What to Expect from Gaming and SciFi Conventions When You’re Speaking

Thanks to everyone who recommended RSS feeds for me; I’m going through the list and love the recommendations. This next post was inspired by a question from Facebook; it was such a great one I wanted to write about it so everyone could read it.

So you’ve come to a milestone in your writing career; either you’ve published a book or designed a few games and someone has noticed your product. Congratulations! You’ve been asked to be a part of their gaming, science fiction or similar convention. Never been to one before? Piece of cake!

Before you Go

The benefits to speaking at cons are pretty easy to see. You can develop relationships with new readers, fellow authors and promote a few of the other pros that have helped you along the way. Before you hop in your car, keep in mind that when you do go to a con (no matter how big or how small) you’re representing yourself as the “creative face” behind your product. That creative face becomes your persona, something that you can use as a promotional tool both on-and-offline.

Before you book your trip, you might want to ask a few questions:

  • How much of my expenses (convention pass, food, hotel, etc.) will be covered?
  • Will I have space in the dealer’s area to sell my books? Will I be charged for that?
  • Will I have the opportunity to perform an author reading for my book?
  • What type of speaking will I be expected to do? Panels, workshops, monologues, roundtables?
  • What is the expected attendance of the con? Hours?
  • Will there be any media coverage?
  • Do I have any other responsibilities as a guest or speaker?

Depending upon the size of the engagement, you may run into a situation where the environment is smaller and more focused, so you’ll have more one-on-one time with the people there. Generally speaking, the larger the con the more professional it gets. GenCon Indy, for example, has a Press Room but more often than not this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

The most common type of speaking engagement at a con is a panel-based structure with a moderator. Featured speakers often provide a fully-developed, professional speech in a monologue format during key moments of the con.

As A Speakers or Guest

As a convention guest or speaker, you have a behind-the-scenes look at the fan culture. Many of the attendees that go to these cons are rabid readers and collectors, who follow authors religiously. In my experiences, there are often very knowledgeable attendees that are truly passionate about what they’re into. If you are not into gaming or science fiction or fantasy, be transparent with your potential readers. In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing a fan loves more than to tell you why they love Firefly or Babylon 5. To navigate around unfamiliar territory, many conventions will post their schedule online: I highly recommend either renting, playing, or learning a little bit about some of the events you might be interested in before you go. While you would not be obligated to be accessible 24-7 for the entire convention, appearing stand-offish because you’re uncomfortable in a room full of World of Darkness fans might end up giving people the wrong message.

Your first con might be a little overwhelming, but as you keep doing them you’ll find you can develop techniques to be professional, polite, and entertain your audience. Like most things, it takes work because there will be things you enjoy and things you don’t. A lot is riding on how well the convention planning holds when the day arrives. Take it from someone who has mentored others on running cons: it’s a lot of work. If something gets screwed up because your event was delayed or the room’s not perfect, be gracious. There is nothing worse than an unhappy guest in the middle of a busy con.

As an Attendee

So what does actually happen at a con? Well, if you’re going to something that involves gaming, there will be game demos–usually in blocks of time–that people may be pre-registering for. You might see a bunch of folk rolling dice or running down the hallways with feathery hats and leather vests; a lot of different kinds of games are played at gaming conventions. Sometimes sign-up for gaming is free, sometimes it’s not, so coordinate your schedule if you’d like to play.

You’ll probably see a variety of attendees dressed up in various costumes; dubbed “cosplay” there are some folk who enjoy donning a well-designed costume to support their favorite character. Age will vary from con to con, depending upon the games available and the events. Other events might include contests and awards, celebrity signings, a dealer’s room and/or art show, room parties, seminars, interviews, charity tournaments or auctions. Attendees often gauge what events they participate in based on their intent for attending the con; people are either finding work, having fun, reconnecting with old friends, networking, speaking, or are simply curious about what all the fuss is about.

Special note: Many of this year’s conventions will offer memoriams to one of the founding fathers of gaming, Gary Gygax. Be sure, if you are a speaker this year at a gaming con, to attend at least one of them.

June 5, 2008
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How to Ruin your Online Reputation in 10 Easy Steps

Are you concerned whether or not you’ll get hired in the future? Wondering if a potential date will Google your name? Don’t care whether or not there might be legal repercussions to what you say? Well, great! If you don’t care what people read about you online, then you’re well on your way to ruining your online reputation. Here’s my top ten tips for tanking your online reputation indefinitely:

(1) Become a Member of the Grammar Police: Remember to correct grammar and spelling in every post, email, and comment you read–even people that have established reputations. Everybody loves to be corrected on their English, don’t you? Not only will you get the reputation as a know-it-all, but you’ll also be quickly recognized as a major pain-in-the-butt. Or, if you so choose, remember the phrase “when in Rome” and post exclusively in txt, LOL or l33t-speak.

