johnwilker.com

Conferences

MileHiCon

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My first in-person event of 2021 is finally in the books!

MileHiCon 53 was two weeks ago. I had a spot in author alley and was on a panel and did a reading.

It was awesome to be back with people.

Tables.

I look at tables as advertising, as such, making back my investment, while nice, and certainly a goal, isn’t the main goal.

I sold some books, that was nice. I handed out and likely moves some when not there, my ‘take-one’ cards. They lead to a page here on the site (that needs to be updated) where folks can find out more about my writing. Likewise, though less direct, stickers flew off the table. I look at all that as potential value.

I was next to an awesome gal, Tricia, and next to her, Kendra, who I’d met at a Bookbar event in… 2019 I think.

Where our tables were, we had a front-row seat to tea dueling which is both weird and entertaining as hell, win!

All in all, I hope to have a table at MileHiCon 54. It’s a fun event, with some awesome content, and attendees.

My First Reading.

Technically my second, but the first was for an online con early in the pandemic and I think it was just me and the host. I digress. This was… interesting. I’ve noticed with MilHiCon panels and such (at least the ones I’m on) the moderators don’t seem to actually pay attention beyond where they need to be and when. So for the reading, none of us heard from the moderator beforehand. We had no idea what we were doing other than the title of the reading “Galaxy Spanning SF” Ok, check I write that. Two out of four of us, didn’t even write SF. The moderator, not knowing he was the moderator, just said, let’s read a piece then have a chat.

Overall it was fun, but I don’t do well without structure on things I’m participating in. I’m not fast on my feet in these settings and so ready my part and then the more forceful, like to be heard, voices carried the rest of the event. I did get a few places to chime in and answer the odd question, but yeah, a little prep would have been nice.

Panels.

This was my second MileHiCon panel and the second on self-publishing. This one had the title of “Ebook or Paper, which to choose when self-publishing”

The panelsts all agreed, “Both” and then we left. Well we didn’t leave, but then the panel turned into an interactive Q&A on self-publishing. It was ok. Again the moderator did zero prepwork, and in those cases, the people who like to talk, took the stage. I got a few bits in here and there, but really just sat there nodding.

I don’t really know why these panels happen. I don’t get the impression that MHC attracts a ton of new or aspiring writers. Considering our panel was the second to last of the event, and had 10 people in it, that seems supported. in 2019 the panel I was on, was at 7pm on Saturday, again about 10 attendees.

Take Aways.

I enjoyed MHC. As I said, I plan to apply to be back. I’ll probably skip doing panels. I don’t know that they do much for me other than cause stress I don’t need. Maybe I’ll think up a topic and offer it as moderator since I know what I like in a moderator. We’ll see, that’s a lot of work.

I didn’t plan far enough ahead but by next year I’ll have updated merch that reflects more than just Space Rogues.

On Flying too Close to the Sun

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It was bound to happen, really. I got ahead of myself.

I got in the habit of picking a date at semi-random to include in the backmatter for a book, as the release date for the next book. Then I’d set up the pre-orders everywhere so that when book X when live, there was a link in the back for book X+1 so readers could place their pre-order right there, easy peasy.

It worked so I kept doing it.

Well, it worked until it didn’t. This is the story of when it didn’t.

‘Big Ship, Lots of Trouble‘ was given a release date of August 26, 2021. I picked that date…. Sometime early 2021 or maybe late 2020, I can’t recall.

I set about writing the book. It wasn’t as fast a process as in the past.

This release ran into a few things that caused problems. Things I could have accounted for had I been more on the ball.

  1. I took longer than planned to get a first draft done, and longer still to get revisions completed. No real reason other than dragging my feet.
  2. Because I took so long to get the revised draft ready for my editor, she couldn’t get the manuscript back to me until august 20th. 6 days before release. That in and of itself wouldn’t be an issue. I’ve worked with tight timelines and can hunker down and review all edits in a matter of a few days. Except I also…
  3. Picked a stupid date. 8/26 is the day after my biggest conference of the year. This year it was hybrid so I was juggling in-person things and online things. It was a rush right up until it started, to get butts in virtual and real seats. Had #1 not delayed #2, I could have put the book to bed before the conference started and been fine. EXCEPT, I didn’t squared. There was simply no way to get the manuscript and review changes while starting the all day in-person work of the conference.

So, I punted. Thankfully Amazon eased their pre-order push penalties during the pandemic.

