The publications page is finally loaded! With excerpts! And links!

Also, I’m waiting for permission to announce some things, but I will be making some form of professional appearance at the following conventions.

April

Purgatory: 10 Year Anniversary, April 13, Charlotte
NC Speculative Fiction Night, hosted by Bull Spec Magazine, April 23, Raleigh
East Coast Game Convention, April 24-25, Raleigh

May

Nebula Award Weekend, May 16-19, San Jose
BookExpoAmerica, May 30-June 1, New York

June

Origins Game Fair, June 12-16, Columbus

July

Cascade Writers Workshop, July 25-28, Portland

August

GenCon, August 15-18, Indianapolis
Dragon*Con, August 29-September 2, Atlanta

Below is a starter list of resources for writers wanting to educate themselves on publicity and other elements of the business.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

Grasping for the Wind’s Mega List of Reviewers!

M.K. Hobson’s excellent post on marketing and more

Lee Moyer breaks down Kickstarter campaigns.

The mighty Inkpunks!

The suave members of Booklife Now.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

As previously mentioned, I’ll be a guest at ConVolution this weekend! While I won’t be able to make it up on Friday (friend coming into town for my birthday!), I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday.

I only have two panels, which is a wondrously light and pleasing change from the norm. Alas, I maintain my streak of Sunday 10am panels.

Saturday: Publicity For Writers, at 4pm, in Sand Pebble A.
Sunday: Anatomy of a Review, at 10am, in Sand Pebble B.

I will also most likely be in the bar Saturday evening. Because what is a convention without BarCon?

I will not, alas, be at World Fantasy Convention in Toronto. However, you should totally check out the Cheeky Frawg/Prime Books/Tachyon launch party there. Jeff and I worked hard on this, and it should be pretty awesome.

Best wishes to everyone affected by Sandy. Twitter and FB are awfully quiet right now, and the NE voices are missed.

Update!

Because I love you all SO much, here are a few things we’ll be discussing at the Publicity panel on Saturday!

PR, Publicity, Marketing, what’s the dif?

I’ll just rely on word-of-mouth!

The hard-sell of DOOM

Dirty laundry, negative reviews, and buying the love

That’s JUST a sample, and if the rest of the week goes according to plan, I’ll have a whole bunch of resources available early next week!

Hey everyone,

I just signed with Paizo to represent their Pathfinder tie-in fiction. This fills up the last remaining bits of space on my calendar.

A lot of the books I’m working on launch in November, so be sure to check with me in December or January to see if I’m able to take new clients in early 2013.

Reviewers, bloggers and the like:

Contact me at JaymGatesPR@gmail.com if you would like to request review copies, catalogs or interviews with the following:

Prime Books
Candlemark and Gleam
Pathfinder Tales
Rebel E-Publishers
L.A. Kornetsky
M.K. Hobson
J.M. McDermott
Underland Press (Cyberpunk Anthology)

Yay, convention season!

Sort of. It’s been a long summer, with ridiculously bad travel-luck.

However, after a (very) brief break, I’m back on the road for GenCon, North Carolina and Dragon*Con.

First up: GenCon: Indianapolis.

This is my first time here, so please be kind. I am happy to meet you, but I am embarrassingly bad at translating names and faces from online to meatspace. So feel free to come say ‘hi’ if you see me, but you’ll get theoretical cookies of joy if you tell me your name AND where you know me from. If that place is Twitter and your username is not your real name, please let me know the username. Seriously. I’m that bad with names.

I don’t have much of a schedule for GenCon yet, except lots of meetings, one or two games (pray for me, it’s been years since I played), keeping Lily alive and getting into trouble with, well, everyone. I’ll also be helping out at the Eden Studios table, it looks like.

If you have some questions or want to schedule a meeting to talk publicity after I’m off the road, I’m always happy to do so. I do have to make a living though, so please understand that I charge for any Q&As over 10 minutes, and will need to schedule those for after Dragon*Con.

North Carolina

Then, it’s on to North Carolina for a week or so. I’m going to try and make it to Raleigh for an evening, so if there’s something cool going on between August 20-26, let me know! I’ll be in Charlotte and Charleston the rest of the time, catching up and getting ready to for Dragon*Con.

Dragon*Con: Atlanta

SFWA will have a table and signings at Dragon*Con! We confirmed a few weeks ago, and we’re racking up a very nice list of participating authors. Keep an eye on the SFWA website and Twitter feeds for more on that.

I’ll also be moderating at least 2 panels: Race in SF (gods help me…) and the official Z*Con Panel! Michael Dougherty and I have been friends and colleagues since my first Dragon*Con almost 5 years ago, and I’ve been doing some consulting on Z*Con. This is a fantastic opportunity, and I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends.

