Last weekend I did my first face-to-face author event since Supanova back in 2017… and honestly, I didn’t realise how much I needed it.
I was invited along by my mate Max, who had a stall for his children’s book series, The Minecraft Hero Pig. If you’ve got kids around 6–10 years old, I highly recommend them. My son owns the first three books and absolutely loves them.
Max had way more space than he needed and generously invited me to come along and sell some books of my own. Which led to a slightly chaotic last-minute decision…
“Why not launch The Mountain’s Shattered Heart at CollectFest?”
So began the mad scramble to finish typesetting, finalise the cover, and pray Amazon delivered the books on time.
Somehow… everything came together.
And the reaction to Miner’s Quest completely caught me off guard.
The moment people saw the cover, they gravitated toward it. Conversations about the book regularly turned into sales, which honestly gave me a massive confidence boost. Writing can be such an isolated thing. Most of the time you’re sitting alone in a room, hoping the story in your head will resonate with someone else once it finally escapes into the world.
Seeing people genuinely excited about the book reminded me why I love storytelling in the first place.
One thing that really surprised me was how many women were excited about both Miner’s Quest and LitRPG in general. Ever since I started publishing in LitRPG back in 2019, there’s always been this assumption that the audience is overwhelmingly male. After this weekend, I’m not convinced that’s true anymore.
The other surprising thing? Almost everyone who bought a book wanted to follow my Instagram. That’s never really happened to me before, so I’m quietly grateful I’ve been making more effort to post there lately. But this is the kind of nonsense that ends up over there.
CollectFest itself was mainly centred around Pokémon cards, so I spent the day surrounded by collectors, vendors, and some truly wild amounts of money changing hands. I even got to meet The Aussie Pokémon Noobs, whose YouTube channel I enjoy watching.
At one point I looked around the room and thought… “Am I in the wrong business? Some of these stalls look like they’re making my yearly salary in a single day.”
But no.
I’m a storyteller.
That’s the thing I love. That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
And after this weekend, I think I want to do a lot more events like this.
Author’s Note: this post was first posted over on my Patreon, free for members! If you want my content before anyone else, come on over and join for free!
Matthew J. Barbeler 