Jul 05 2009
FiestaCon winding down
Last day at FiestaCon/Westercon. I’ll be heading to the airport in a few hours, but before that there are still a couple of interesting panels, including one on alien languages with Stan Schmidt and Juliette Wade, and a meeting with Beth Meacham, Executive Editor at Tor.
I hope everyone had a great 4th of July; I did. It’s been a lot of fun. I met a couple of people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years, in one case since the old BIX days (hi Henry! hi Rick!), plus the usual fun of meeting someone for the first time who turns out to have several connections with you that you were both unaware of. Since this is my fourth day of the con I’m feeling a little shell-shocked (but in a good way). I hope this is more or less coherent. I intend to come back through these last two posts and fill in some links. Stay tuned.
2 Responses to “FiestaCon winding down”
Ooo! Ooo! How did the meeting with Beth go??
Well, full disclosure, it wasn’t a one-on-one, there were about eight other people in the kaffee klatsch. But it went well.
We spent a fair bit of time discussing the Google-Author’s Guild settlement (Google is in the process of scanning just about everything ever printed, and making it searchable — technically violating copyright in many cases but with a probably-valid Fair Use defense). Other hot topics included tor.com, e-books, POD (print-on-demand), and the changing shape of the industry.
One thing about POD — that potentially means your book will never go out of print. The good news is potentially more sales, the bad news is that rights will never revert. Established authors might get some threshold of copies ordered below which the book is considered out of print, but good luck to newbies on getting that in their contract. I have rather mixed feelings about that, especially since Tor editor Theresa Nielsen Hayden in another panel gave the sound advice “never sign away anything in perpetuity”.