Tag: publishinglife

Can Con 2023 Schedule

Anthologies, conventions, editing, marketing, podcast, podcast, self-publishing, Writing

The summer went by so fast! Now I’m suddenly scrambling to pull myself together for Can Con 2023, a writing and publishing convention held in Ottawa. Things were going well, I actually did a jog in the park yesterday, but then in the afternoon I lost my favorite pair of headphones in the supermarket and my day went haywire from then on (I found myself crawling on the supermarket floor in search of them in case they got kicked under the shelves, but they stayed lost).

Sometimes I feel like whenever I feel happy, that is when things go really wrong. Anyhow, I’m hoping things will go well at the conference now that my bad streak has happened…below is my schedule if you happen to be going to the conference, feel free to come chat with me!

The schedule looks action packed with lots of writing sessions, book launches and interesting topics about the future of publishing. It’s one of the few conferences left in Canada that features genre writing and it should be hopping!

Why a publishing house is selling design work

Artsy Raven, Books, business, Writing

Recently we merged the Dark Helix Press newsletter mailing list with the Artsy Raven club mailing list due to limited time capacity. Marketing people will say we are doing something wrong, but we have too much to do and need to focus on creating things!

At Dark Helix Press we are working on new books, but we have also started making designs that are suitable for t-shirts, notebooks, mousepads, etc. These items are in our Threadless shop: https://darkhelix.threadless.com/

Books take a long time to make and are not easy to sell. Designs aren’t easy to sell either but people may pick up t-shirts or other items for their friends as gifts knowing there’s a better chance that material goods will be better liked than books.

All revenue from design work goes back into books because they are expensive to make and since we are a traditional publisher, the costs are all up front.

As a small press, Dark Helix will never qualify for any grants because there are conditions of selling X and reaching revenue of Y. We are a tiny player on a large playing field and over time, the larger companies have been merging into mega-corporations with different labels. The Goliaths are getting stronger and the Davids are trying new things to avoid them!

The future of the playing field for publishing seems bleak, as the larger Goliaths still have much control over the usual aspect of the industry such as access to bookstores, superstores (Walmarts, Costco, etc), databases and libraries. There are many emerging Davids over time – the self-publishers who are publishing themselves because the Goliaths refuse to. The most successful Davids are the ones that can get published by a Goliath for one or two books because the Goliaths have more marketing dollars and staff to make a book a success. It’s all still a gamble, but if the Goliath can shield a David temporarily it’s easier than a David struggling by themselves. Then after the partnership is over, the David can earn more from selling books themselves since there is no Goliath to take a giant cut of the revenue.

There are no easy answers to publishing success if you are a David! Throw in a mix of people using AI to the party and that changes everything as well! Hope my biblical analogy makes sense and have a great day!

Ed Seaward answers “What process do you use for writing novels?”

Artsy Raven, publishing, Writing, you tube

Ed Seaward has written a number of short stories and screenplays, including Mother Daughter Happiness, which was a screenplay finalist at the 2019 Pasadena International Film Festival. His novel, Fair, was published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2020. Ed shares with us his journey on publishing Fair, his experience writing screenplays and drawings from different experiences to create his stories.

He answers the question “What process do you use for writing novels?” on the Artsy Raven podcast, Episode 4. This clip is an excerpt from the episode.

The Artsy Raven podcast about writing & publishing episodes are on Spotify & Youtube: https://jfgarrard.com/arpodcast/

Live on #Spotify, Ep 1 of the #ArtsyRaven! #ChrisGorman, #fantasy #writer, shares his #writing tips and reads from Dawn of Magic!

Artsy Raven, editing, food, podcast, podcast, publishing, Uncategorized, Writing, you tube

The first episode of The Artsy Raven podcast is live! It’s available on Spotify and YouTube at the moment. Anchor will be sending out the podcast to other channels as well, but it’s still early so the computers are all talking to each other and negotiating, I presume. Bonus content about the secrets of success from the guests for each episode is available exclusively on Patreon.

We had a tiny party with myself, my husband and my little one because of COVID and we didn’t feel comfortable asking people over to our tiny apartment. The cake was baked by Ginny who is fighting on Food Network’s Great Chocolate Showdown and it is a chocolate cake. She said all sorts of fancy words like “caramel something” and “ganache something,” I will have to ask her for exact terms before I post about the specifics of the cake! But it was yummy, that’s the important part!

Chris Gorman, the first guest on The Artsy Raven, has been recording the Words with Writers podcast for a while now and he was the most prepared guest. I had sent him questions and he actually wrote out almost every word he was going to say and even practiced reading the entire transcript to note his speaking time! Of course when we actually did the recording, we interjected impromptu things and I had to cut him off from answering three questions or else we would go overtime.

It’s a bit frightening how fast the podcast went up after the files were ready for uploading. With the click of a button, it was live on Spotify/YouTube and I could see it in the search engines when I look for it. Editing the podcast took a few hours in comparison and I hope in the future I can produce these episodes faster as I become more experienced. At the moment I’ve booked a lot of “local” guests and the challenge in the future is asking “strangers” to come onto the show. I feel I need to have a few more episodes up before approaching big potatoes to come onto the show.

Forward and onwards!

Scheming and planning for The Artsy Raven Podcast where writers are the superstars!

Artsy Raven, editing, podcast, podcast, self-publishing, Writing

Everyday I turn down the chance to promote authors 99% of the time because the magazines I work with have limited capacity for interview pieces. As an author I know that writing is hard work and marketing is even harder. For a long time I pondered how to help these people and finally I decided I should launch a podcast with the writers as superstars!

Whenever I finish listening to an author interview on a podcast, I often want to hear them read. So I thought why not? Let’s make a show to interview authors and then ask them to do a reading!

In parallel my husband is bugging me about how come I didn’t earn enough as a writer and publisher to pay the accountant in 2020. I had thought about Patreon in the past but a combination of self-doubt and imposter syndrome led me to not do it. Under some buckling pressure, I decided to launch my own Patreon page and made an account on Ko-Fi (digital coffee) to hit the goal of paying the accountant next year. I can do a lot of things, but accounting ain’t one of them!

I don’t know if this podcast will succeed or fail. But I am ordering a small cake for the podcast launch from Ginny who is competing on “The Great Chocolate Showdown” on The Food Network Canada right now so at the very least I will have dessert. What’s another five pounds on top of my already gained COVID weight?!

As Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

As my mom says (whenever I start a crowd funding endeavor), “I will give you money, stop groveling and stop writing!” If this was about money, I would have taken her up on her offer a long time ago.

Meanwhile we did make an awesome trailer for The Artsy Raven, please have a look! And so we begin another adventure…