Ever since our old business started collapsing in 2015, driven mostly by Google’s destructive changes that at first whittled away and then wholesale destroyed our site traffic on our legacy websites, I’ve been looking for a new direction. A new calling.
And for the last two-and-a-half years, I’ve been on a job hunt, as we worked to keep our writing websites going – sites we built to disregard Google’s influence entirely. I’ve been looking for something solid, something real I could do with the next part of my life.
None of those searches yielded a definitive answer. Time after time, a promising lead, a job where I had a connection, something which was uniquely suited to my learned skills as an entrepreneur, withered up and vanished in real time, leaving me confused, sad, and bitter.
And then I fell into running the Sacramento Book Festival.
I’d been saying for years that we needed a book festival here in SacTown, and so when the opportunity presented itself to help build one from the ground up, I couldn’t say no. Along the way, I worked with an amazing team, learned some new skills, and demonstrated to myself (and the world) that my old ones still had relevance. All they needed was an opportunity to shine.
The success of the book festival landed me my current contract job, running Nebula Con in Chicago in early June.
And after that? Who knows? But a path has finally opened up, one I am ready and willing to follow toward something new.
I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far, running these two events. They’re really not that much different from writing a novel with a complicated plot.
Many Chapters
A book is made of many chapters – and so is a large event. Each of them has to be written in turn, drawing on what came before. And the enormity of both can seem overwhelming, until you break up the process into manageable chunks and tackle them one at a time.
Some Amazing Characters
Both good books and good events are filled with memorable characters, the ones behind the scenes and those in full public view. Many a good book has been written drawing on the author’s knowledge of human nature and the people the author knows. And in many cases, it took the expertise of a number of folks to put together the story. As an author, I’ve reached out to psychiatrists, deaf people, folks with OCD, trans fiends, and many other experts to help me write my books. In much the same way, I’ve worked with folks with amazing skillsets (that I don’t have) to produce both the con and the festival.
And on the public side, every novel needs great characters to be a success. So does a convention or a festival. Appearances by Kim Stanley Robinson, Wendelin van Draanen, Brenda Novak, Gail Carriger and many others made the book festival a must-attend event. And the same goes for N.K. Jemisin, Steven Barnes, Mary Robinette Kowal and the other luminaries, who are helping to draw crowds to the Nebulas.
It’s Like Making Sausage
If you do it right, your book will shine when folks read it, and so will your festival. But what most folks will never see is all the messy sausage making underneath. Many great books have suffered from fractured plots, uneven characterization and a myriad of other problems in early drafts, all of which were fixed in editing. Similarly, large events usually have a host of hidden issues that the public never sees. I counted over thirty of these in the 2025 book festival, and close to sixty this year. But our attendees declared it near perfect. If we do our jobs right, the finished product will hide most of its flaws.
New Mistakes
Finally, one of the things I always tell my team is that there will be problems on the day of the event. We prepare for them in advance as best we can, but there are always unforeseen issues. The toilet gets plugged. There’s not enough parking. It’s a hundred-and-ninety in May on the day of your event.
That’s okay. We deal with them when they happen, and plan better for them the next year.
It’s the same with a book. Each new book is a chance to learn something new… and to make new mistakes. Writing a book (or running a con) should never be easy, and you should expect that things will go wrong.
Strive to make different mistakes every time. That’s how you learn.
Pulling together a year-long project is an amazing feeling, especially when you finally get to see the fruits of your labor in someone else’s hands.
That’s why I love event building so much – seeing the expression on people’s faces when they finally experience the event you’ve created, and it all works.
It’s just like writing, only BIGGER.