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This weekend, the Decatur Book Festival is taking place.  My experience of the festival started yesterday morning at 6:30 when I reported to the volunteer table to help with set up.  My primary task was to help unload cars for exhibitors in the pink zone (the area right in front of the current court house.)  Of course, at 6:30 in the morning, there weren’t many exhibitors dropping arriving.  So, I spent some time making sure there was a table and two chairs in each of the exhibitor tents.

When that was done, I stood around with the pink team waiting for cars with little pink slips to drive up.  When they came, the idea was that the volunteers would unload their cars and carry their stuff to their tents while they would go and park their cars and come back.  There were some snags at first but by the time the shift was done at 9:30, we had this moving pretty smoothly.

For my work, I got a Decatur Book Festival t-shirt and a free Chick-Fil-A sandwich.

The main panel that I was interested in attending at the festival was the one called “Young Ones To Watch” featuring John Scalzi, Cherie Priest, Tobias Buckell and Kevin J. Anderson.  I was interested in attending because I got free ebooks written by all of these authors, except Kevin J. Anderson, through the Tor.com promotion.

Here are some notes from the author panel:

• Cherie Priest says you’re more likely to win the lottery than to sell a novel from a blog.  (I think that may be an exaggeration, but point taken.)
• You can’t use your blog entirely for self promotion.  It will become boring.
• Which current author will have to most influence on authors twenty years from now?  Scott Westerfeld.
• Cherie Priest wants to prove that steampunk can be American.
• Current space opera is very self referential and requires readers to be very well read with the genre to understand it.  The books turn off new readers.
• John Scalzi has the mother-in-law test.  He wants to write books that his mother-in-law will enjoy.
• Strong female characters should not be exceptional.