On May 11, 2024, I will be bringing a Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) vendor table to the Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. I’ve never attended Watch City before, but it looks like it will be a lot of fun.
Currently, we are scheduled to have four or five authors sharing the table. I will be sure to bring Revin’s Heart, which is steampunky fantasy adventure. (And I’ll also bring a few copies of Better Angels: Tour de Force, just in case.) But Water Dragon Publishing has a few other steampunky offerings. And, as I say, there will several other authors there as well.
The SPBU model has been doing very well! It lets indie and small-press authors share the cost of a vendor table and avoid the need to get a tax identity or manage the purchasing system to sell books independently. A big traditional publisher might be able to just justify a table of their own, but very few indie or small press publishers could. We tried out the approach experimentally at Worldcon in Chicago and we’ve had tables for SPBU at Baycon, Arisia, and Boskone. It’s been a boon for authors who want to attend a con and they can tell people where they can buy their books.
