On March 21-23 Dana and I attended Minicon43 in Bloomington, Minnesota. We had attended the year before and met the publisher who made The Spell Keeper a reality.
Here is Guest of Honor Alastair Reynolds signing books. |
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| As well as debuting the book, we also decided to put some of Dana's artwork on dispay. We sold no originals, but did sell one print. |
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| Here are the volunteers setting up the bar in the con-suite on Friday. |
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| Bar again. |
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| This was the dealer's room. |
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| Tyree and Dana schmoozing a guest at the Sam's dot booth. |
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Dana and Tyree at the booth. Tyree is the Owner of Sam's Dot Publishing, an independent press from Cedar Rapids Iowa. This is the company responsible for publishing The Spell Keeper.
(That is NOT The Spell Keeper in their hands. This picture is just for Ed.) |
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| Dana and Tyree with a copy of The Spell Keeper. |
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| Here is Dana's at her first reading. Eventually there were three. That's three more than we expected. This reading was the first of the entire convention and was scheduled Friday afternoon. |
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| First reading again. Dana preferred sitting in front of the table. More casual, ya' know. |
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| Here's Dana signing a copy of The Spell Keeper for another author, Jason D. Wittman. We ended up selling lots of copies over the entire weekend. About half were last minute last minute purchases on Sunday. |
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| The next generation of fandom. These girls were dressed as a Star Trek officer, a pirate, and Harry Potter. |
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| Dana's Second Reading. 11 people all told. |
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| The way we look at it is that it was nearly four times larger than the first!
One person walked in late and left after only a few minutes. We thought that maybe he hadn't liked it, but after the reading he ran up to us with a newly purchased copy of The Spell Keeper! He said that he left because he didn't want to spoil his own enjoyment of the story. We thought that was really great. |
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| Bunny-girl! Most of the Klingons have moved onto Convergence, but some people still have fun with their costuming. |
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| Dana chatting in the Con-suite on Saturday afternoon. |
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| The gaming area. The convention is about 300-400 people and it's spread out so it never looks that busy, no matter where you are. In reality, it is not a huge convention, but it has been around for 43 years, now, and, the panels are informative and the readings fun. All in all, a positive experience |
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We had a lovely time, and although we didn't really know anyone all that well (except for Tyree), they all made us feel really welcome.I'm sure we'll be back next year. |
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