Last month, I wrote about getting into events for indie creators. The post covered pointers on how to get into conventions / festivals, and how to prepare your booths for the days you’ll be at the events.
This post will give a few tips on surviving behind the booth, especially if this is your first event. Rule number one when it comes to being a booth owner at a festival / convention: Event personnel are also usually volunteers or very frazzled full-timers who barely have time to sit down, so here are a few fundamentals to get you through the event without having to call for help: BE CLEAR ABOUT HOW MANY BOOTH PASSES YOU CAN HAVE / YOU NEED Confirm the number of people who will be able to man your booth while you’re registering. If it’s not possible to get more than one or two extra passes, make arrangements so that you won’t clog up the registration desks with your requests on the day itself. It’ll be a crazy day for the event staff, don’t make it crazier for them. MAKE YOUR TRANSACTIONS EASY The greatest factors in determining product price during my first time was follows:
It’s a good idea to visit the event site the day before or earlier to know where to head to for booth registration (and to collect your deposit). Again, this is to save yourself time and headache, especially when during the event – when it’s crowded and claustrophobic. PACK FOOD. ENOUGH FOR AN ARMY (ISH). One of the first things I learnt during my first boothing experience was that no one was going to serve you lunch, and that the food stand is not as accessible as you think it is. And while cookies are delicious, there are only so many that can last you the entire day. Personal tip: Pack dried foods / foods that can stay in an airtight container for a day or so – cut fruits which have been soaked in salt water, crackers and canned tuna, buns, onigiri etc… (I highly recommend good onigiri. Hehehe.) – and lots of water (1.5l at least). MAKE FRIENDS WITH BOOTH NEIGHBOURS This will help you a ton. If you need a quick run to the bathroom and there’s no one else to look after your booth for you – your neighbour can be there to help. It’ll also help you pass the time during “slower” periods. The ultimate plus point though, is that once you’re friends with your booth neighbours, your creative circle gets that much bigger. ENJOY YOURSELF At the end of the day, these creative events are organized not just for the enjoyment of the event visitors, but also for creators to meet one another and have fun. So yes, price your goods right, pay your booth rent, and hope to cover costs – but also remember that at the root of it, you create because you love to. Your first event will not be your be all and end all of your creative career, so embrace the experience and enjoy yourself.
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A couple of weekends back, Mickey and I held a workshop with the All In! Young Writers’ Festival. While we merely touched the surface of what Speculative Fiction and storytelling was, we also conducted an exercise taught to us during our Mentor Access Project (MAP) Retreat.
It was introduced to us as workshopping. Before you apply this to your own storytelling, you will need:
It’ll be good if your friends have already read your entire draft / abstract before coming for the session for context. (Note: It’ll be good if you’re able to bring someone with some background in storytelling, writing, or creating in the group as well, just to give perspective from a commercial point-of-view) As a setup, have everyone sitting within earshot of each other, preferably in a circle. Then you start: READ YOUR WORK First, read your work. No one else is to interrupt or ask questions. Whether you’re just there to help with feedback or are waiting for your turn to share your stories, just listen to the story as it’s being told. At the same time, be clear with your reading – don’t rush over your words. LISTEN TO FEEDBACK After you’re done reading, everyone gives their feedback one-by-one, starting from the person directly on the left or right of the storyteller. The most important aspect of this stage is this – Listen to the feedback without any interruptions. This stage is to simulate a reader reading your book on their own. Realistically, such cases won’t allow either the author or other readers to intervene with feedback and opinions. For the most constructive feedback, it’s best to let each person say their piece before going on to the next person. (Note: It’ll also help to craft your feedback to be balanced – talk about what you were not sure about, but also mention what you liked about the piece. This is not praise for praise’s sake, but this can help provide the author with a direction on what to enhance and keep in the story.) DISCUSS This is when you get to ask your readers any pertinent questions or discuss any pressing concerns you have about your work. Commonly, authors tend to ask about (but not limited to) the following topics:
Regardless, it’s your story, it’ll be good if you enter the session with an idea of what you’d like to get out of this workshopping session. APPLY At the end of the session, take the notes you’ve gathered and go over them again. Decide the direction of your story while keeping the feedback you’ve received in mind, especially feedback that has been repeated over the workshopping session. Now that you have a good stack of notes, make full use of the feedback and polish your story further! The Workshopping technique was taught to us by Man Asia Winner, Miguel Syjuco. You can find out more about him and his works here. Comic Fiesta, Anime Festival Asia, PopCon Asia, Singapore Toys, Games, and Comics Convention, Game Start, Illustration Arts Fest… the list can go on.
