Hal-Con Report – Day 2

On the second Hal-Con day, I held two panels and the first one happened right away in the morning about “Traditional vs. Indie Publishing”. I discussed/presented the pros and cons of the two.

I recently like to say it like this: every author is a tree in the Amazon rainforest – there is a mind-boggling number of them and they all try to get heard and want to be bigger and prettier than the other trees around them. They all look pretty much the same though and it is very hard to rise above the crowd. No matter in what form you are published, if you are not published by a big house you have to do most or all of the marketing work yourself, since neither you nor small presses have any advertisement etc. budget, and also the big houses don’t spend much on advertising new authors these days.

You have to howl like the others do and somehow try to be heard.

The advantage that self publication brings you is that you are in total control of your project and not subjected to publication schedules and too busy small press editors. The advantage that publishers give you is that someone else beside your friends and relatives has liked your book and has endorsed you. However, apart from this little advantage, I see no great difference anymore between the indie way and the small publisher’s way.

One fun aspect of my panel was that I had to say everything twice. Once in Japanese, once in English, since there were non-Japanese in the audience. It was a bit confusing and exhausting but also fun to juggle the panel on my own in two languages.

I had given my second panel in the afternoon the odd title “Time Management for Authors”.

At first I threw two readings at the audience, one from “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” and right after that one from my latest publication the contemporary fantasy novella “Lord of Water”. The former one is on YouTube since last week, the latter I uploaded right now.

After those two readings, I showed the audience a little mind-map I made about tasks an author has nowadays. There is so much more than sheer writing and trying to improve your craft. There is workshopping, social media as one big branch and submission wrangling as another big branch of marketing. Then there are all the issues surrounding publication: All the tasks you have when doing it yourself and the not significantly fewer tasks you have when going via a publisher. Another big branch is reading in your field and reading in general and last but not least there are conventions.

Now, how do you manage all these tasks plus a day job and family and friends? In my opinion you need to plan, plan, plan, prioritize and organize and plan some more. Pareto analysis is an interesting aspect – it says that you need 20% of effort to do 80% of the work and you need 80% of effort to do thee remaining 20% of work. At least in my case that is completely true. I write quickly and have 80% = a first draft done in 20% of the time. Then I take forever to revise, workshop and revise again and so on. I am seriously searching for a more efficient way to handle the remaining 20% of what it takes to write a novel without having to use 80% of effort. So far I have not yet found a recipe and will continue looking.

I think my panels were well received and thanks to them and thanks to Katoh sensei’s support I managed to sell quite some books despite many of the buyers having difficulty reading them

Busy with my own panels, I did not manage to attend much else, but I must come back to Joe’s Tauran.

In the evening of the first day, one diligent model builder had made a model of the Tauran and presented it to the Haldemans, who were of course highly impressed by the speed and quality of the work. I don’t know who got the Tauran in the end Then, Katoh sensei did a life painting and he used the Tauran as well. So in the end there were three Tauran’s, Joe’s whiteboard original, Katoh sensei’s painting and the model. Since nobody dared to erase the Tauran on the whiteboard, the chairman of Hal-Con asked Haldeman san to do so himself during the closing ceremony – see the picture on my Flickr account. I don’t know who got the other two Tauran works

And so the Con was already over.

There was a nice happening though during the dead dog party. Several young Japanese SF writers whose short stories appeared in an anthology (in Japanese) had also come to the dead dog party and one of our staff members (the great lady who allows me to borrow some space on her booth in the dealer’s room) dragged them one after the other before Joe to greet him, talk to him and shake his hand. One guy was incredibly excited and half collapsed and I was doing simultaneous translation for him. The admiration and devotion was great to see and it was fun to translate.

I think we had a great convention and thanks a lot to the Haldemans for coming and a special thanks to Katoh sensei for his support for me little aspirer

I’m looking forward to next year’s Hal-Con already.