BB – BookBub (the gold standard paid newsletter promotion service)
ENT – eReader News Today (a paid newsletter promotion service)
KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing
KENP – Kindle Edition Normalized Page (count)
KU – Kindle Unlimited
NL - Newsletter
Appendix B – Synonyms for Said, Yell, & Move
Synonyms for said, yell, and move. Don’t overuse anything and don’t break the flow inserting a synonym. Many times, ‘said’ is the right word to use. I offer these simply as something to think about. Remember, there is no one right way and don’t let anyone tell you something different.
Said
accounted
alleged
announced
answered
articulated
assumed
barked
blubbered
blurted
called
chided
claimed
commanded
communicated
compared
complained
conjectured
considered
countered
cried
croaked
declared
deemed
demanded
droned
estimated
exclaimed
expressed
gossiped
griped
growled
grumbled
grunted
held
hissed
instructed
intonated
intoned
joked
lectured
mentioned
moaned
mouthed
murmured
muttered
narrated
offered
ordered
phonated
pleaded
pronounced
put into words
quipped
reckoned
recounted
regarded
relayed
replied
reported
requested
responded
retorted
rumored
said
scoffed
seeming
shot back
snapped
snarled
sneered
sniveled
snorted
sobbed
sounded
squeaked
stated
sung
supposed
taunted
thought
told
uttered
verbalized
vocalized
voiced
wept
whimpered
whined
whispered
yelped
Asked
Requested
Queried
Questioned
Wondered
Yelled
Bellowed
Hollered
Howled
Roared
Screamed
Screeched
Shouted
Shrieked
Wailed
Yowled
To Move
Ambled
Crept
Danced
Departed
Edged
Hurried
Hustled
Left
Lunged
Marched
Meandered
Moved
Padded
Ran
Rushed
Sashayed
Sauntered
Shambled
Slipped
Slogged
Sneaked/snuck
Sprinted
Stepped out / stepped off
Strode
Strolled
Stumbled
Tip-toed
Tripped
Walked
Went away
How about architectural terms? http://www.aviewoncities.com/_architecturalterms.htm
Appendix C – Notes on Conference Planning
Why have a conference at all? What is the unifying purpose?
20Booksto50k was a premise that Michael Anderle had. It’s based on simple math, breaking down the numbers to yield a bite-sized chunk in order to earn a living wage from your writing.
It’s about being a professional author. That means, selling your books. Finding readers willing to buy your books. Our unifying purpose for 20Books Vegas was about indies helping indies. Everyone is in a different spot on their journey.
Everyone needs a different tidbit of information to get them over that next hump. We all need the same information. We all need different information. We need it at different times. And then sometimes, we can forge our own way ahead. But someone else has already done it successfully, while others have failed. Take the good lessons and forge ahead.
Leave the bad lessons by the wayside.
Find a unifying purpose and you’ll have a reason to hold a conference.
* * *
Arrange Guest Speakers simultaneously with reserving space
Talk about chicken and the egg. Until you know your guest speakers and the number of people who may attend, you will have a hard time finding the right-sized space.
For 20Books Vegas, we reserved a room that could handle 650 people, but our break-even point was 250. That gave us a lot of room. How did we know what our break-even point was? That will come later, something else that you need to know before you’ve even started.
We called places and checked online, but until we had an incredible volunteer go to Vegas and beat on the doors of a dozen hotels and conference centers, we didn’t have a place to call our own. Finally, Sam’s Town came back to us with the best offer in regards to rooms.
Negotiating points:
Cost of the conference room can be waived by guaranteeing a certain catering minimum
Room nights (number of nights that your conference attendees stay in the hotel – the higher the room nights, the more clout you have in negotiating)
Electronics – most hotels have exclusivity contracts as in, you can’t bring your own stuff in. They grossly overcharge, but that’s how they pad their bottom line. They’ll give you a price list. Understand what you are getting and ask yourself, do you really need it? We encouraged our guest speakers not to have anything that needed to be projected. Cost savings was nearly $1000 by using handouts in packets instead
Extra outlets in the conference room – this is a pure cost, but in this day and age, being able to plug-in during a long day’s conference has a great value, since most conference rooms have almost no outlets. We paid $1500 for 300 extra outlets scattered throughout our conference room
Breakout rooms – these can be clumped in with your main room. Make sure you have enough space for everything you are trying to accomplish. Give the people room. Being squashed in isn’t the best learning environment, either in the main room or breakout rooms
Wifi for your conference room may be extra – verify that
Rental for your audio/visual equipment is by the day, not for the full event
The cost to rent for a half day or a full day could be the same. If it is, just take the room for the full day and that way the hotel will have it set up early so you can put out some banners do other prep-work without issue if you need to because you’ll own the space
Catering – if you have your people there for a full day, get them something to eat. To control your conference schedule, it’s better to pay to feed them than to have them disappear. Sure, we’re all adults, but the value that you deliver requires a little bit of leading the thoroughbreds to water.
