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Book Expo America 2009 was a BLAST! It is quite an amazing thing to go into an airplane-hangar-sized conference hall, and be surrounded by others from your own world of writing and publishing. I met countless authors and got a stack of books (including an advance copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, a signed copy of the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and loads more).

My book signing for The Farfield Curse started at 11:00 AM, and there was already a short line formed. Once the time hit, people began to come from everywhere, and the signing didn’t really stop! There were so many people, we actually ran out of books, so that by the time the signing was over I simply couldn’t sign any more because there were none left to hand out. Hopefully this is a good sign for how it will do in stores

I was interviewed for Borders Media by the one and only Pel from the Twilight Lexicon. It was a bit odd since it was my first film interview, and I had never been in a studio set up like it. There were five cameras, all set up at different angles, and they wired me up with a microphone and had lighting hanging all around. I also had to get film makeup put on — a first for me, and a bit itchy (it had to be explained to me that you actually have to wash it off afterward, ha ha). After BEA we headed over to Books Of Wonder, where I saw Tiger Beat play. Tiger Beat is a rock band entirely made of YA authors, with my editor Daniel Ehrenhaft on lead guitar and Libba Bray doing vocals. YES they were very good.

Even more exciting was the nearly-half-page article about me, TwilightGuy.com and my Twitter/Youtube stuff in Publishers Weekly. As with the opening of pre-orders and the signing of Brandon Dorman, publishers generally tell their authors nothing until after we’ve read about it in the papers: I learned via the article that Bran Hambric will have front-of-store placement at Borders bookstore and a 75,000 copy first printing! There are no extra zeroes in that number. It was easily 4 times what I was expecting!

Here are some photos from the event (special thanks to my friend Becka for taking them!)

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Posted in About Me, Bran Hambric, Photos, Videos
Tags: BEA, Book Expo America, Book Signing, Borders, Bran Hambric, Maureen Johnson, Publishers Weekly, Twilight Lexicon

One of the many tribulations that plague a new and relatively unknown author is having your title constantly misspelled . I cannot even count the times people have called my book:

Brandon Hambric: The Farfield Curse

Bran Hambrick: The Fairfield Curse

Brian Hamric: The Farefeld Curses

to the point that I now just laugh when I see a new variation and add it to my growing list. I, obviously, am at fault for picking both a character name and a title that can be a hundred different words depending on how it is pronounced. Woe to me if I do a radio interview and tell people to go to BranHambric.com (for this reason, I also got TheFarfieldCurse.com, which is slightly easier to spell correctly).

Not only that, but my uncommonly-spelled name has doomed me to get the Caleb Nation equivalents on every site (AKA, CalebNation.com, Youtube.com/CalebNation, Twitter.com/CalebNation) in an attempt to ward off future squatters. Snapping up every Caleb Nation site was prompted by my research on who owns StephanieMeyer.com (the more common spelling of Stephenie Meyer’s name, whose real site is StephenieMeyer.com). Stephenie does not own it, unfortunately. A company does, and is demanding $4,695,200 for it. CalebNation.com costs me $10 a year. I think it’s worth the security

Another woe of having a book title made of obscure words is with bookstore search engines. Amazon.com, while being quite gracious in putting my book on the rankings (the highest we got was #85 in the 9-12 list, which merited a BlogTV party of course) has gotten me confused with Some Other Author who has written Some Other Book. Recent searches for Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse rendered these results at random times:

Maybe if Bran was a Hobbit.

Bran’s long-lost, super-smart cousin.

I Twittered about these a few days ago, and thankfully we all had a glorious laugh at the Amazon’s Search Monkey’s expense. Then, Laura at the Twilight Lexicon came up with something that might help Amazon’s failmonkeys: a Branagram.

I laughed so hard (funnier still: this post will appear on my Amazon.com page for Bran Hambric; perhaps they will notice it there?).

Still, there are even more advantages to having an uncommonly-spelled name. For some reason I’ve always liked that my name is spelled with a K instead of a C, despite the obvious wonders the initials CAN might have done for me if I was to become a motivational speaker. My uncommonly spelled name has served quite well over the past few years, including this glorious, one-line review from a blog:

“The author’s name is Kaleb Nation – I will buy it just for that!”

which makes all the misspellings and search-engine-fails completely worth it

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Posted in Bran Hambric, Twilight
Tags: Amazon.com, Bran Hambric, Twilight Lexicon