While all these conventions celebrate stories told across various mediums and forms, they also recognize the importance of the independent creator. With so many new faces and names coming out in the storytelling scene (comics, writing, games etc…), organizers are seeing an increasing uptake of booth registrations for events featuring a corner for independent creators. Yet, the first booth experience can be both exhilarating and disappointing, especially when we’re not prepared. So here are a few pointers from registration to booth-owning. BE INFORMED Once you decide that you’d like to sell your works on a specific platform, make sure you’re following them on their various channels – Facebook, Twitter, the main website, etc… Many event organizers announce their calls for booth artists / creators way in advance. Comic Fiesta (held in Dec) calls for booths in July or August. STGCC (held in Aug / Sept) have a list of artists they invite to their Artists’ Alley. This is on top of the fact that artists can also write in to request for booths. Keep their schedules in mind – no one has the time or energy to listen to you declaring that your work will bring the crowd to the event if you cannot even be bothered to respect deadlines or the staff helping you. (Yes, there are event staff that have questionable attitudes too, but that will be another post.) BE PREPARED So yay! You managed to go through the reviewing process and get a booth. Now what? The Tiger and my checklists for booth preparation includes three main things:
If you’re able, you can digitize your stock tracking / sales sheet on Google Drive so there won’t be any pesky mental math involved while giving change. Regardless, take care of your stock, present your booth well, and take care of yourself. BE POSITIVE This is possibly the most important pointer in my book. It’s very tempting to fall prey to impossible math – where we think that we’ll make a killing just because we’ve got a booth at an event with high foot traffic, and a high concentration of people who’d most likely love your products. Most of these booths are screened for quality, right? And I’ve been putting my work online every day for the past six months or so. My number of likes on Facebook has reached three figures – My stuff will fly from the shelves! Not so fast. Yes, there are cases where one or two artists are picked up from the convention scene, but these cases happen once for every few hundred or so creators. Factors contributing to a great booth experience at an event have little to do with good sales or pure recognition. From what I’ve observed, a good attitude brings about a better experience. Whether it’s your first event ever or in another location, I’d recommend concentrating on the following instead of just sales:
I hope this post was helpful to everyone who’s reading this! Do leave your tips for other booth owners in the comments, I’d love to hear from all of you. It has only been a couple of months and I feel like I’ve been using this planner for way longer. Thanks to sites like iheartorganizing, the Hobonichi Users Group (on Facebook), and various users on Instagram and Pinterest, my Cousin is shaping up to something I’m glad to have in my life day after day. The yearly and monthly pages remain the same as they did when I wrote about it in my previous #Hobonichi365 post. Most of my changes, however, were made after compiling a list of post-mortem pointers after using the planner in January. What really helped was removing financial information and moving my focus of the day to purely the upper right corner, where the To-Do squares are. Fewer things to worry about, greater focus. Speaking in terms of a greater focus, the Tiger introduced this method to me while I was having a huge guilt trip about doing so much but still not moving. What I used to do was to assign different personal projects to different days – with the intent of focussing on just one thing as much as possible a day. However, that induced a lot of guilt if I felt tired or sick on that day. So having a few major points like these help with goal and process-tracking – and that, in turn, helps with personal To-Dos for each week and each day. Bonus Pages: Collections – Projects Another great incident which happened within these couple of months was how my good friend, Mintea, got a Hobonichi Cousin as well. Inspired by her talking about trying to fit a Collections page into her own planner, I decided to give it a try as well.
