So one thing I need to decide fairly soon is whether we want to book a dealer's room table at WorldCon for the Small Press Co-op / SLF. It's $225, which is more of the SLF funds than I want to spend purely for promotional purposes. But if enough of our small press people want to chip in a bit for costs and actually use the table to sell stuff (and share some of the staffing so I'm not trapped there the entire time), well, that'd be just fine. But I'm just not sure that we'll have enough interested presses attending that Con at that point -- and I need to make the decision now, rather than later, and put down our $100 deposit. Waffle waffle waffle.
I need to look into WisCon and World Fantasy tables too.
I'm pleased to note that people have started signing up -- if you go to our new co-op page on the site, you can see a list of our very first members. :-)
Hmmm...I was just wondering what a dealer's room table would do for the electronic publishers. I wonder if it's possible to bring a laptop and hook it up to a tv on a cart (the convention provided?), and set it up with a bunch of sites, so that visitors could browse through them. How hard would that be?
Not so hard at all, if you’ve got the TV and the correct cabling (most of which should have shipped with your iBook…) Monitors–>mirror displays, and you’re set…
I’m actually more confused about whether the conference center would have things like a TV. I mean, it’s WorldCon, which is huge, so it ought to, no?
– M
I imagine most conference centers would have TVs, but I don’t know whether they’d be available for this purpose…. But you could still put a laptop on the table and let people look directly at the laptop screen.
But also, setting it up so that there are a bunch of websites on the laptop and the user can go from one to another and look at them all is non-trivial unless you have a Net connection. If WorldCon has wireless coverage in the dealer’s room, then it would be easy; if not, it would take a fair bit of work.
And that’s just for websites where everything’s free. You probably wouldn’t be able to set up a usable version of the Fictionwise site on a laptop, for example, even with their cooperation. For most ebook publishers (ElectricStory, say, or Embiid), you’d probably also want to provide samples of the books for people to look at—which wouldn’t be hard in itself, but it might get tricky to provide a nice way for people to look at samples from different publishers, and there’d be no way for people to easily order the ebooks in question (unless, again, there was a Net connection).
Still, it would be pretty cool to be able to show electronic publishers at such a table.
I’ll check on the wireless thing — if not, what I could do is download the SH site onto a laptop, and the SLF site, and then have any other electronic publishers who want to participate bring CD’s with downloaded versions of their site, right? Which I could then copy onto the laptop, and set up a list of bookmarks for the various sites, so users can easily find them all? Would that work?
We wouldn’t need to make it all functional — just visible. Heck, if all of this is too much trouble, even copying all the front pages of the various sites and having them up on a tv screen, in rotation, would be pretty cool…
whether or not the laptop viewing works out, the electronic publishers should still have paper flyers with their url and other info, list of texts and authors published, submission guidelines, etc. Still valuable pr, even if their publications can’t be seen at the table.
Oh, definitely, Heather. But it’s so nice to actually see the product… 🙂
Sorry, I should’ve been clearer—what I meant was that getting a website to work on a standalone laptop is often a little difficult (even with my checklist, it takes me ten or fifteen minutes to set up SH on my laptop), and getting multiple sites to work at once on the same laptop might be impossible, even if you have all of the files. It’s mostly an issue of how the server handles things like redirects.
But yeah, just showing nonfunctional front pages in rotation isn’t a bad idea. (Though I’m not sure it’s that much better than hardcopy flyers.)
You might check with the Small Beer folks (Kelly & Gavin) whether they plan to have a booth at any of those cons. They often do, and they might be willing to pitch in.
Already discussing with them. 🙂