I went to the Nebula Awards conference. This is the professional writer's award conference with lots of professional oriented panels. Carol and I qualified for membership just before the lockdown and this the first time I've been able to attend one of these.

The conference was held in Chicago, about 20 minutes from a good friend's house. Unlike the fan-run conventions I hit, where parties and filks run until 3 AM, events at this conference are done about 9.

It hardly seemed useful to get a hotel room when I could crash for free and catch up with a friend.

So, that's what I did. I got to my friend's house on Wed evening, chatted for a while, slept and hit the convention bright and early on Thursday, when things were starting.

I arrived right behind Joe Haldeman one of the great authors I've admired since forever. Luckily, I ran into a friend right after that, so I didn't feel quite so much like a little kid at the grownups party.

The first talk I went to was on contracts. This was topical for me because one of my writing groups is moving toward releasing some of our stories as an anthology, and we'll need a contract to define terms for why stories are there and how they revert back to the author.

A scary thing I hadn't thought of is that sometimes stories have become 'owned' by an entity that went away, and nobody had rights to ever republish the story and it fell into limbo.

I also hit a panel on launching your book, and realized I'm months behind where I should be for doing *stuff* to release a rework of Promised Rewards. I thought finding a cover artist was going to be the big Must-Be-Done event, but I should be lining up folks to review my book on Amazon as soon as it's officially out (buying is nice, but not required.) doing blog swaps with folks, podcasts, press releases to local papers, and, maybe deciding how I'm going to actually get the thing printed, and formatted for e-book.

The panel on doing a kickstarter was another wake-up call. Kickstarter is designed to get funding for a new project. It's how indie authors get money for cover art, editing, and such.

It's not a begging platform (like GoFundMe), it's advance sales where you buy my book before I publish it, maybe at a discount, maybe with extra "bling" like a free short story, a special edition, signed or getting the book six months before Amazon lists it.

Mark Twain called it Subscription Sales - it's how he financed publishing Grant's memoirs - he sold the book before Grant finished writing it.

More important, it's how you get some exposure outside your tight group of friends and family. Again, you need to line up folks in advance so when the KickStarter goes "LIVE", they hit it immediately and pledge a minimal amount. Or just visit the page. The KS algorithms look for active projects to promote to other folks who might be interested in something like this.

There's an ecosystem of folks who promote each other's projects, share costs, and such.

I'm only feeling a little overwhelmed. I was planning on re-releasing Promised Rewards, releasing Simple Penance, and two anthologies this year. Now, I'm wondering if I can manage just a couple of those and still eat, sleep, and clean up after the animals.

And attend more SF cons, of course.