MisCon, Missoula, May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend)

[Malik]

I'll be at MisCon as a panelist and featured author this weekend. I'll be talking writing and marketing, doing a reading and a meet & greet, and demonstrating a few of the finer points of beating the living crap out of people.

This is an awesome fantasy and science fiction convention, one of my favorites, held at the Holiday Inn near the University of Montana, which has an outstanding creative writing program.

MisCon is one of my favorite cons, because it's not strictly for SF/F writers. It's well-attended by content creators, industry pros, gamers, LARPers, Trekkies, comic fans, and pretty much every related interest under the sun. It's Missoula's big blowout convention.

My MisCon schedule is here.

I'll also be doing a signing and author meet & greet at Fact & Fiction Books, just a few blocks away from MisCon, on Saturday at noon.

 

[Ankari]

Hello Malik . Glad to see you're doing well. I'll be doing a panel at a convention in July. If you have any tips, please send them my way. You should still have my email. If not, send me a message. My panel will be 45 minutes long.

Congratulations on your success. I hope you continue to know more.

 

[Malik]

Hi Ankari.

My personal advice to anyone doing a panel is to prepare your notes ahead of time. It sounds silly and obvious, but you'd be amazed at how fast panels will get off-track without them. Even just bullet points to rein the conversation back in if necessary. Every panelist should have a few bullets ready.

A thing I like to do when I'm moderating is hand out 3X5 cards and little golf pencils to the audience at the beginning, and have them write their questions down as we go, and pass them forward at about the halfway mark. Then, for the last half of the panel, we sort through the questions and each panelist picks one or two (time permitting) to answer, and then we give the audience members whose questions we choose some kind of author swag. A bookmark, or a free book, even. I give away signed 4X6 author headshots because I'm a vain bastard.

This keeps the panel on time and also keeps anyone from launching into the dreaded 15-minute "Not so much a question as a comment . . ." line of bullshit.

Hat tip to Myke Cole, from whom I first learned of this trick.

 

[Malik]

I also recommend arranging a signing at a local bookstore away from the con. Even if you have an author event booked at the con, it's good to reach out and make friends elsewhere. Plus, I used to daydream about bookstore signings way back when I was nodding off in third-year theory, and I'm here to tell you that it's everything it's cracked up to be. Sitting at a table in a bookstore behind copies of your novels, shaking hands with strangers and talking about what it's like to be an author, is a pretty major high.