Sadly, that wasn’t the worst part. This being the first time I’ve had to push a pre-order, I screwed it up. I made a list of every place I needed to update. I thought I’d checked them all off (I had, but still screwed it up). It turned out that I messed up Google and Kobo. Somehow I had them checked off, but didn’t save or something. They both released the book on 8/26. Both Google and Kobo require a file for pre-orders, which means authors use a placeholder. Something that basically says, “You got this by accident, please let the store know so we can fix it.” Had it been a store with asset-less pre-order I’d have been nagged about adding a file and likely caught my mistake. Since technically Kobo and Google had a file, they released it. Annoying, but really not their fault.

Amazon has a pretty robust (surprisingly) setup for this where I could beg them to push an update, which includes the file and an email saying that the reader got the new file.

Google and Kobo, not so much. I finally got replies from both that users would get new files, but no idea if they’re notified, etc. Kobo took about two weeks, slowly going back and forth over email, with a bit of prodding on my end. I actually didn’t know google had released until I got a support email. From that point on they were quite fast in making things right.

In the meantime, the first review on Kobo was from a nice person, mad about the placeholder, who left 1 star. Something tells me they won’t update their review… :(

Lesson learned. The final file for ‘Big Ship, Lots of Trouble‘ does not have a link to a pre-order. I’ll update the file when I have a pre-order for subsequent buyers, but right now, no.

I suppose it was inevitable. Screw ups happen, and juggling Rogue Publishing and 360|Conferences sometimes overlaps in annoying ways.

To my readers, I promise I’ll do better and apologize for the hiccups.

Cons in the time of COVID

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I’ve now finished all of my 360|Conferences events for the year, and have participated/watched two writer events.

This past weekend I attended my second MileHiCon, overall it was better than my first.

MileHiCon 52 was this past weekend, and October 2-3 was… I’m honestly blanking and all I have are Zoom links in my calendar, shrug.

Anyhow, many events just threw in the towel (Starfest, Rocky mtn Con, 20booksto50k, etc) so it’s nice that a few gave it their best shot to provide the community something to do. Here are some takeaways I gleaned.

Booths

Don’t bother with author alley/vendor areas. Thankfully MileHiCon wasn’t overly expensive, but it was all a waste. Zero sales that I can link to the event. No “came to my table” that I know of.

I saw this with 360|Conferences events as well. Our sponsors (gods bless ’em) didn’t get much traffic. It just doesn’t work the same as in-person.

Assuming 2021 is likely to still be virtual, I won’t be offering booths at 360 Events. I’ll find someting else to offer sponsors that gets them engagement.

panels/sessions

There are a lot of things to not like about online events. Being able to do the laundry, mow the lawn, etc. WHILE watching (or at least listening to) a session is not one of them IMO. I love the freedom that comes with virtual events.

It’s great to not be stuck in a ballroom, etc while still enjoying the amazing content.

As a panelist, it’s certainly nice to be in the comfort of my home office. To have notes, etc available if needed. MileHiCon specifically, it was nice to have a moderator, LOL. I need to work on my getting on panels game as there were several i felt I could have contributed to.

Overall

As an organizer, while I missed going out for drinks with folks, etc. I didn’t miss having to get up early and be at the venue from 7a to 8p. I was able to still work out, do stuff around the house, actually eat lunch, etc.

Also, from an organizer standpoint, the overhead is next to zero. No overpriced internet, food, etc. No swag. That was nice from a budget perspective.

As an attendee those are all negatives to a degree. While I haven’t made a ton of inroads in the writing community yet, being in the room is a must so from the networking perspective, MileHiCon and the other (Still can’t remember the name!) were for not.

So, you know one more feather in 2020’s fuck you cap for sure are events. There are plusses and minuses of on-line vs. in-person, to be sure but in any model things were just… ‘off’

I’m not overly hopeful that 2021 will see many in-person events, but here’s hopin’.

Lessons learned in Online Events

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So 360|AnDev 2020 Online was last week. It went well. Really well.

The biggest compliment was that several people said that while it wasn’t the same as in-person, it still felt very friendly and community-focused. That means a lot to me!

Let’s dive in!

Technology

We used Hopin.to. They’ve more or less become the de-facto platform for online events. Which is a shame, because they’re clearly not event people. The platform is mostly fine, for sure an 80% solution, but where it falters, it falters big.

To get around a few of hopin’s shortcomings, we used Streamyard, which I like a lot. It’s not perfect, but it wasn’t meant for online events, it’s a live streaming platform.

Hopin

The biggest problem we found was the sessions, which are barcamp style in nature. The organizer can create them, put them in the schedule, but they can also be created on the fly by attendees. I like that an attendee can stand up a session, that’s kind of like, “Let’s go to the lobby and talk about your idea.”

