For all of you who attended my book signing yesterday, please accept my heartfelt thank you! I hope you had fun!
I gotta say, that was very interesting. Is this something I’ll do again? You bet! But let’s go to the film for our post-game analysis.
Oh noes! Bullet points…
The Good
- Diverse panel of authors and subject matter.
- Attendance not hampered by geographic limitations. We had folks from all over the country in the audience.
- Overall format for the event was good.
- Technology used was Go-to-Meeting by Citrix. Flexible, stable, and reliable provided you have the network bandwidth. Used in the business world everyday.
The Bad
- Pacing of the on-screen presentation had some problems. Jumpy and much too fast at the end.
- Moderator did well overall, but chattier authors tended to dominate the discussion.
- One-hour time limit squelches a more free-flowing discussion between the panel and the audience.
- As we had a husband and wife author team, that brought the total number of panel members to five. This is probably too many.
The Ugly
- We lost one of our authors for a large chunk of the presentation due to technical problems, some of which may have been pilot error. Regardless, it threw the whole question and answer portion off kilter.
- On-screen presentation was not quality-checked after our practice session a couple weeks ago. My mug was pictured next to one of the other author’s books. Stuff happens, but this was pointed out before and was not fixed.
Overall, I think this is a neat way to do book signings. It cannot replace the face-to-face variety, but is an excellent supplement to them. Being online, you can cast a much wider net for interested readers. And poviding a free ebook to all attendees is a nice touch too. For all you authors out there, give this some serious consideration.
Thanks again everybody!
