Kidlitosphere Conference 2008: Day Two

That fearless native guide on the left is Laini Taylor.  If you have not read her Fairies of Dreamdark: Blackbringer then there is a hole in your life waiting to be filled.  Fearless Native Guide #2 is Jone MacCulloch, she of Silver Star Elementary and the blog Deo Writer.  And this picture was taken much later in the day, so don’t worry too much about that glass of beer there.  Please.

After the initial announcements, the first discussion of the day included a panel that included me, the Readergirlz Dia Calhoun and LorieAnn Grover (how cool is it to have the name "Grover", by the way?), Mark Blevis from Just One More Book, and Alice Pope of Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market.  Of course, I was on that panel and didn’t take any pics.  Which is fine because as I recall I was still a little sleepified.  Fortunately I woke up enough to pay proper attention to the next duo.

Aren’t they gleeful?  Gleeful and cold since the temperature was a bit nippy in the morn.  They’re clutching their arms for warmth here.  These gals were discussing blog tours with a bit of snark on the side.  Good snark, not the cheapo kind you find at the drug store.  This here was some high quality snark on display.  And they specifically discussed the Blog Blast Tours organized by Colleen and done in a manner that makes a lot more sense than your average "tour".

Here’s the deal.  A normal blog tour consists of the author (or their publicist) contacting five blogs.  Then the five blogs send the author questions and for each day of a given week that author appears on each blog.  The idea is that different blogs have different readerships and that the writer can reach a wide swath of potential readers with this method.  It’s pretty much understood that no one but hardcore fans actually go to each blog each day to read the interviews (particularly since the questions too often overlap).  Enter the Blog Blast Tours.  When these happen (and there’s a November one scheduled, so you’ll be able to see it in action soon) about 14-15 bloggers or less interview 2-5 people apiece.  Then they link to one another each day so that you know who has been interviewed where.  The result is that the author’s name shows up on 15 rather than 5 blogs, they only have to answer a couple questions, and everyone’s happy.  S’alright?  S’alright.  If you want to know the future of blog tours, this is how it stands.

Jackie explains all of this to the masses . . .

  . . . then indicates how tall one must be to blog.

Colleen remains, as ever, incredulous but you simply don’t argue with facts.

Next Pam Coughlan (better known as MotherReader) spoke on the topic of How to Be a Bigger (not better) Blogger.  That was fun.  I don’t have a picture though so, uh… here’s Pam!

. . . who is not made of pipe cleaners.  And if you haven’t read them, think of the Ratha books as Erin Hunter’s Warriors series on steroids.  Big big kitties.

Eventually it was time for dinner.  I sat at the same table as Matthew Holm and his lovely wife.

This was the Whooping Winners Table.  If we had a name, that would be it.  For some reason our raffle tickets did better than anyone else’s in the room.  Then to top it all off, we were so thrilled when one of our own got a prize that we would whoop.  It was probably cute at first but as we won… and kept winning… and winning… well, eventually we decided that we’d never make it out of the room alive.  Here’s one pile of wins:

And another:

What I couldn’t figure was why the other tables did not whoop.  Whooping clearly attracts luck, so whoop we did.  Ah well

After dinner, Jaime Temairik and I finally got a chance to do that interview we’d arranged.  You probably saw it earlier this week with the sock puppets and zombies.  Zombie Puppet Theatre Hour couldn’t exist without the stars in question, however.  Here is the full cast in repose:

For some reason Jacob was particularly amusing to me.

And last but not least, here is Jaime herself, reclining amongst her creations:

Not long after Kirby Larson and I headed back "home" and that was that.  A lovely conference filled with lovely people.  One of these days I may even get the videos of it up.

If you’d like to see other posts about the conference (and thereby determine if I am lying about any of this or not) check out the list of them here.