(2) Take Credit for Other People’s Work: Feel free to avoid referencing, linking or crediting the content you’re publishing on your own site. Sure, there’s so much content on the internet that no one will ever know if you plagiarize, right? And who knows? Other people may notice what you’ve done and start talking about it. Free publicity!

(3) Claim you’re an Expert on Everything (Even When You’re Not One): Be sure to speak to your vast and impressive background of experiences whenever possible. This is especially true if you don’t have any experiences (or proof) that you are knowledgeable in the subject you’re talking about.

(4) Be “the” Internet War Guru: Start flame wars by calling a fellow poster an [insert word] here. The fastest way to tank your reputation online is to start an argument with someone over the [topic of your choice], so start early and fight often. Forum posts and email are great vehicles for flame wars, because other people who don’t even belong to the forums (or know you personally) can read what you wrote. Fantastic!

(5) Put Other People Down to Get Visits: Promote your site and get more traffic by telling other people how much they suck. This is a great way to get traffic to your own site. Simply, all you have to do is comment on as many blogs and websites as possible, trashing what they’ve done and telling people where they should go–to your domain.
Read More…

June 2, 2008
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Market Your Books by Offering Free Samples

One of the marketing techniques I’ve been seeing more and more of lately are authors and publishing houses providing readers with free samples in multiple formats. Short stories, online spoilers and free books have been circulating through the web, conventions, and bookstores. Publishing giant Tor books offers both free downloads of books and free books that I’ve seen at conventions. If you sign up for Tor’s new site, Tor will give you access to free ebooks, too.

Individual authors have been following suit as well. Paul Kemp, a contributing author to the popular Forgotten Realm fantasy series, was able to post a preview of the upcoming book Shadowrealm. Other small press (and self-published) authors have done the same like David Talon, who handed out chapters of his book at OddCon. You may have noticed that I posted free samples of my fiction on this blog as well, to provide readers with a feel of my writing style. On the gaming front, there’s also been a slew of video game and tabletop publishers who have provided free mini-books of licensed fiction for collectors and people interested in setting.

Why Free Writing Samples Work

In my opinion, giving away free samples of your work is great marketing for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a great conversation starter. If you’re an unpublished author, it gives potential employers a feel for your professionalism and your style: two things readers can’t get from listening to you talk about how well you write. For established writers, it helps you circulate your work in front of your fan base and, in a sense, rewards their loyalty.

In addition to giving fans (and potential fans) something to read, the format you use can help generate interest by playing on an old marketing standby: the teaser. Ending on a cliffhanger, or providing readers with an intense mystery, action scene or thriller, will keep your readers coming back for more so they can find out what happens next. The caviat to this is: make sure you have the what happens next planned out. Truthfully, I didn’t do this for my ebook experiment because I had an unknown factor happen and I got slammed with deadlines. Please don’t follow my example here, it’s not good for you or your readers. (I can only hope mine will forgive me.)

Speaking of fan loyalty, what better way to reward your diehard fans with their ability to read some of your hard work before the publishing date? By giving them sneak previews or things to speculate about, you’ll build mystery and fandom faster than you can say “Hello Kitty!”

Remember, that writing for “free” isn’t the same thing as giving away free samples of your work. While related, these are really two, different concepts. When you write for free, you may or may not have a goal in mind. Writers who admittedly write for “free” sometimes get a bad reputation because they are labeled as inexperienced or worse–too idealistic to not want to “sell” their work. In this case, providing different webzines, blogs or conventions and bookstores with free samples may actually help you increase your book sales and might just get you a few new fans.

Happy marketing of your scribings! 😀

May 27, 2008
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How to Infuse your Creativity by Researching Tropes, Myths and Beliefs

As promised, I’d like to give you all a little exercise that my fantasy author friends might appreciate and immediately recognize. This is an example of how I do my research, and I’m offering it to you to put more questions in your mind than answers, to challenge not only what you write—but how.

For those of you who are familiar with research methods, you will notice that some of the steps are out of order. For my own work and curiosity, it has become necessary to formulate my hypothesis after I read my source material to reduce personal slant and remain objective.

Research Exercise: Avoiding a Common Trope in Your Setting

Step One: Identify your Intent

Create a dark-skinned race of characters that do not adhere to the common fantasy trope: all dark-skinned characters are primitive, barbaric, or villainous.

Step Two: Recognize Potential Sources of the Belief or Trope

Specific to fantasy there might be: Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings, or Conan the Barbarian. In this area, I would also recognize the need to read history or other nonfiction source material.

