I recently spoke to one of the founders of the start-up togather.com -- he's an sf author who was disappointed when he had some poorly attended readings, realized this was a common problem, and decided to see if he could create a new kind of venue. The idea is to create in-person or online meetups with authors where there's some level of audience committed in advance to attend and/or buy a book. He felt their best events were ones in which the author did a reading or signing and Q & A and all the attendees already had the book and had read it. (Their system can facilitate book sales in advance).
I think it's an interesting idea, but I was disappointed to note that aside from Tobias Buckell, who first brought my attention to the site with some posts on his blog, the (relatively small) set of sf authors they have signed up so far are all white, and most of them are male. I would love to see that change.
Go to http://www.togather.com/authors to see what I mean.
The site is in Beta right now, so I'm not sure how rapidly they are taking on new authors, but I wanted to bring it to wider attention in case folks here are interested in trying it as an additional way to promote your work and meet your fans. I'd be curious to see if sf conventions could pair up with Togather to try to improve attendance and other planning for readings at cons. Andrew was open to that idea.
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