My schedule is pretty packed, but I’ll be at the SFWA table in the Fan Table area (between the exhibit and dealer hall areas) most of the day, so that’s the best place to find me if you want to say ‘hi’ or bring me good Scotch or coffee. Both are quite welcome, really. Appease the anti-mornings publicist!

After that, thankfully, it’s back home for a long, long while. Aside from a local convention in November (the one I posted about earlier), all travel until April should be lower-key and not convention-related. As much as I love seeing friends and working conventions, I’ve been going without a real break since April, and I’m wearing out a little.

Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter or FB if you’ll be at one of the conventions so that I know to watch for you.

Cheers!

P.S.: I will not be at WorldCon or World Fantasy Convention this year. I committed to Dragon*Con early this year, and WFC is just too expensive. I’m sad to be missing out, but lift a drink for me, will you?

I was at the Clarkesworld table at ReaderCon, selling books, when I first heard about the harassment going on. My first thought was “Oh, thank god it’s ReaderCon. This won’t be an issue like that guy at WFC”.

It wasn’t. Everyone was supportive, and no one had to call hotel security to have him escorted off the premises before he physically assaulted a woman. But it continued all weekend, and a complaint was finally lodged. About that time, I heard from someone else who had been dealing with this precise person. She’d been subjected to longer-term, more aggressive harassment. She was so happy to see that he’d done it in public, where other people had witnessed it, at a convention that had a no tolerance policy.

Well, the verdict has been rendered. No tolerance is, well, kinda no tolerance. Two years. He’s banned for two years.

I’ve been subjected to this sort of harassment before, to the point that I brought my then-boyfriend to an event with me and had him have a chat with the guy. Everyone else told me it was just “X being X”. It wasn’t physically dangerous, although the hugs and touches left me cringing. But, newsflash: it was still harassment. I still felt unsafe. In fact, I felt MORE unsafe because no one took it seriously, and that meant no one would pay attention if something more serious happened.

It’s dehumanizing, depressing, frustrating and, over time, fear-inducing for a lot of people. And while I’ve been told, time and again to ‘ignore it’, ‘let it go’, ‘just stay with people you trust’, ‘it’s just you’, ‘I’ve never had it happen to me, so it’s not a problem’, this is a huge problem. From inappropriate comments to outright date-rape, this is a wide-spread disease in fandom, and one that is leaving scars.

When we were dealing with the World Fantasy 2011 stalker, we looked to ReaderCon and WisCon as shining examples of safe places and havens where we could go and relax. With this verdict, it is almost worse than having no support at all, no policy, no protection.

Come on, fandom. This has to stop NOW. No more harassment. No more ‘well, it’s not that bad’. No more ‘we can’t really do anything because he’s important in X community and this would make enemies’. Yeah, any solution or answer is going to suck for someone. Enemies will be made. The waters will be choppy for a while. Deal with it.

Grievance Committee

This is not something I’ve forgotten about. But I barely have time to keep my own work going. I’m a full-time freelancer, and working 18 hour days as it is. I support it whole-heartedly, and if there are people who can get the ball rolling, I am willing to be the face or voice or whatever you might want. We have a lot of support, a lot of solid backers. I have plenty of ideas, but no time, resources or experience in this particular arena.

I’ll be a guest at ConVolution, a new local SF convention. This is entirely the fault of Lee Moyer and Venetia Charles, who introduced me to the organizers.

However, I’ll actually be earning my keep! I’ll be leading a workshop on publicity and professional self-promotion. The details are still rather nebulous, so stay tuned for details around October.

I’m off to New York for the beginning of a month of work away from home. I’ll be manning the table for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Tuesday-Thursday, booth 3591. If you’re at the expo, come on by and see us! We’ll also have authors like Laura Anne Gilman, Myke Cole, Ellen Kushner and Holly Black, so check the SFWA site for a signing schedule.

Editor’s Note: This post comes from a dear friend who has been wrestling with the problem of where to post such a personal thing. I offered my site as a safe, anonymous place to post.

Because it is a sensitive subject and on my personal site, I WILL be deleting any negative or harmful comments, so please consider your response carefully and keep it respectful. Above all, read with an open mind, please. I’d like to start seeing positive, accurate portrayals of alternative mind-structures and mental illness in my fiction, thank you.

I’m schizophrenic. Writing this is difficult for me. English is my native language, but disordered thoughts are part of my life now. The words don’t want to come out right, whether I’m talking or typing.
I don’t see anyone like me in fiction. Male or female. Usually, we’re cast as murderers, or savants. Soothsayers. Catatonics. People tell their writers to make things more schizoid, when they’re trying to say something else. Make it more erratic. Confused. Hallucinatory.

