Avatar photoSteven Savage

About Fan To Pro

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Fan To Pro is a blog about how people can apply their fannish and geeky interests to their jobs and careers. Our goal is to help people find out how to do what they love not just on the side, but every day of their lives!

To that end this blog focuses on:

  • Reporting, commenting on, and analyzing on the geeky and fannish career news you need to stay aware of.
  • Providing help to geek career seekers with advice, exercises, and techniques.
  • Reviewing books, websites, and other useful resources that you need.
  • Keeping you up to date on career trends, pitfalls.
  • Finding resources that you need in your career.
  • The occasional heartfelt, therapeutic rants we all need to hear.

The Site Contributors

Convention Spotlight: Tigercon!

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Looking for other ways to add professional and career elements to your convention?  I've been contacting a few conventions to find out just what they're doing in that regard.

Tigercon, an event in Towson, Maryland (north of Baltimore), is a friendly university convention that had two neat additions you may want to use for your own convention:

First, if you want some pro guests, see about getting patronage from a larger convention to help set you up.  You may easily make some contacts or get some new ideas – and even find if you have some local or other guests that may be interested in helping out.

Secondly, keep cultural education in mind especially if you're, say, an anime convention.  People have interests in learning about other cultures, it helps add to the overall feel if you want to add more educational tracks, and you can often get help from local establishments, universities, and cultural centers.

Thanks to the folks at Tigercon – and if you're in the area, check it out!

-Steven Savage

Facebook and distribution

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Idle speculation time here.

With Facebook pretty much dominating social media, and having obvious gaming aspirations, I began to wonder what else Facebook can deliver.  Once I began theorizing, I really began to wonder more.

Facebook could actually be useful as a way to distribute artistic (comic and manga) and written fiction.  Easy for alerts, easy to notify people it's ready, incredibly easy to get more fans to buy into it.  Nice, public distribution that makes people very aware of what their friends are doing and reading.

Facebook could be an excellent distribution platform – read the manga there, discuss it with your friends, etc.  There's already a lot of this in place now – and the widget creation could let OTHER companies do it while Facebook enjoys the piggybacking and additional attention (and possibly cash).

As its my firm belief community building is a big part of success for media efforts, especially new ones, Facebook is a logical place to try or do some of it.  You want to build and maintain an audience – that's one of the ways to do it very fast (with some limits).  A retained, happy, engaged audience buys more of your stuff when it comes down to it, and is more likely to want to see you at a con or invite you to one.

Do I think this is where media distribution is going?  No.  Part part of it doubtlessly will try, far more than is being done now.  I await seeing the results.

– Steven Savage