#CapitalIndieBookCon: Aftermath

As I type this, it’s Sunday night and I’m tired. Saturday, I got up at 5 and couldn’t get back to sleep because I knew I had to run a book fair that day and fifty billion things bombarded my brain–things to remember, things to do, things to take to the car, things not to do.

Folks, I put on a book fair, and it rocked. Jeffrey Cook, my ConBuddy, handled the volunteer side of the affair, among other things. A dozen people did that volunteering to make it really work. My part was all the logistics and venue management. Bookkeeping, paperwork, contracts, payments, spreadsheets, lists, badges, phone calls, emails, maps, arrangements, dragons, tacks, safety pins, tables, chairs, disaster management, tact, mailings, setup, and teardown. So everything I normally do, but times fifty.

From about 6am to 7am, I kept remembering things I needed to put in the car. I’d packed it up the night before, but of course I didn’t remember everything.

The venue is five minutes from my house. I wasn’t supposed to have access until 7:30. I left at 7 anyway, figuring I could unload by the door and move the car. To my delight, the door had been accidentally left ajar. I walked in and got to work.

By 8, I had everything unloaded and tape on the floor to mark table spots. This tape turned out to be one of the early jokes. I will never claim to be great at straight lines. The tape job followed the Pirate Code–it was really more of a guideline for where the tables should be. In the end, we had to wiggle it all to fit everyone. Why? Because I hadn’t actually been able to get into the room prior to the event to measure things out and get a perfect map. I went in knowing I had to wing it. Which is probably why I couldn’t sleep past 5.

Authors arrived starting at 9am. I won’t go into the minor disasters, because they were mostly on the order of “Oops, I didn’t think of that.” It did turn out that my Pirate Code tape was a little more off than I thought, and we had some authors who were extremely gracious about making changes.

The show began at 11. Which is to say that I got someone to shout that the show was technically live then, but we didn’t actually have any attendees for a while.

It turns out that Olympia has a giant festival in mid-July, called Lake Fair. It happened to coincide with our event, which is something we had no way to know about or prevent when we booked the venue, because the dates weren’t announced that early in any of the places I looked back in December. We also didn’t have a lot of choices for the date by the time I was able to get in to see the facilities manager in January. For next year, we’re already looking for a good date.

After that, we had some people come in, most of whom knew one or more of the authors present. Random strangers came too! It was exciting and wonderful.

For the most part, because we’d never put on anything like this before, we positioned the event as a chance to get in on the ground floor, to meet other regional authors, and to find new books. For a first year event of its type, we had a good showing and a good time.

I learned. So. Much.

Dealer’s Room Liaisons, I respect you all so much more now, even when you screw up.

Special thanks to Jennifer Brozek, for being wonderful and forgiving. To Madison Keller, for doing me a solid when someone didn’t show. To Matt, for answering with an oddly emphatic and uplifting “YES” when I asked him to do something minor. (I think he was just pleased to hear me admit I needed help with something, since I rarely do.)

CapitalIndieBookCon will happen again. If you’re an author, reader, or relative of a reader who lives anywhere near Olympia, WA, and you think you might be interested in the event, sign up to be notified about CIBC2 news here, on the Clockwork Dragon website.

Though some folks started tearing down early, we waited until 7 and mostly facilitated everyone else before getting our stuff packed up and out. Post-event dinner at a local burger joint featured much chatter about how to make the next one even better. We’re looking forward to it already.

For the record, I got home around 10:30. Jeff left Olympia around then, which means he didn’t get home until much later. My poor co-author, Erik Kort, had to go even farther and probably didn’t get home until after midnight. It was a long day. For all of us.