Schizoid, if you don’t want to look it up, is defined as “pertaining to a personality disorder marked by dissociation, passivity, withdrawal, inability to form warm social relationships, and indifference to praise or criticism.”

I don’t see it used accurately very often.

Because you’re writers, you might want to start here; it’s an Australian site for media professionals on reporting about suicide and mental illness. There’s also the NIMH site on schizophrenia, which is a cornucopia of info. When I see schizophrenia portrayed in expertly in fiction, I think that maybe you just don’t do your homework.

I don’t need you to care about me or my case in specific. I just need you to be mindful. If people can tell you to just write characters as people —not as women or disabled or children or whatever —you should be able to do that for the mentally ill, too. You never see characters before the psychotic break, you don’t ever show the struggle for recovery.

Some of us become schizophrenic as children, or in our teens. As happily married adults. Middle-aged. Elderly. Most of us were people with normal lives until this happened. And that’s all some of us want to go back to. We’re not monsters.

When I had my psychotic break, I lost everything. My job, my spouse, my grip on reality, my life. Under the disease is the person everybody thought would be a politician or a lawyer. A doctor. I was a socially adept person who could work a room, and loved every minute of it. I was the one everybody thought would go as far as they wanted.

I don’t feel like that person anymore. I’ve made a new life, sure, but it’s one with unsteady legs at times. It’s one where I try to keep quiet that I’m schizophrenic, because I’m afraid it’ll tank my career if I’m too public.

I probably could have said all of this in a sentence, but I have to fight for the words to figure out how to tell you what I’m thinking.

You’re writers. You can do better by your stories, and by people like me, than you have.

*edit* A friend linked me to her blog from a while back on this same subject, for those of you who want more insight. No Mental Conditions Allowed

I’m earning my keep at this one! I have 6 panels in 2 days. Haven’t heard if I’m moderating any of them yet, but since I seem to moderate about 50% of the panels I’m on, it’s quite likely. I’m also pleased to see that I know at least one person on every panel, except the two I’m most nervous about. Any port in a storm, although Marty and I are already conspiring.

1. How to Develop Your Marketing as an Author on Saturday from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM in Winchester (with Tony N. Todaro, Laurel Anne Hill, Dave Trowbridge, Emerian Rich, Dani Kollin)

What every author needs to know or what to do to make their books and stories sell after they are published.

2. Self-Promotion and Publicity for Writers on Saturday from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in Ballroom D (with Tony N. Todaro, Dave Trowbridge, Clare Bell, Marty Halpern)

So you’ve figured out this whole writing thing and your work is finally out there. Wouldn’t it be great if people actually bought it? Just because the publisher bought your book doesn’t mean they’re going to publicize it. Learn the whys and hows of self-promotion from the experts.

3. Editors, Agents, and other Endangered Species on Saturday from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM in Camino Real (with Jay Hartlove, Tony N. Todaro, Marty Halpern, Dario Ciriello)
(I’ve never met Tony, but he’s going to be sick of me by the end of the weekend!)

Amazon, with its in-house eBook self-publishing and print-on-demand books, along with their own publishing deals for selected authors, is looking to completely supplant publishers, their editors, and the agents they work with. Will this be successful? Will it work? What dangers lurk behind the untrammeled masses of would-be writers?

4. Defining Alternative Lifestyles on Sunday from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in Lawrence (with Franklin Veaux, Lon Sarver, D.M. Atkins, Ian Grey, Brad Nelson)
(Whoops, I don’t actually know anyone on this panel. Pretty nervous about this one, just on its own merits.)

It’s not just about who you sleep with. Panelists discuss alternative lifestyles that have worked for themselves and others, as well as how to avoid pitfalls.

5. Erotic Science Fiction and Fantasy on Sunday from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM in Lawrence (with Lon Sarver, Veronica Belmont, D.M. Atkins)
(PERFECT timing! I wonder if I could sneak Lee in with me?)

Boy meets girl meets robot meets vampire: what makes for good erotica in worlds with different rules than ours?

6. Alternative Lifestyles and Sci-Fi/Fantasy on Sunday from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM in Lafayette (with Kyle Aisteach, Chaz Brenchley, Lon Sarver, D.M. Atkins, Ian Grey, Andrew Clark, Brad Nelson)

From Heinlein’s line marriage to Ethan of Athos, a discussion of alternative lifestyles, chosen or otherwise.

So, there we have it. I’m talking about erotica, promotions and alternative lifestyles. Throw a panel on horses in there, and it’s me in a nutshell. Don’t necessarily expect coherence though: between traveling and event prep, I’m already forgetting English.

I’ll be holding down a spot in the bar on Saturday night, continuing last year’s excellent impromptu Barcon. Please come by and see me.