Melissa and I have the table set up for the final day. It’ll be short. In a few hours, we need to take the final inventory, pack everything up, haul everything to Steven D. Brewer’s car, then Uber to the airport to make our 4:15PM flight, assuming it isn’t delayed or canceled for mysterious reasons. As far as I can tell, the weather here is fine and shouldn’t be a factor, but we already received a warning email from American last night, so who knows what will happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of that, I’m writing this now, in case I don’t have another opportunity to write my post today. This is #15 of potentially 366. Gotta keep the streak going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of my time at Arisia has been spent in the dealer’s room, selling books at the Water Dragon and Small Publishing in a Big Universe tables. It sounds like I’ve missed out on the conference but in reality, I’m doing exactly what I like to do at these things: I’ve been meeting people and geeking out over writing and books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The panels don’t hold much draw for me anymore. The after party scene was not robust here — I checked last night before going to bed. Conferences like this have always been about meeting people and networking, and that’s exactly what I did, from the dealer’s room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also sold books, but I wasn’t a monster about it. I did best when I went to the other side of the table and just talked with people. I talked about other people’s books first, generally, and then gave my rehearsed elevator pitch for The Repossessed Ghost<\/em>. I didn’t pressure, but I expressed enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is contagious. Several copies of The Repossessed Ghost<\/em> sold simply because people enjoyed talking with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I might have even sold a copy to our Uber driver last night. They found out I was a writer and looked me up on Amazon before I got out of the car. I wasn’t trying to sell him anything. I was just engaged, enthusiastic, and authentic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s something I’ve seen with Steven D. Brewer and the sales of his books. He pushes his stuff a little more than I push mine, but he’s authentic and friendly, and he has a good hook when people are passing by: “Do you want to be an airship pirate?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think this has been a good weekend. Does it make financial sense for me to come all the way out here and sell 7 of my books and bunch of other people’s stuff? Absolutely not. Like I said in a previous post, I’m planting seeds. I’m meeting people. I’m doing what professional authors do, and I’m doing what I was doing before I finally managed to get one of my books out in the world. Nothing has changed in that regard, and the goal is still the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dealer’s room just opened. Time to get back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Melissa and I have the table set up for the final day. It’ll be short. In a few hours, we need to take the final inventory, pack everything up, haul everything to Steven D. Brewer’s car, then Uber to the airport to make our 4:15PM flight, assuming it isn’t delayed or canceled for mysterious reasons. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53786"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53788,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53786\/revisions\/53788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}