Except, sessions don’t show up as viewable, until the minute they’re set to start. If you click into the “sessions” section of the site, and it’s a minute before a session starts, no sessions are visible… WEAK. This is fine for the ones attendees created, but kinda weak if you’re trying to use sessions as your second track.

Overall the sponsor support is pretty weak, but better than most others I found. Thankfully (I guess?) Many sponsors have pulled out of events this year.

Hopin found themselves the big dog and I think weren’t prepared. Their support is lacking, their sales channel is give us all your money or walk away, we don’t want to talk to you.

  • Want to embed their ticketing on your site, can’t.
  • Want to have a second stage (for two tracks)? $12,000/year for Pro.
  • Want to use your own ticketing system and import attendees? Cough up that twelve grand.
  • Want an answer to your support email? Maybe the twelve grand will do it? Without it, you can expect a week or more for a reply, if you get one at all.
  • The Pro thing includes a few other features, none that are worth that price.

[Edited to add]

Hopin provides mostly useless data. I had assumed I’d get views by hour (to sync against the schedule), who went into the ‘sessions’ area. Who visited sponsor booths. NOPE.

Useless Hopin report.
Who cares, right?
Certainly not important…

Honestly, overall Hopin does the barebones job I need it to do, but that’s it. My sponsors certainly aren’t thrilled since I couldn’t even tell them who came to their booth.

Streamyard

Streamyard is a great backstage/TV Studio experience. You can upload overlays, banners, tickers, logos, etc. and add them into your stream at will. This was great for doing sponsor lower/side thirds.

My Co-host and I were both logged in so each of us could mange these aspects, turn speaker streams on, etc. It was very nice.

I found only two things that I didn’t like about Streamyard. The first is just inconvenient; You can upload animated overlays, but the file size limits were, for me impossible to meet. No movie file I created was even close to the max Streamyard can handle. So all my overlays are images that just “pop” in and out of existence, which is not awesome, but not bad. I’d have prefered for them to slide in and out nicely.

The other issue was bigger. They don’t have a way to support pre-recorded conference talks. This is annoying but understandable. Streamyard is a live streaming platform. I’m sure online conferences are a new thing for them (Thanks COVID-19!). Several 360|AnDev speakers recorded their talks so they could answer questions in Slack, or because they were in India and their talk time was 3am.

So… I collected the talks, then opened them locally to stream through streamyard. That worked for 1 or 2 talks, then fell on its face because my home internet was not remotely close to up for the job of streaming video out. Scrambling ensued. My first thought was, “Ok, I can re-encode these recordings to be stream friendlty. Wait no. I’m not technically streaming these. They play in a chrome tab that is screen shared. Damn”

(Insert Golden Girls theme song) I uploaded the remaining files to my friend who has gigabit internet. That saved the day, big time. The day one stream was plagued with trouble. I set up an extra computer in my office to watch the live stream on mute as QA. Day 1 required several refreshes of the browser when the stream would degrade enough that the player stopped. Day 2 did not have those issues. The stream ran nonstop on that machine all day, almost 8 hours.

I suppose it’s an upside, I’ve upgraded my home internet :)

Internet

Picture a venn diagram of three circles. The circles are; your internet, the speaker’s internet and the attendee’s internet. Any one can be a problem, any two can be a disaster.

Pre-recorded talks, remove one circle, but put a heavier load on another.

A lot of the chatter was :

“I lost audio. Refresh fixed it”

“Stream stopped. Refresh fixed it.”

etc.

It’s difficult to troubleshoot to say the least.

Non-Tech, AKA People (Golden Girls Theme plays again)

Have help! Chiu-Ki was my co-host both days and it was a huge help. We split up the schedule so I didn’t have to be ‘on’ all day long. I could grab a bite, check my garden, etc. She had it. That was invaluable! When she went to lunch I was there.

I can’t say enough how important having someone to backstop and take some of the load, is.

I found that it’s both more and less stressful than an in-person event. Less, because the expenses are nil, and you’re at home. More because you have no idea if the speaker is awake, you don’t know if your internet will crap out, or theirs will. Once we got started though, the stress drained away (mostly), and we could have fun.

As I mentioned I offloaded the pre-recorded talks to a friend. Tom signed in to Streamyard as “Videos” There was a little coordination on Slack for “Hit play when I say X” but otherwise he was right there in the studio to see what was going on, etc.

So, next steps?

Well, I’ve upgraded my internet (yay all the other things I do that will benefit). That should be a big win for 360|iDev and Chicago Roboto.

I’ll work with speakers on pre-recording their talks. 360|iDev is two-track, so for better or worse, we have to rely on Hopin’s janky way of doing sessions. So I’ll have to make sure attendees know what to expect there.

