CSFF Blog Tour: Day -1

Tomorrow the blog tour will start up for The Legend of the Firefish by George Bryan Polivka. I'll be submitting my review tomorrow and probably blathering on the other two days. But there's something that occurred to me this past month that I wanted to share with my tourmates. Rather than dedicate one of the three days of the Firefish tour to it, I figured I'd post it a day early so anyone traipsing into my blog can see this and hopefully react.

I had a brainstorm the other day about marketing Christian speculative fiction. Obviously we are all hoping to call attention to this worthy field. The way I see it, we basically are trying to reach out to two groups:

1) Established Christian fiction readers

2) New Christian fiction readers, perhaps people who like sci-fi, fantasy, and the rest but are unaware that there is a Christian version of it.

My idea deals with how to reach that second contingent. There is a place where sci-fi and fantasy aficionados gather on a yearly basis, a place where the powerful are flocking to see and be seen, a Mecca of sorts for those who might appreciate a good speculative read.

I'm talking of this place:

That's right, I think the Christian speculative fiction genre should invade Comic-Con International!

Even if you're not a comic book geek at heart (or a closet comic book geek like me), I'm sure you've seen the press that Comic-Con has been getting lately. This is the place where Hollywood goes to premiere their big ticket projects like the upcoming Iron Man movie or the fourth installment of Indiana Jones. Apparently this past year, somewhere around 10,000 people crowded through the doors for one day.

Could you imagine if we could get a booth at Comic-Con? I'm not saying that all 10,000 would pass by our booth. Some may even give us the fish eye. But there might be a few people who would stop by and give this well-deserving genre a look-see. They may even buy some books. They may even become fans.

So what would we need for a booth? Well, off the top of my head:

1) Money. And lots of it unfortunately. According to this form, it costs $1,800 for a bare-minimum 10X10 booth. I don't know if that's per day or just one flat fee.

2) Swag. I've never been to Comic-Con before, but my brother-in-law is a veteran. He says that the way to get people to your booth is to give out free stuff. Posters, tote bags, that sort of thing. If we're going to attract any attention, we would need to be able to shout, "Free stuff over here!"

3) Books. We'd need a stack of books to sell to the convention goers. Probably not that many, but we would want to be able to sell whatever we could.

4) Volunteers. People would need to man the booth. Probably a few shifts of people. That way it's not just one person trapped in a 10X10 space for hours on end.

5) Authors. It'd be cool if authors would come to sign their books. They could talk to potential readers and that might help a little.

6) Booth babes. Well, maybe not...

Now granted, this might be a little ambitious, but maybe it's time we think a little out-of-the-box. Even if we connected with a few new readers, it could be the start of something good.

So what do you think?