuit is my big cash-generator--my profits from one convention can equal months of Amazon royalties. Last year COVID put the hurt on my events, but now that the pandemic is easing (fingers crossed), a lot more in-person events are happening. Here's my confirmed schedule as of this mailing...

Atlanta Comic-Con-This is the absolute big kahuna of conventions--when I went in 2018 with C.S. Johnson I made nearly $400 profit on $600 gross selling signed print books, and that was with only two books. Now I've got a bunch more books, a table partner in Venessa Giunta to split the costs, and I'm going to do the trick from the toy/game shows in which I set the e-books to $0.99 and hand out a lot of cards with QR codes linking to them. Given the popularity of digital comics (I'm not even a comics fan and I've gotten some for my Kindle), that strategy might be particularly lucrative even if I make less per book. I can get people to take LOTS of notecards by offering them as free bookmarks. :) August 6-8th.

FarleyCon-I found out about this one at Toylanta in March. I'm leery of events that require staying overnight anywhere (hotels are a BIG expense), but this is a one-day thing in one of the suburbs of Chattanooga close to the Georgia line. Drive in, drive out, done. Comic shows have been pretty lucrative and this is another foothold outside of metro Atlanta. August 14th.

Next ChapterCon-This will be my third trip to this one, a convention focused on independent authors. The first one was quite a success, but the second one was in the middle of the pandemic and the day of a big Clemson game to boot. This one will be at a new location (Dalton, which is a much bigger town than the original Ringgold site) and I imagine COVID numbers will have dramatically improved by then. October 2nd.

I've spoken to the organizers of the Middle Georgia Comic Convention in Macon, GA slated for June 5, although the formal application process hasn't started. I have also applied for a table at JordanCon in Dunwoody and at Monsterama in Alpharetta and a guest position at MultiverseCon in Sandy Springs. All of these are in the greater Atlanta area, so I can go home each night.

If I can find a table partner, Fandemic Dead in September might be nice--the table price is going to be substantial, but there are a bunch of actual Walking Dead actors who'll be there. Maybe Jeffrey Dean Morgan will be impressed with my Negan impersonation, which my students find frightening. :) David Simpson from the Atlanta Horror Writers Association chapter clued me into a Peachtree City event at the end of May called The Camp, but that's expensive, Peachtree City is a haul from Atlanta, and I might have some RL job stuff to do around then. There are only three vendor spots left, so "I don't know" has a really good chance of becoming "no" if I don't make up my mind.

One can tell one is doing well when publishers are asking you to submit to them. In this case, the Utah small press Weird Little Worlds invited me to submit a short story to their upcoming collection about modern-day monsters. How do monsters function in a world of urban sprawl, no privacy, etc? I've got my ideas, and even though I didn't have a short story available when they contacted me, I was able to bang one out in about four days. I'll send it their way once I've run it through my writing group this coming Sunday (4/25).

In the meantime, here's the Kickstarter for the collection. It seems like they're using Kickstarter as a sort of pre-order for exclusive Kickstarter paperbacks and a way to get swag like pro-monster buttons and pamphlets. If you all could help support the collection, that would be awesome. They've already covered their minimum costs and hit their $10K stretch goal (in which all 20 stories will be illustrated and the maximum story length raised from 3.5K to 5K), but they have a whole bunch more. We're talking color illustrations and a pay raise to $0.07 per word ($15K stretch goal) and gathering seed money for future projects. The $20K stretch goal includes another pay raise to $0.08 per word and three more story slots. You might end up with quite a swanky product by the time they're done.

And the more slots the better--there are only ten slots for non-invited authors but per a recent e-mail from the publisher, there've been 150 submissions as of Friday. I'll probably send mine in sometime this coming week, so I imagine by then there'll be even more. To misquote The Hunger Games, please help the odds be somewhat in my favor. :)