Just for giggles...

[bovil]

kevin_standlee gets in a good zinger in the Colleen Lindsay wank, and she probably doesn't even get it.

And wank it is. It's no longer the "venom cock" wars, it's the Colleen Lindsay Wank. After going to otf_wank (other-than-fandom wank on journalfen.net) it got migrated to fandom_wank. Comments include luminaries such as Diane Duane.

Oh, and just to get back to the whole thing that started it all, the devil himself, nihilistic_kid, posted a link back to Paperback Writer's blog entry about email exchanges with Jeanine Cross.

Comments

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

Clearly.

For her, Fandom Is Just A Source Of Income, as opposed to Fandom Is A Way Of Life or Fandom Is Just A God Damned Habit.

(Mine's "Fandom Is Just One Part Of Life")

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

And so far she has refused to answer when I called her on the point that Worldcon could be either 1) a Trade Show with little fannish attendance, OR 2) a Fannish Event (which she also described it as), but it could NOT be both.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Hey, she's stopped responding to me too.

[kproche.livejournal.com]

But both of you already read fantasy and science fiction, so you are by her own admission unimportant to her or her job. Why should she bother responding?

[lysana.livejournal.com]

You're being sane, sensible, and holding her to her word.

I may not be submitting fiction anywhere right now, but I swear, Del Rey/Ballantine fell off my list thanks to that woman.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Check the date-stamps. We stopped talking about this 10 days ago.

The issue surrounding WorldCon is one near and dear to many of our hearts. You're talking to WorldCon staffers, department heads, and in one case a past WorldCon chair.

Let's see if I can put this in terms you can understand.

We'd be doing a bad job promoting WorldCon if we let the characterizations you've made go unchallenged. Nothing you've said would make anybody want to go to WorldCon.

This is the first time you've stated "world-con is two separate cons for all intents and purposes." I've quoted back your statements that contradict that. You've painted WorldCon in broad strokes as purely being what you experienced and how it's not what you need in a convention, and you've dismissed any arguments that it's more than your experience.

You've been dropping a lot of names of professionals. I think you need to go back and talk to them about their experiences at WorldCon. Bantam Dell and George R. R. Martin thought that marketing at WorldCon was worth sponsoring a cash prize in the TorCon 3 Masquerade for the best costume based on one of Martin's works. Harper Collins and Terry Pratchett did the same thing at Noreascon 4. Tor Books and Jim Minz (and Tom Doherty) think that marketing at WorldCon is worth throwing parties that are open to fans and professionals (I knew Jim back when he was a gamer-geek college student and we swung foam swords at each other). Many professionals see the benefit of enjoying more of the convention than just networking and signing. It may be two cons for you, but many others don't make that distinction, they enjoy the whole.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

The opportunity to have my book promoted by someone who forgets the contents of her own marketing materials ranks on my to-do list somewhere around having said text being translated into Spanish by a first-year student of Russian.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen Jim in probably 3-4 years; what with him on the east coast and me in California. He definitely made his mark on Tor parties while he was there, though. Ask him about Madison, squids and a sauna (and that was his first convention outside gaming conventions).

[bovil.livejournal.com]

6 months isn't "Quite some time ago" in my book, not when compared with a decade at Tor, or as I said, knowing him since college.

You got a good guy, though. He connects well with pros and fans, and is probably the best liquor-buyer that publisher parties have ever known.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

She's got a point, even if it's a nitpicky one. It's not her employer's sampler, it's another company. Still, she says she read the book and initially swore that "venom cock" didn't appear in it.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I was about to point out that the name of the convention in question is Worldcon (a registered service mark of the World Science Fiction Society), not "world-con," but then I noticed that you didn't capitalize your own company's name either. A minor, pedantic point, I admit, but as I'm Chairman of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, I reckon it's the sort of thing I'm supposed to do.

Seriously, what bovil said. Your opinion about Worldcon and anything with less than tens of thousands of attendees being useless for marketing to new readers is valid, and you know your job better than I do. However, your characterization of the World Science Fiction Convention as a trade show for a small number of professionals is wrong and can't be left unchallenged -- not for your sake, but for the sake of anyone else who might stumble onto it.