Romantic Times organizers found themselves
– probably for the first time ever – inundated with participants from the NY
Times bestseller list (the “List”), and they were in a tailspin tending to that
List. Directions to workshops and events
were mixed up, many of them had the wrong names on the wrong rooms, event
organizers were hard to find and support staff seemed non-existent. The most common response was “just go look at
the tags on the doors or read the schedule that came in your bags” (many of
which were wrong). Mass confusion!
Of course, it was inevitable that certain
participants would need to be pushed aside in order for the organizers to
respond to all the members of the List who showed up this year. Those participants were, unfortunately, readers,
aspiring authors, small press authors and other members of the “smaller
community”. On the day of the big book
sale, I understand some of those authors got
together and rented a room over at the Marriott and then passed out
postcards to their fans telling them where they could be
found. My partner, Jamie Hill, and I were
grateful that we didn’t bring any books and were spared that experience.
Jamie Hill
As Books We Love, we focused on what would
be most beneficial to our authors. We attended
workshops related to changes in the industry, marketing using social media and
(here’s where the eavesdropping came in, a few workshops geared towards larger
publishers and agents and how they were faring), which, interestingly enough,
was fairly consistent across the board. A
large number of List authors were freaking out about the fact that with ebooks
dominating the industry their NY publishers are pricing their ebooks out of the
competitive marketplace. That’s not to
say their books aren’t selling, hey, I myself bought a JD Robb ebook for $14.99
and got severely scolded by my partner: -), but I had a long airline flight,
and if the new release by Books We Love’s Joan Hall Hovey ("... Joan
Hall Hovey has penned as good a thriller as I have ever read...a superb tale of
terror and suspense that puts her right up there with the likes of Sandford and
Patterson..."Ingrid Taylor for Small Press Review”) whose novella is priced at only $2.99 had been released before I
left, then I’d have foregone the JD Robb and been reading Joan’s Defective which
is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and coming soon
to all your favorite online retailers.
Fortunately, Jamie and I made good choices. The workshop focusing on Apple and their
major move to counteract the Amazon machine was fascinating, and gave us lots
of new material for charting our own course in 2014 and beyond. One of the List authors gave a particularly
interesting presentation on the use of Facebook fan pages and groups and as a
result of what we learned in that workshop we’ve started our book club, which
in three days has gained 350 members. Those
of you who follow our Blogs and Facebook will already know about this but if
you don’t already follow us, we’d love to have you, please do come by and join
our Facebook Book Club (or like our Facebook Fan page) where you’ll see that we’ve already implemented many of the
suggestions we got from those workshops.
In summary, Romantic Times is not a
conference that I would recommend for small press publishers or authors. They’ve already decided to jump on the List
train, and maybe, for them, this is the right choice.
As a small press publisher, Jamie and I
will be looking at regional conferences – the ones that are very happy to have
small press publishers and authors in attendance and who make a lot of effort
to provide opportunities for authors and readers to connect and interact, and
to provide Workshops that focus on advice from experts in the small press
segment of the publishing industry – relevant content to all of us, and of
course, Readers! Readers! Readers!
In my opinion the Romantic Times organizers
made a huge mistake when they shunted the small press authors and their
publishers off to an “overflow motel” to sign their books, and Jamie and I were
very glad to have opted not to participate in either the eBook Fair or the
print book fiasco. We’ve heard there
were many complaints from small press publishers and authors who stated that
they “definitely won’t be back to Romantic Times”. Unquestionably they did not appreciate being
treated like the proverbial unwanted step-children.
Jude Pittman
Putting on my author hat, Romantic Times
had very little to offer me individually and if I’d paid that large conference
fee as well as airfare and accommodation to attend a conference that was
focused on an entirely different segment of the industry I’d have been mad. As a publisher, we benefited from the marketing
workshops, the social media workshops, conversations about industry changes and
fluctuation and of course, from watching some of the scrambling. It was like being an outside—insider to
observe these “industry leaders” reacting to this new world. One of the agents joked that an awful lot of
his contemporaries were out there selling cars instead of books.