And I think I’ve found a new way to track and limit the amount of creative projects I can take in a year. So that’s 54 days into #hobonichi365. I’m excited to see how the rest of the year will be like =) Plannerd Feature: Lessons Learnt from TrashLit, Comic Fiesta, and the Indie Scene in Singapore2/24/2017 The #BuySingLit Festival and NOISE SIngapore panel Draw ‘Em / Print ‘Em / Sell ‘Em happening this weekend are a couple of events in an increasing number of initiatives set up to promote local and regional talents. An industry thought to be solely on the shoulders of a select few until the early 2000s, Singapore’s Literary… no... Storytelling scene has flourished since.
However, how far have we come? Before we start, there’s a need to clarify a few aspects. Like respecting authorial intent, context is the basis for everything here. Firstly, I’m a content reader / consumer. I go for plot twists, character-driven stories, or stories where weird things happen to normal people. My interest in turn-of-phrase, metaphorical statements, and poetic license is foundational at best (unless there are subtle pop-culture references or the language is obviously mind-blowing). My main concern is this: Do I understand what’s going on? Secondly, I’m an empath. It’s incredibly important that the author’s passion for the story (not the words) shows through. If I don’t feel it, I don’t feel it. At best, the story becomes a one-note / one-time read / listen / watch. Finally, Singapore Literature, or SingLit, will be defined as fictional work produced by Singaporeans, or in Singapore, be they commercially or self-published. The Critical Triage of SIngLit / Singapore Creators “Anything from Singapore sure not good one lah!” “We get people writing speculative fiction, but they are all not good!” “Everyday work OT 12-14 hours until want to die already, go home still must stress about this and that. Cannot even sleep properly, read what?!” These problems continue to haunt us (as storytellers, producers, and managers) today. However, I’d like to focus on the lessons learnt from my experience working alongside other independent storytellers. Lesson #1: Accessibility is important I firmly believe that you should have a target audience, but if you want your story to spread, make it accessible. When I was in a focus group on how to get Singaporeans reading, one idea stood out to me the most - let everyone read “rubbish”. “Rubbish” meant anything and everything - good literature or not. For me, it made the most sense. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies steered me towards the original. Video game Return to Mysterious Island got me to return to Jules Verne’s works. Watching Red Cliff motivated me to finally read Romance of the Three Kingdoms. All my experiences which led me to read classics started with works the intellectuals diss as “disrespectful”, “mainstream”, or “insert your own negative connotation here”. Lesson #2: In an environment where reading is almost an anomaly, there’s no benefit in judging what people read Do you want your non-reader kid to read? How about starting with Colin Goh’s Dimsum Warriors? Or A.J. Low’s Sherlock Sam series (which got my chronically-anti-reading cousin to finally read for fun)? How about the Yellow Princess series by the Global Beards? Know someone who wants to read but has no time? Try anthologies like HEAT / FLESH / TRASH (urban fiction edited by writers around Southeast Asia), or Ayam Curtain (edited by JY Yang and Joyce Chng). How about people who want a twist on epics? Terry Ho’s Forbidden Hill Chronicles then? Or wait a bit and give JY Yang’s silkpunk novellas a chance. What I’m saying is - there’s no point in judging how / what people read. Lesson #3: What you don’t like does not necessarily equate to bad writing / fiction Reading doesn’t make you superior. It gives you ideas, trains your thoughts, teaches you, gives you a form of escape or entertainment. Regardless, leisure reading should open our world view, sharpen our minds, and lead us to what we like. Note that I said what we like, not what’s “good”. There’s a difference between bad writing and prejudice against certain genres of fiction. Unfortunately, because the line is so fine and the word “good” is so subjective, what we like and what’s “good” is often the same entity. For example, Clancy and Patterson are decent writers, but not exceptional in my book. I still read Patterson here and there anyway because I’m bored and I like his stories, formulaic as they are. Or how I don’t read Lovecraft or most of King because I don’t like Horror / Terror, but you cannot deny that there’s literary credit to their work. Which brings me to my next point - ranting excessively that we should have exceptional Pulitzer / Man Booker / Hugo / Printz-worthy writing (much less local / regional writing) when our stories are not accessible (story-wise and physically) misses the point. Yes, we have to strive to write well, we should hold ourselves to international standards, but we do have to remember that at the heart of it, we are storytellers - tell your story. Lesson #4: There is no one or fixed road to publication, even in Singapore My earliest memory of Singaporean works were from Catherine Lim - Colin Cheong, Goh Sin Tub, and Stella Kon here and there, but Catherine Lim was pushed to us more than any other author. And I was