Meeting Jennifer Fallon, playing with arrows, and other fun at Au Contraire

So it's been almost two weeks since I had the pleasure of both presenting at and attending the Au Contraire fan convention.  I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to meet other like minded people - writers and readers - as well as learning lots from the various workshops and talks I was able to attend.  I also enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Guest of Honour, Jennifer Fallon.

Grace Bridges of Splashdown Books was one of a number of presenters who spoke about self- and indie- publishing as the way of the future.  Many people describe what's happening to the publishing industry as similar to what happened to the music industry over recent years.  In many ways, Amazon.com is the Itunes of the book world.  Print on demand sites such as Lightning Source and Create Space make it easy to produce books without the huge financial risk of the past.  While I've always been cynical about self publishing, it seems that I, and the rest of the world, will need to get used to it.  In this brave new world of publishing, quality is the only thing that can help writing stand out from the crowd. 

 Other interesting learnings included a couple of good sites for finding suitable short story markets and tracking submissions:  The Submission Grinder and Duotrope.  And that arrows in medieval times were a lot better made than I would have expected.

Meeting Jennifer Fallon, the guest of honour, was a treat.  Jennifer was kind enough to let me have a sneak peek at the covers of her upcoming Rift Runners trilogy (see above) and it's always fun to talk writing with someone more experienced than myself. Jennifer spoke to everyone about her experiences in the publishing world and taught an excellent class on characterisation. 

Interestingly, Jennifer also spoke about self publishing and how it compares to traditional publishers in the modern day world of writing.  Her new series is going to be published under her own indie imprint.  It's an exciting move for Jennifer and will be a great example of how quality writing will be found by readers no matter what the method of publication.  I'm looking forward to reading it.