I don’t own a laptop anymore

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For the first time in twenty-odd years, I don’t own a laptop. This past weekend, I fedex’ed my MacBook Air (With the shitty keyboard. Thanks, Tim Cook) back to apple for trade-in credit on a Mac Mini.

Macbook Air packed up and ready for shipment.

The Mac Mini is great, it’s way more powerful than the MacBook Air, which is a plus, but wasn’t super necessary outside of making video editing and possibly running my upcoming online conferences easier.

I really liked the Air, except for it’s keyboard. I bought it knowing it wasn’t outrageously powerful, which for conference organizing and writing was just fine. Except the keyboard made writing agonizing. keys would repeat, keys would not activate, all randomly and never the same behavior in a row, so my manuscripts would be riddled with repeated words, wrong words that spell check was ok with and outright typos. It was annoying.

Mac migration tool screen.

Writing with the Mac Mini

I had already started moving to my iPad Pro for travel writing; it went to Egypt and Tanzania and was my only device and was just fine. The addition of the Magic Keyboard was the final nail. For a few weeks I’ve been leaving my laptop in my office, docked at the end of the day and just using my iPad around the house (Living room, kitchen island, etc). During the day writing on the Mini vs. the MacBook Air isn’t any different as the Air was docked behind monitors. The Mini is under them.

It’s definitely a little weird, and there are some things that require me getting up and going to the office (Designing book covers, for one) but I think as I get more used to using the Affinity tools on my iPad that might change. Otherwise walking away from my office at the end of the day, leaving the computer there, is kind of nice.

Conferences without a Laptop

This will be the first full week so we’ll see how I feel (not that there’s takebacks, the laptop is enroute to Apple). Right now I’m pretty happy. I think when I get closer to conference time it’ll be a great help running Zoom, and other tools for live streaming.

As I’ve been exploring online conference options I realized that since my MacBook Air would struggle with being a zoom participant (fans roaring, etc) that being host, plus running other tools like Ecamm Live, etc would tax the power little laptop.

Once the world gets back to allowing in-person events, I’ll face the final test of my set up. During the conferences, I do a lot of work at the registration table, or anywhere else, plus at least two times during the event, I am presenting on screen. Thankfully some of my speakers have already blazed the trail on presenting from an iPad.

Selling when things are shit

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I won’t lie, two weeks ago, we wrapped up Ignite Denver a few days before social distancing was the order the day (we were about two days before the venue decided to close up). I thought, “You know this sucks, but things will continue like normal, more or less. It’ll just be inconvenient for a while.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong. We’re now in week two of social isolation and self-quarantine. Everything is closed except grocery stores, pharmacies and (here in CO) dispensaries. 180,000 people in CO filed for unemployment last week. Things are shit.

People (rightfully so, I mean tomorrow is scary, four months might as well be four years from now) aren’t thinking about conferences. They’re not buying tickets, not signing up to speak. Sponsors are waiting to see what events are happening before they write checks. All perfectly understandable because things are shit, but not helpful.

And I can’t file for unemployment. Well, I could if I fired myself, which would be closing down 360|Conferences. So I’d prefer to not do that!

I sent an email to one community earlier this week, another went out today. Essentially begging folks to buy tickets. I hate sending emails like that. I hate asking my communities for charity. I’d rather support them than ask them to support me. I’d rather be the one to bring them together. Help them grow, meet new people, do awesome things. Not beg for their time. I did it because things are shit.

No ticket sales, no sponsorships means no payroll for me.

Mr. Brightside

Writing is a bright point right now. I’m hard at work on Space Rogues 7. Space Rogues 6 comes out next month. Pre-orders have surpassed book 5 numbers, so that’s awesome. I’ll have book 7 ready for pre-order when 6 launches, so that will be awesome.

The downside is that…

  1. Sales are slow. Makes sense, a lot of folks suddenly have far less disposable income. I certainly do, I’m not buying much of anything. I get it, things are shit.
  2. Next month, when book 6 launches and those pre-order process, I’ll get paid in June for that. Such is publishing.
  3. Amazon is giving away 2 months free Kindle Unlimited, which has blown the bottom out of the market. Why buy a book, when you can read thousands for “free”? Even if only for the next two months.

 

What can you do?

Well, if you’re so inclined, you can directly support me. Buy books (or merch) directly from my shop page. I get paid immediately for those purchases. If you’ve read all five books, tell people you know that might like them. Gift them copies, send them the URL with “Buy this book” all of it helps, because right now, writing income, will be supplementing conference income.

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