I've been tabling for a few years & last year really was Despair Soup...but people were absolutely hungry for something like real hope. Even in stories (maybe especially). And this is your first time! Exciting.

One thing I've found really helps is having zines to hand out -- especially since you're introducing a new(ish) genre, that's immediately a talk piece.

I spent half my time evangalizing with my #solarpunk zine https://brightgreenfutures.substack.com/p/zines

@screwturn

@screwturn

@screwturn

Care to elaborate?
Are you setting up a stand with a box of books and a cash box?

@susankayequinn

@screwturn

I hear you.
The money is certainly not my *primary* motive, and being a bestselling author also holds little interest.

However, reaching the kind of reader who is eager to consume dark short stories about murder and misadventure, or novels about delightfully lethal female psychopaths, is tricky unless one goes wide

I don't fancy myself as a brilliant writer, but I do craft stories that are enjoyable to a specific narrow audience

...and in fact the answer to all of it is human-to-human recommendations, which is the primary discovery mechanism for books anyway, and always has been. So, in a way, the distrust that AI breeds drives people to seek more recommendations from trusted friends (in person or online) and increases the usage of human-to-human connection (word of mouth)... which is to our advantage. No one's recommending slop! (well, no one you trust)

I think the assumption that the slop machines are *loud* and that you have to be heard above them is not quite what's really happening. What slop is doing is breaking trust -- people aren't sure what's "real" sometimes -- and also (for books) doing a form of DDOS attack, breaking the actual infrastructure (sci-fi zines, retailer hosting) that delivers stories (distributors are also using AI to justify raising costs on authors).

But it's not burying your work...

This is not going be a universal solution to being heard above the slop machines

@susankayequinn

I'm creative about my writing, but my creativity about marketing doesn't extend farther than the odd "hey, read my books" post

@darkuncle @joshsutphin @Daojoan

So far, i have definitely achieved the first. And in aggregate over 10 novels, have also managed the second.

If I needed to support a household, I'd still be working as a physical therapist. But our kids are adults, spouse & I are retired.

Think of all art forms embracing a collapse of the old rules, like Angine de Poitrine

I find myself having to constantly remind writers that most writers through all of time never made a living from their work and were not considered "unsuccessful" because of it. It's also a gift when you *don't* have to burden your art with making a living for you.

(I say this as someone who DOES make a living with her work but also knows that some of her work sells better than others and that makes things a lot more clear about what this is about)

I do think that you can actually make a living doing paperback only sales at local events (or even travel to events, but then there's carbon and other costs to that). For artists, a TON of them are primarily local but then they also have online shops.

Mostly I encourage people to make real connections to the people who consume their art/books and to get creative about how to make those connections. Any way that works, works.

I am increasingly allergic to the "things must scale to be 'successful'" ideology, a concept so universally accepted, it's broken and homogenized everything.

I'm a big fan of local in many many ways. And yet I treasure having connections to people in Germany getting my ebooks (and even print books, locally printed) into their bookstores/libraries/homes (for example). I have readers all over the world. This is also good.

I don't have to "scale" to do that.

“This logic is tempting, and in certain contexts it's perfectly sound. If you've discovered a real solution to a widespread problem, it would be odd not to try to bring it to more people. But the framework becomes toxic when it's applied universally, when every small creation gets fed into the same evaluative grinder and comes out measured against the yardstick of potential scale.

Because most good things don't scale.

Most good things are stubbornly local.”

The Noble Path

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model... Every tool is a startup now. Every script is a SaaS product. Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own

Westenberg. (www.joanwestenberg.com)