The SFWA Blog proudly announces “some of us are bucking the trend and going to Dragon*Con”. Oh, you rebels.
Several notable SFWAns will be in Atlanta. SFWA also advertises where its table will be, managed by SFWA Communications Director Jaym Gates, and links to Dragon*Con’s guest list and schedule.
The same post starts with a throwaway line, “While many SFWA members are at WorldCon in San Antonio this weekend….” that hints at the organization’s much larger presence there. It’s even holding an official meeting at the con on Saturday. But the SFWA Blog has never promoted its members’ participation at LSC3 in any way.
In fact, the SFWA blog has only linked to the LoneStarCon 3 site one time ever — in 2011 on the day San Antonio won the site selection vote.
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This is just evidence of the recent aspect of the field in which writers can come to it outside of the traditional fannish stepping-stones-from-fan-to-pro which used to be the dominant paradigm.
That would imply some lack of knowledge is the cause, which doesn’t make sense because, if nothing else, SFWA knows it is having a major meeting at LSC3, that there will be many members there, and quite a few SFWAns are up for Hugo Awards, any one of which are sufficient reason to do some organizational marketing. But there is nada.
Instead, there is SFWA’s overture to Dragon*Con.
I simply got the impression that they consider Worldcon too well-known to need promoting.
That says something about SFWA if they’ve decided there’s no need to promote one of their biggest turnouts of the year while they do need to publicize a connection with Dragon*Con. If the SFWA Blog had said nothing about either convention I wouldn’t have noticed.
Then, upon checking, I found the SFWA Blog had also ignored LSC3’s Hugo voting deadlines, something it tracked for several previous Worldcons. Made me wonder.