convinced (as a 14-year-old can be) that there was no hope for literature that was not about national pride, or how Singaporeans are so Singaporeanly Singaporean in Singapore. My first ever rejection from Angsana Books cemented that. How publishers asked for stories before the 2010 rise of Spec Fic came about perpetuated those themes as well. It was not until I visited Comic Fiesta (an independent comics festival in Malaysia) that my perspective on this changed drastically. For the first time, I experienced an event where independent creators were able to sell their own works without the pressure of booths that cost as much as your monthly rent. Regardless, the selection was so diverse, you were bound to find something you’d like. Until then, your credentials were at the mercy of a traditional publisher. If you were self-published, you had to deal with the image of “not-good-enough-to-be-considered”. Comic Fiesta proved to me that your portfolio need not be restricted to traditionally-published work. Self-published creators still have a plethora of problems in Singapore - high printing costs, storage, distributors who dodge payments, tedious processes for individual sellers. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that they continue to produce work with “no standard”. The idea of Comic Fiesta and more recently, Comic Art Festival, Kuala Lumpur (CAFKL) attracted a group of indie creators in Singapore, leading to events like the inaugural Illustration Arts Fest held last year. Seeing its potential, some of us were even given booths to promote and sell our works at the Singapore Writers’ Festival. No, it’s not that the situation in Singapore is hopeless. If we, as creators, want to put something out, we do it to the best that we can, not write in private and then make noise about how we’re not given opportunities. Lesson #5: The industry is not just about creators (a.k.a. you). Publishers, at their core, are businesses. In a capitalistic, pragmatic environment, they need to balance value and cost. Like it or not, money has to come from somewhere and constantly asking the government for money is not sustainable if we want an environment that supports the arts. Should publishers extend opportunities to unknown writers with potential, take risks on stories that have nothing outwardly to do with Singapore? What about stories written purely for entertainment and escapism? Yes, definitely. It’ll only do us, as a community, good to have all levels and genres of writing. However, don’t forget other avenues (as creators and readers) - go beyond bookstores and the Internet, go beyond emailing and social media, and meet your readers / creators at panels, festivals, or groups. As creators without agents / managers, we have a greater responsibility to keep the industry thriving - if we don’t support each other, will others feel confident supporting us? And I have yet to start on educators, distributors, marketers, the lot. Lesson #6: Attitude matters, regardless of how recognised or talented you are. At the end of it all, I’d say the most important lesson from working with the local indie scene is that attitude matters. You may be internationally recognised and / or able to live off your writing modestly, but if you guilt-trip your supporters, or excessively rant about how the local industry is holding you back / not good enough, you may be taking a couple of steps back. We need to not only step-up our creative game, but also our professionalism. It’s a complete waste if we write magnificently, but cannot even answer a simple email promptly and professionally, or meet deadlines with event organizers. Lesson #7: Do not undervalue your part-time / day job Man Asian winner Tan Twan Eng once recounted how he possibly disappointed a budding writer. During one of his talks, a student dragged her father to see him, telling Tan that she wanted to be writer when she graduated from school. Tan’s advice? “Get a job first.” Aside from the financial stability and benefits, a good-enough job truly benefits us as creators. Time & project management skills come from having to answer to your day job responsibilities. Customer service skills come from having to answer emails from people you’d rather not talk to. Most importantly, you learn humility and empathy from working for someone else - two major lessons essential for being good writers / storytellers. Colin Cheong, Loh Guan Liang, Shamini Flint, and Dave Chua still teach. John Green is a social entrepreneur. Ransom Riggs is a photographer and filmmaker. As much as I hope and wish that writers who want to go beyond being “hobbyists” (and are in it to become professionals) get to become full-timers, the environment doesn’t permit that for now. I’d love to just spend my days creating stories in novel, podcast, or game form and collect royalties while I dabble in Arts Management as well. But I still need to eat and pay bills. And venting and blaming won’t make people give us money immediately. Lesson #8: Change is still necessary Case in point: Buku Fixi and Maple Komik in Malaysia. When Fixi’s founder, Amir Muhammad, came to SWF last year, he shared his experience running an urban fiction publisher in the capital of Malaysia. While a good lot of their earnings come from translated work, he knew, as a publisher, that he was going to face two major problems:
