SCASL conference update

Overall, I consider this is a successful event and we are planning on being at next year's event as well, which is on the calendar for March 6 through the 8. It will be held in Columbia and Sybil has already booked our hotels. Sarah and I will be staying at the Hampton Inn Vista and Sybil will be staying at the Embassy Suites (Sybil's husband works for the Hilton group of hotels, so she can discounted rooms for events like this - $29 or $39/night - yeah - who wouldn't take advantage of booking rooms a year in advance?).

I sold ten copies of State of Successes and two copies of Finally Home and maybe eight or ten bookworms. I did sell one extra chance for the afghan drawing in addition to the chances I gave away with each book sale. I also talked about the plan of going interactive ebook for the state series and the librarians all think this is a great idea.

Basically this is in the baby stage but Heather and I have talked about it and she is in the process of developing the prototype for the interactive ebooks. I'm not sure how much we would sell the apps or whatever we come up with for the ebook program for and not sure how we will market it but all that will happen as things develop.

We were right next to the Scholastic booth and they were a busy booth because the librarians were using all their "Scholastic bucks" to add new books to their libraries. Sybil came up with a similar idea for our group, "SC Author Connection", to help get us in the schools around the state of SC. We talked with the ladies in the Scholastic booth and they suggested that we try to get in the schools at the same time that Scholastic book fairs were occurring and that way we would feed off each other, and we can offer them something that Scholastic can't - authors to do book signings and presentations/workshops because the authors through Scholastic are very expensive and schools can't pay for them (at $5000/event, I guess that's a bit much). So we are going to start recruiting a few more authors to join our group and participate in book fairs. This will be a growth over the next year and we hope to build up to a group of ten authors from different parts of the state so that we would be available everywhere. We are going to create a flyer/order form and a brochure for our group to be sent to the schools in advance.

Sybil had great sales (last I heard was over 35, and could have been close to 40) and Sarah had pretty decent sales (I didn't ask her what her final count was but it seems she sold over 20 books over the course of the three days). I was the one who sold the least amount but I think in the long run the contacts and school visits will be worth it.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted on what takes place with the SC Author Connection and where the JGDS series goes. Stay tuned - Ma America :)