IT Questions to ask your hotel: Is the provided wifi sufficient to live-stream the presentation? If not, how can we get at least one exclusive high-speed internet connection?
What is th
e connectivity to the projection system (such as, HDMI male or female)? Will tech support be available? Who is our Point of Contact for issues related to the room during the conference? (And please include a phone number.)
Will there be outlets for the computer to be used to drive the projector?
How many microphones will we have available? We need at least two cordless, preferably three, and how can we ensure they don’t run out of juice during the show? (i.e. what battery size do they take)
Can we hook up audio to the system to play music during the breaks? What connector will we need to accomplish this?
Controlling Attendee Numbers
Gauging the number of guests is important. You have to have a ballpark figure to get started, but dialing in the catering numbers takes real signups. I recommend a cost structure that helps you rein things in.
From when you open registration until three months prior to the show, charge your first price. In this case, $99.
From three months to two months, charge your second price ($199).
At two months out, you should be able to order your swag, badges, and stuff like that. The people who paid the extra registration amount will cover the costs and risks as you hedge forward. Order more than what the numbers show.
At two months and less to showtime, it is best if you have registration locked, but doing that is hard. You’ll have people fall out and others who could use what you’re pushing at your convention. From two months to one month, I recommend something on the order of $299 to offset any costs associated with last-minute phone calls to the venue to up your numbers.
Using price to encourage earlier signup and discourage late signups is one way to help you control your numbers, or at least cover the costs associated with last-minute additions.
The Schedule
Keep in mind your general conference theme. Begin with the end in mind. At the end of the conference, how do you want people to feel?
Build them up one piece at a time as if you are building a house. Start with the foundation. Set the expectations of a shared journey and make sure everyone knows what is going on. Having both a printed and digitally available schedule is important. Conference attendees will get frustrated if they don’t know where they need to be and when they need to be there.
The Space
More chicken and egg stuff. If you plan to do things that require people to write or type on their laptops, then give them the space to do that. Tables are best for ergonomics, but don’t have the attendees sitting on top of each other. If the conference room says it can seat 250, DO NOT put 250 people in there. They won’t have room to move.
In Vegas, we rented a space that could hold 650 people and we capped the conference at 400. We’ll have tables and plenty of space to move around. We’ll have snacks and drinks available throughout. (Budget for this and make sure you know the full costs. In Vegas, whatever the catering cost shows, we need to add 26.25% because of taxes and mandatory gratuity.)
The Guest Speakers
These good people are your drawing power. You need to give them the red carpet treatment. For 20Books Vegas, we were truly blessed by having an all-star cast volunteer to speak with us, and they even paid their own way. What an incredible testament to our premise of indies giving back to indies.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the venue in a place that doubles as a neat vacation spot. Another point to consider when organizing a conference. Make sure you are able to share the other amenities offered at your location. You can post links online or share information in the handout packet.
Pre-Conference Prep
Stay in touch with the hotel. If you aren’t on a first-name basis with everyone who has anything to do with your show, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t be a pest, but be complimentary and make sure you haven’t assumed anything. Keeping everything in writing will help you have a shared understanding of your conference.
The hotel is there to make sure you have a good experience. Some things you want may have an additional cost. Understanding that up front and what those costs will be will go a long ways in making sure that you don’t add stress and friction to your lives.
A step-by-step walk-through of what you want as you are shaping your conference helps immensely. If you can’t do the in-person thing, then you will need to spend some time on the phone.
Have both digital and printed copies of the material you want each attendee to have. We bought a high-capacity printer solely for this purpose as we were going to have about 5000 pages of printed matter to hand out. We cleaned out Walmart for their folders, but it was the best price and one-stop shopping.