Sound familiar? Yet Fixi is considered to be one of the most popular publishers and creative houses in Malaysia. I’m putting my money on Amir’s mission to publish more urban fiction and fiction people in general want to read. Likewise, Maple Komik was formed to publish comics the founders wanted to read but never found in Malaysia. Yes, we need more diverse books - creators can stand to be more regular with content or promotion, publishers can stand to publish more diverse stories, readers can benefit from reading unabashed, action-packed science fiction / fantasy / thrillers / general fiction from Singapore here and there. Yes, publishers can step up. But at the same time, we can still push our own and our community’s work forward by creating more, creating well, and creating regularly. If it took me almost 30 years to get to where I am today, I can only imagine how it’s like for a nation. And if my own soul and community are telling me to push on, I see no reason to stop supporting a scene which has contributed and taught me so much, for better or for worse. A few years back, the Tiger introduced me to this book titled, “Brick by Brick” by cartoonist Stephen McCranie. It was a comic about sustaining creativity as a creator / storyteller, where McCranie spoke of his journey as a developing artist. As someone who is still trying to run with things, this book gave me quite a few tips. One of which is probably one of the most difficult, yet foundationally important step one can take: FINDING YOUR ARTISTIC LINEAGE Note: This is not going to be me telling you what you should do, I’ll just be offering my point of view through my own experience doing the same thing. All creators are influenced by another party, be it a more established artist, works by a certain production company, or a story which touched them on a personal level. And these influences serve not only as foundation, but also sources of inspiration. When I learnt about this, I did my own searching and found an inkling of focus – wasn’t much but it was a good step. This was how I did mine: What do you like? Whose works do you follow? It starts with us – why do we create? What do we create? And who inspired us? What I did was to write a list of people whose works inspired me. In my case, it was a lot of authors of works which I loved reading – Suzanne Collins, Gillian Flynn, Koushun Takami, Ransom Riggs. Work backwards From there, a quick search on Google and a bit of background knowledge helps. If you’ve read your favourite author or artist extensively, you’ll be able to get an inkling of where they get their influence from. Here’s a lineage I have as an example: Ransom Riggs – influenced by -> Stephen King – influenced by -> Richard Matheson Explore
After that, you can start exploring! From a single author or artist, you now have a wider range of works to look at – more ideas, more inspiration. It’s a simple step, but it has helped me put together To-Read Lists and opened my reading repertoire to more contexts and ideas (*cough*Atwood*cough*), many of them unexpected. Try it on your own and see where this takes you. For more information on finding your artistic lineage, check out Brick by Brick by Stephen McCranie, or click here. I make no apologies for my love for paper planners – Self-Designed, Passion Planner, Kikki K., Bullet Journal system – they all intrigue me. However, since we started planning our trip to Japan, I came across this brand while searching for A5 20-Hole Punch devices: Hobonichi. While many friends who have gone to / are familiar with the land of stationery magic that is Japan knew about this brand, it wasn’t until I discovered it myself and the Tiger went, “I was wondering when you were going to find out about them,” that I got curious. I’ve been combining scheduling mechanics with some basic bullet journal techniques for the last year. The planner I was using worked well enough, but it was starting to get a little bulky, especially with the need to replace sheets or stick to weeklies in order to stay within the folder’s thickness. So after browsing the specifications of the Hobonichi Cousin, and being able to feel the paper and its heft for myself in that huge LoFT store in Shibuya, I was hooked. One of the best things I found out about the Hobonichi was not only its versatility (yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily calendar pages), but also its large community. Some use the diary as it’s meant to be used, some use it as a travel journal, and some use it as a sketch book. All of them got me motivated to join in the fun and do my own #Hobonichi365 on my Instagram. So here’s me giving you a glimpse of how I’ve set up my Hobonichi Cousin for this year: Yearly Index – Habit Tracking I got this idea from @christie_ingram, which I am incredibly grateful for because I’ve been cracking my head on how to include habit trackers into the Hobonichi itself. So many thanks and do check out her other ideas on christieingram.com. Monthly Calendar – Major Events, Holidays, and Dates Weekly Calendar – Penciling and Bookings There were already holidays included in the diary, albeit Japanese public holidays, so I took the opportunity to add our local holidays, including the events I’ve already been confirmed to be involved with. Likewise, I’m using the weekly calendar schedules as usual. Daily Pages – Daily BuJo Fixings Now comes the fun bit.
Taking my needs from my previous planner together, I’ve decided to track the following with my dailies:
And a few tweaks here and there. So that is all! You can take a look at my daily pages on my Instagram, and I’ll be posting some updates here as well. I’m excited, and I hope all of you are too! I have a confession to make – I think about writing more than actually doing the act itself. For the longest time, my worst habit was to write as little as I can get away with and hope for the best – only because I was not in the groove. Of course, this proved to be incredibly unsustainable if I wanted to produce work on a regular-enough basis so that there’s something to put out in the world.
This meant times where you had to buckle down – something I believe even the best of us have inertia against. Therefore, instead of forcing the words out after a few hours of staring at a blank screen, here are a few things I’ve been doing to keep at writing, or getting back into the groove, even on the dry days: CONSUME Read to reacquaint yourself with your love of the written word and turns of phrase. Listen to good fiction podcasts for dialogue and descriptions. Watch good films and TV serials for inspiration. To paraphrase Stephen King, to not read is to not write. We can only discern what’s “good” or what speaks to us if we consume the media we like to create. In our current circumstances, good stories are not confined to the written medium, so look out for stories you can relate to or are interested in. Who knows? Maybe you’ll pick something up. P/S – This is also useful in giving you some pointers on what to avoid as well. HACK YOUR IDEA BANK Remember those ideas you had over the course of the last few years? Did you manage to write them down? That’s your idea bank. I find it really useful to keep my notebook / journal of previous story ideas in the event of days where story ideas don’t flow. Even if you don’t go with any of the ideas you’ve written down in the past, it’s also quite a great exercise to flex some creative muscles and see if they get triggered reading your past thoughts. GET HELP There are two main ways I do this – collaboration and / or working side-by-side with other creators, which gives you that slight pressure of keeping up with your end of the project. The other way is what I call the Charsiew Space Tactic. A good friend of ours, Ben (a.k.a. the creator of the Charsiew Space universe), told this to one of our friends who kept asking, “How do you manage to put out so much stuff with a full time job?” His answer was, “Apply for a booth at the next indie festival and ask your sourced printer about the last date you’ll have to send you files over or else you’ll have nothing to sell to make your booth costs back during the event.” I’m not saying that this is one of the best ways to get yourself to work, but I’m not saying that it doesn’t work as well. (Shhh…) FINISHED, NOT PERFECT I feel this is probably the most important pointer I have both for other creators and with myself. Since I started participating in the National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) programme, I’ve learnt the value of having finished, instead of perfect work. We know of people who speak about wanting to put work out but never do in fear of criticism or that it’s not “perfect” enough. A blank page is more difficult to edit than a “crappy” piece of work – and I feel that having this in mind while I finish the last, painstakingly-written line for the day makes my writing session feel more productive. I can always go back to a piece for more edits. I can’t really do much with a blank piece. JUST WRITE ANYTHING Anything. Fan fiction, short lines, dialogue, chapter plans, story plans, just so you can get your muscle memory of the act of writing back. And you may be surprised with what you find during this period so why not? So as I leave all of you with this post, I hope these pointers helped in some way. I am, no doubt, still on this journey. So I’d also like to hear from all of you – what else would you recommend to boost your creative motivation? Leave it in the comments =). |
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