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| A Steampunk anthology. |
Hallo, folks!
I know: I'm late. Camp NaNoWriMo has mostly given me back my
soul (I still have the last several chapters and epilogue of Comedy of Rain to
complete), but I will be back on my every-15-days posting schedule now.
I had the wonderful opportunity recently to participate in
an online launch party as host, and with the authors' permission, I'd like to
talk about our behind-the-scenes preparation and experience.
My good friend, Virginia Marybury, asked me two months ago
if I would be willing to host the Facebook launch party for The Faraday Cage anthology, which she had
been asked to write for by author/editor Steve Turnbull.
I'll admit: I was nervous. I'm glad I was asked two
months ahead of time, because it took me the better part of a month to build up
my courage. I was being asked to host someone else's launch party. Something I
had never done before. No easy feat when I'd only participated in a single
previous launch party, and that was as a member of the audience.
But I'm glad I decided to accept the challenge of hosting.
It was a wonderful experience, and Steve and the others were great
to work with.
We led up to the event with an "exponential
growth" of communication, and since
we had over a month to plan (and also because I was intensely focused on Camp
NaNo), Steve and I played a bit of Facebook tag, sharing pre-planning ideas.
One thing I want to make clear here: I was completely open
and honest with Steve from the get-go about my lack of experience with hosting
such an event, and he assured me right back that we'd all be in it together
because none of them had been on the host side of a launch party before,
either. That openness made for a great behind-the-scenes development team, as
everyone was involved in preparing for the launch.
Steve set up a private organization group on Facebook for
myself and the authors, and as we got closer to the event and everyone had a
better idea for their schedules, we made preparations accordingly. Katy O'Dowd
knew for certain that she wouldn't be available for the launch, so she scripted
some Q&As for us to have on hand in her stead. I'm so grateful she did
this, as it made us think to have the other authors script Q&As, too (turns
out we needed it, as three of the five were unable to make the launch in the
end, so "Yay!" for building a script).
Now, before I ever got involved, Steve and the others had
everything for their anthology worked out – including a magnificent piece of cover
art for the book, as well as custom interior black and whites for each author's
story. Those black and whites came in handy: since I wanted to take the time to
spotlight each author, I was able to make those spotlights more visible during
the event by having each paired with its applicable artwork. Add to it that the
Q&As were posted for each particular author under their spotlight, and we
were able to keep the event posts condensed, clean cut, and organized.
Something I did once we had everything collected for the
trivia, spotlights (story title, author, short-form blurb, and 1-sentence
author bio), and Q&As was put it all together in a timetable. I composed an
event kickoff note, then staggered events on my timeline by 5-minute
increments. Including two reminders about how trivia winners would be announced
and what prizes were available, I was only able to cover an hour and a half of
our two-hour event. But that was okay. The last 30 minutes gave us a buffer
window in case we got busy or had hiccups (miraculously, no real hiccups aside
from Facebook switching Steve and me back to our private account names instead
of our author accounts a couple of times), and with the way we got busy, that
1.5-hour schedule stretched the entirety of our party. Steve then, of course,
closed us out with Thank Yous and winner announcements.
Oh, and before I forget: about 15 minutes prior to kickoff,
we shared the event page to several large Indie Author groups on Facebook to
maximize exposure. There were several participants who none of us recognized,
and I can only attribute them to those Indie Author groups. Not bad for what
was a last-minute decision in the hour leading up to launch!
If all of that seems disorganized, then rightfully so. We
were flying by the seat of our pants with limited experience, but we pulled it
off through great communication via a behind-the-scenes group chat so that we
could navigate in real time what we were posting next. As such, I'd like to now
streamline this for the bullet-point folks who would prefer to see our practice
put into a practical model form:
