Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

May 8, 2004

Saturday 17th April - the convention sessions

Filed in BX Convention 2004, Book Crossing

Saturday 17th April

Morning conference

I woke up anything other than bright and early. Tzurriz was about to meet others for breakfast; I was too late, having actually slept, but since I was still stuffed from the previous night’s cheese adventures I wasn’t terribly upset about that. I skipped breakfast, and headed off downstairs. We had a conference room outside which were tables full of books and
goodies, t-shirts for sale (I bought one, they were exquisite), and a display about Book Crossing and Geocaching from nyisutter.

That was a lot of books!

When I went in some complete strangers waved me over, and thus we became friends. :-) I got to meet independencemo and portias, and very nice they both were too. They had come over from the Kansas side of Missouri for the convention. We chatted until nine, when the first festivities began. 4Libros, feeling a bit nervous, gave us a talk on release techniques. It was geared towards question-and-answer, but she shared her thoughts and showed us what she did to prepare books: a heck of a lot more than I do, but one can’t argue with success: she has a great catch rate.

Then Ron came on, to talk about Book Crossing. He had a nice presentation with Far Side cartoons. Anyone who uses Far Side cartoons can’t be a bad person. We were given a timeline for Book Crossing, and were amazed at how far it’s come along. His enthusiasm and love of the project shone through, and yet it’s at a stage now where it must be supported or get into a lot of trouble. Salient facts:

Ron is the dreamer, Bruce is the tech/implementer, and Heather singlehandedly runs the supply store, which is a problem in terms of storage space, stress from stroppy Book Crossers (”got my order wrong! waaaah!”) and sheer overload. Along with Ron’s wife, who could not make it this weekend, that makes four people - count them, four! - running the huge enterprise. (They just hired a programmer/webmaster, Dan, whom they can’t really afford.)
Only about five thousand Book Crossers have Wings.
The site costs tens of thousands of dollars a MONTH to run. The number quoted would be enough to pay my bills and food and gasoline and have some left over for fun…for a year. Over half of that is the huge bandwidth we generate. (This wasn’t a terrible surprise to me - I knew it would run way up high.)
None of the founders have drawn a wage yet. They are heavily invested in the site, but they’re not profiting or even breaking even.

They ended the session with a brainstorm on how to make money. They had some ideas which made us scratch our heads a bit. For one, they wanted to do a separate non-profit site for authors who whine about BX taking away their profits. Um. The thing about non-profits is that you can’t donate to businesses in that way (an author is a business, in a way). You could donate to a charity designated by the author, but not to the author. The idea was that readers would contribute a buck or two to the author who registered there if they read his/her book and liked it. We noted that if the BX team was really so overloaded - and we believed that they were - then surely it was not a good idea to start something new like this, but to concentrate on leveraging the existing members for their support?

Someone mentioned about asking authors to donate signed copies of books for auction. The BX team said they had better get that started. I had to bite down on my tongue to not speak. When I investigated competitions for promoting Rhaeva, on Book Crossing (some will remember these and some will not), they suggested that I send a signed copy for auction. I did. There was never any acknowledgement of its arrival, nor was there any response to my follow-up. I don’t know if it arrived, or if they rejected it, or what. But that is one of the few times I have ever felt disappointed in Book Crossing, and I think they need to concentrate on the resources they already have instead of what might be.

There was another suggestion to get round the problem of new users coming to the site and thinking that it meant “Yay! I’m going to get free books!” This involved a kind of points-based barter system. This went down like a “lead turd in a punchbowl” (Shendoah, you’ll never live that one down). I couldn’t think of any way to make it work, though I can
understand why they thought it was a good idea.

That is my remembrance of that session. And let’s not forget the basic idea for Book Crossing. There is/was a site where one would tag a disposable camera, leave it somewhere, and you could take a picture and pass it on, then send it back to the site. Ron came across that and immediately knew he had to do something along those lines. After rejecting Garden Tool Crossing and Kitchen Utensil Crossing (Skillet Crossing), he came up with books. And here we are. But Skillet Crossing may have been laugh of the weekend.

At some point there was a nice break with juice and cookies and stuff.

After that Rich Shapero came on to talk about his book. Ron and Rich took separate armchairs on a stage, and did a kind of informal chat/interview. It felt a bit like Ebert and Roepert, the film reviewers. Rich talked about his inspiration for the book, why he chose Book Crossing, and what the book was about. I had not yet received a copy, but found the chat interesting and at times amusing. He genuinely seemed to want to get feedback for the book, and there was no sense of us being ripped off, which for some reason others had decided was why he was giving us access to thousands of free copies (sigh).

He explained that he had indeed set up his own publishing company, and why. Those reasons resonated with me; I am not of the school of thought that self-published equals bad: that’s a narrow and inaccurate view. The conventional publishing industry is interested in big profits and is quite conservative, and good books slip through because they don’t have the
potential to make enough profit. As a participant in the very professional self-publishing community, I could only agree with his reasons.

Some others were being interviewed by a newspaper through this, and a lady from the radio station came to record the sessions. Rich had his own TV crew there as well. Found out that he was from San Francisco.

At the end, Rich’s publicist told us about the release challenge, which is supposed to be in May, and showed us the cool new copies of the book - the first ones ever to have a BCID printed inside the front cover! And I got a copy, at last.

Then it was lunchtime. They put out a wonderful buffet spread for us: it was really very impressive. Salads and platters and stuff like that. Ron came to join us and was two people away; Bruce was two people away in the other direction. I was drowned by noise from our table and the tables behind me and couldn’t hear a word that either of them was saying, nor
concentrate on any one conversation. Like I said, bad seating karma. ;-)