Welcome to the limited series return of BETWEEN THE PAGES, running Mondays and Wednesdays now through mid-December 2020! Dubbed BETWEEN THE PAGES: FINDING MY VOICE, follow Shannon’s journey as she learned and grew to become more of a public speaker, and how she’s still learning today! Today is Installment 12, “Market Your Own Textbooks!”.
I did complete GARDNER’S GUIDE TO WRITING AND PRODUCING ANIMATION in one year, actually turning it in and doing the final edits while attending WorldCon – a major Science Fiction and Fantasy convention – that year in Anaheim (still the only WorldCon I’ve attended up to now). They’d already sent me a contract to do a follow up called GARDNER’S GUIDE TO PITCHING AND SELLING ANIMATION, which I completed but they apparently only issued in PDF form, I never saw it in print, and many resources show me sharing co-credit with Garth Gardner as author. To my knowledge, GGC Inc. is no longer in the business of creating books.
For all the struggles, I still meet people to this day who tell me they read and were inspired by GARDNER’S GUIDE TO WRITING AND PRODUCING ANIMATION, which means my goals were accomplished in accepting the assignment. When I turned it in, I thought that would be the end of it and that the publisher would market the textbook to academia.
Then I found out they expected me to do all the marketing myself, just like any fiction text.
I wasn’t prepared for that, mentally or otherwise.
So, I turned to the only world I’d known up to this point to promoting animated product and productions – the convention circuit – and found myself in front of the microphone again.
The next several installments will detail experiences promoting my book at various conferences and conventions in the year that followed, from the small scale to the extremely large scale.