You’ll need to start printing stuff early, but don’t start too early because things will change! You only want to print and stuff folders one time. We had an incredible volunteer to do all that for us and arrived at the show in a minivan packed with ready-to-go folders.
Make sure that you are aligned with your electronics package. Just know that you’ll have to pay the price for the projector, screen, and sound system. Get it right and ensure that your guest speakers are able to project whatever they want. We asked them to bring their own computers so we didn’t have to deal with software compatibility issues. We knew the projector had an HDMI interface. We informed the guest speakers, and we had a volunteer who coordinated it all, to include bringing extra interface cables just in case.
Signing Up and Paying
This will present your first technical challenge. We created a unique website, and built in WordPress with embedded forms with PayPal.
It took a few trials and errors to get this right before we went live, but we had no problems with it at all. We paid for both WP plugins to make sure that we had technical support to resolve any issues.
Here is the information we collected for the signup:
Real Name (mandatory field)
Pen Name
Name for your badge (mandatory field and to share publicly as part of the published attendee roster)
Address
Email Address (mandatory field)
Website (to share publicly)
Primary genre you write in
Secondary genre
Number of published novels (this is not a mandatory field, but I threw folks for a loop by not having an option for “0”. Next time, I’ll make sure that 0 is one of the drop downs. 0, 1, 2-3,4-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16+.
Number of published works other than novels (drop down with 0, 1, 2-3,4-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16+).
PayPal email address (mandatory field – used for verification of payment only)
Cups of coffee that you’ll drink each day (this was to best guesstimate the catering numbers – non-mandatory field)
Cups of tea (again, catering)
Number of donuts you’ll eat (again, catering)
Biography (a free-form paragraph for information that the attendee is willing to share publicly)
General annual revenue (not mandatory, but won’t be made public – we used this for a general show demographic) Dropdown boxes for 0-$10k, $10k-$50k, $50k-$100k, >$100k)
Will you be staying at the venue (mandatory field) (This was to bounce off the hotel to see if we were meeting our obligation. We received a nice cost break because for a conference with an estimated 300 attendees, we gave them over 1000 room nights.)
A total of five mandatory fields was all for our tracking purposes. The integrated PayPal app worked superbly, although some people were able to sign up (about 2%) and record their data without finishing through PayPal. We simply sent them an invoice and half paid. The others bailed out, but at least we knew.
I issued refunds for the show right up until I submitted the final catering numbers. If I received a request for a refund, I jumped on PayPal right there and sent it to them. I didn’t want anyone to think we were anything less that forthright with the show’s funds.
Swag
Make sure you have some graphics skills or have a volunteer with the skills as each of the below s
ervices wants their graphics in a little bit different format and at different resolutions.
Badges – 4imprint.com
Lanyards – nationallanyard.net
Pens & Notebooks – pens.com
Cups, t-shirts, towels, notebook covers, & more – society6.com
Volunteers
You need help. A great deal of help. People are willing to help, but don’t abuse that trust. Know what you need to do, set clear expectations, and be patient. The conference director does about 90% of the work, but that last 10% is critical to show success. The volunteers will take care of that and they will be the face of the show.
You can’t be in all places at all times. Break out the tasks and get help. Here’s what we did for 20Books Vegas.
Breakout room coordinators – responsible for schedule (in case of ad hoc sessions), posting the name placards of the speakers in those rooms, and generally keeping things on track in the smaller rooms
Attendee packet printing & stuffing
Raffle coordinator – run the raffles at the show
Guest speaker IT coordinator – make sure of no technical glitches
Check-in desk coordinator
General assistant to the director (I need help at the show because I want to help everyone)
Logistics coordinator – someone who lived locally and had space. We incrementally shipped our swag and other conference stuff to him and then he delivered it on the morning of the show where we had plenty of hands to help.
Advertisers
The conference represents an organization or a brand or something unique that has drawn your attendees. We initially contemplated sponsors, but then canceled that idea because we didn’t want to be in a position to vet those who would donate to the show. We didn’t want to promote one service over another.
We dispensed with sponsors and went with advertisers and supporters. We set up an advertisement with half or full-page full-color print ads with a corresponding piece on the web page. Simple as that. We posted a disclaimer that the conference was not responsible for claims or services made by individual advertisers.
We also added a conference donation button. By running lean and not profiting from the show, we limited catering. Donations helped us keep some of the nice things to have like doughnuts, fruit, and cookies for all the sessions.
Become a Successful Indie Author Page 14