Step Three: Investigate a Major Influence for the Belief or Trope

Tolkien is often considered the father of fantasy and, in fact, heavily influenced early Dungeons and Dragons.

Step Four: Create a List of Author Influences

In this bucket, I sometimes either write down or note a variety of things about the author. For example: When was the book written? Where did the author hail from? How did the author create the trope or belief? Was the trope intentional? Did the writer have any prevalent or outspoken beliefs?

Step Five: Formulate your Opinion

Here is where you, the author, come into play. In this really basic example, you’ve done your homework to pinpoint what you believe is the reason why this trope was created and where it came from. Knowing those two things can really help you engineer other ways to avoid the trope or realistically portray a belief.

Step Six: Read Others’ Opinions

When appropriate, it might be a good idea to read other people’s opinions when appropriate. Literary criticism might be a great resource in this example or even commentaries from other writers. This step ends up becoming more important if you’re researching the origin of Halloween, for example, or myths and legends that cross time, cultures or countries.

Step Seven: Return to Your Original Goal

As the last step in the process, I recommend circling back to your goal and writing one paragraph to complete your thoughts. Sometimes, the act of writing down how you’d like to infuse your story with that different perspective can make all the difference.

What process do you use to marry research elements with your work? How do you manage collective thoughts and creativity into your projects? If you have other methods you use, feel free to share! Happy scribing!

May 11, 2008
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The Difference between Game Design and Writing Games is…

Okay, so now that we’ve spent a whole week talking about writing game-related fiction, I’d like to round out this week o’ gaming by talking about the fundamental differences between game design and writing games. This is an often hotly-contested topic in many gaming companies, but really comes down to a very, simply idea and that is: writing is different from designing. The skills may be complementary, but often the two are not the same thing. Here’s why.

Game Design

When someone designs a game, they are planning out a mechanical system of rules that addresses the player, the environment the game takes place in, and the way that the player interacts with other players and that environment. Take UNO for example:

    Player The holder of a set of cards
    Environment The way the deck is laid out or: discard pile vs “play” pile
    Player Interaction Player plays off of the cards in the environment and interacts with other players through a turn.

Okay, so that’s pretty easy to see where the design comes in because there’s this concept of adding and factoring in mathematical chance and…but wait? Does that mean that every game is designed based on math? In my opinion, great game design is based on a combination of math and logic (as in propositional logic) to keep players focused on that game. Let’s take a look at another less obvious game called the Kingdom of Loathing.

    Player Paris the Fat, a pastamancer (Yes, that was actually my character name.)
    Environment Kingdom of Loathing
    Player Interaction Play is turn-based, where you interact with the environment and the environment mechanically responds based on different actions you take. Player may interact with other players by joining a “group” which offers a *stat benefit.*

Now, with games like these you can see where the design takes a different turn. The focus is on how the player interacts with the environment around her in order to follow the “rules.” This is where it gets confusing. In order to have rules for setting-rich environments, you have to describe those rules. Enter the writing aspect.

Writing Games

Sometimes, people who write games and people who design games are the same people, er…person. (You get what I mean.) When someone writes a game, they are either describing the environment for the player to play in, the type of character the player might play, or the rules. If the rules are established (like they are at larger companies) then it’s the writer’s job to translate those rules into a marketable, attractive setting. The game designer knows what kind of game they want because when done right, the rules are integral to the setting. The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic classic is a good example of this because within that game, a writer had to come up with dialog that would influence his (or her) Force rating. The way that a player chose to respond affected his character’s mechanics in game either for better or for worse. Here it takes a great amount of skill to come up with dialog that reflects subtleties of meaning — either positive, neutral, or negative — and not every game designer has that skill. Unfortunately, not every writer can design games either. Within the industry, rules can often get outdated as designers often try to remain current with different styles of play.

Besides dialog in video games, tabletop games often run the gamut of writing skills requiring technical, fiction, and nonfiction styles in order to put all the pieces together. The skills that game “writers” require are often different, because if a game designer is building the foundation or the structure of the game, the writing fills in the bricks, furniture, windows, and other elements necessary to what the game is supposed to be about. Game writers will often familiarize themselves with a game’s rules and setting in order to successfully contribute to a project; game designers will often do the same thing, but from their perspective. Sometimes, a game writer will be able to flesh out the setting like I typically do; other times, creative teams that include artists and other folk will map a game’s scenes out through storyboards while the game is being developed.

Hope that helps clear up the difference between the two. Keep in mind that the roles people have within the gaming industry varies depending upon the size of the company. This is true for any business, but especially true in this energetic, creative field. Happy gaming!

April 25, 2008
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