Following up on my previous post about the Virginia Festival of the Book, I have a couple more things to add.
First off, the Daily Progress, Charlottesville's local newspaper, covered the festival, including an article on my Publishing Day panel. (Hat tip to Ron Hogan for the link.) The reporter wisely quoted the only interesting thing I said during the entire panel, so kudos to her.
The other thing is that several authors have written to ask whether or not I think the Festival would be worthwhile for them to attend. I think that it would be useful for a variety of reasons:
1) The Festival has writers and readers from all different fields and genres, so you have a chance to interact with people who may not ordinarily read crime.
2) There is a large crime presence at the conference (with several dedicated panels), so there's a lot of readers from our genre. Most of the writers seemed to be getting a good number of fans in their signing lines, and the bookseller on location had a good selection. So it appeared that folks were doing business.
3) The conference is free and is almost exclusively fans/readers, not writers and aspiring writers. So you can talk to people who might actually buy books. (Just to prove this point... the whole time I was there, nobody came up and asked me to review their book. The only book I was given was by one of my panelists. This is much different from, say, Bouchercon, where I'm inundated.)
So, bottom line, if the organizers invite you to participate, I would strongly consider accepting.
For those of you who are fans and readers, I would definitely urge you to attend the Festival if you ever have the opportunity. It's a great chance to meet some of your favorite authors, and best of all, it's free!
