DragonCon Report 1: Marketing Wins, Epic Fails, MacGyver, and Rocket City Rednecks

A casual Con-goer at DragonCon, dressed

in a Witchblade costume

So, I survived DragonCon 2013.  This has possibly been one of the craziest I've ever been exposed to.  One panel said that the registration was up 30% this year, and another one mentioned that "We stopped selling tickets around 50,000 this year.  That's what we told the fire marshal. Shh."

Yes, "50,000" people spread over five hotels.  Did I ever mention I have a mild phobia of large groups of people?

Let me see, a few things worked, a few didn't.  You remember I had at least two evil plans for DragonCon.

One was an epic fail. I was going to give copies of It Was Only On Stun! to John Ringo, Timothy Zahn, and Peter David, and hope they liked it enough to give me a blurb.

John Ringo said that, since he tends to write in the voice of books he read, he was rereading his own books.

Timothy Zahn stated, before a room full of people, that he hasn't read fiction in ten years.

By that point, I didn't even bother with Peter David.

However, on the other hand, I was going to hand out flyers for the five free days I was giving out my book to Kindle users.  I had 500 flyers.  The free promo period ended last Thursday. I had 1304 people read the book. So, I guess that's a bit of a win.

Anyway, moving right along, we're going to start the first DragonCon report with something a little lazy -- to start with, I'm going to post a video of Richard Dean Anderson, better known as MacGyver, or as an officer from Stargate, the tv show.







Now, I found him a little boring, and if you folks agree, well, I'm going to try to make it up to you with a video of Travis Taylor (author, physicist, runs a show called Rocket City Rednecks) and John Ringo (author, author, and font of a lot of various and sundry knowledge),  Sadly, it's only ten minutes.  I couldn't get into this panel, since it was standing room only, and I didn't feel like being fit in with a shoehorn.

I actually thought it was kinda awesome, but I'm a nerd.




Be back tomorrow with more vids, and photos, and maybe some written reports.