Last Sunday, I drove up to San Francisco to attend the Independent Online Publishing Conference Webzine 2005 at the Swedish American Hall. Lulu (the online company I published my book Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks through) had a booth there, and invited local Lulu authors to come out and tell their story. Given that I have only good things to say about Lulu and that I had a wonderful experience publishing my first book through them there last year, I decided to go albeit my busy schedule.
Ah... there is something about San Francisco that is just fundamentally different from Los Angeles, and it's the independent, unique, down-to-earth people that I meet in the city. I attend many professional and technical conferences throughout the year throughout the nation, but this conference was definitely a bit different. You meet the funniest, the coolest and the most interesting people here in San Francisco, and you can feel literally feel the “independent mind” that vibrates in the city. It was a very relaxed and chilled down conference, with people mingling and talking about independent publishing, the hurdles, the difficulties and the success stories.
At any rate, I met up with What am I? Bugs author William Sawyers as well as Living in a Vertical Time author Brian Narelle at the Lulu booth and had wonderful conversations with them. We shared some of our experience publishing through Lulu, and I also got to talk to a few of the attendees of the conference, and got to praise Lulu a lot. :) Another cool thing is that I also got a chance to meet Michael Graziano from the Lulu team. It's kinda cool to meet the people behind the company, as I always wondered how that team is like, so he told me a bit about Lulu's background and how it operates. Ah well, a different kind of a conference for a chance.
PS: Can you tell that I love Lulu? :)