#AprilFeelsDay2020 Thoughts and Feelings
We did it! We organized and broadcast our first online version of April Feels Day! Whew!
If you’re familiar with #RomanceClass at all, you’d know that a lot of what we do happens online anyway. So the two annual in-person events (April Feels Day and Feels Fest in October) are the rare times when we invite about a hundred people to hang out and celebrate the books together. While tiring, I love our events, I love them lots, and would not take away from what we enjoyed and learned from those! However I want to acknowledge the interesting things we now had access to, because we took our event online.
The full video is still up at twitch.tv/romanceclass, and I broke down the program with direct links to the video at certain points in this Twitter thread.
Anyway. Cool things:
No venue rental expense.
We can replay the online broadcast — comments in that chatroom included.
Seven authors got to launch their books in the middle of enhanced community quarantine.
Eight actors/performers got to be part of the program, and still be compensated for their participation.
Readers who haven’t been able to attend an event because of location finally had an option. And the video remaining up means people from anywhere (with internet access) can still watch it.
Over 200 people dropped by the stream when it was live. That is more people than we normally even anticipate when looking for venues.
We have all sorts of data, like unique viewers, peak periods, how long people stayed to watch.
Speaking for myself here but: I felt the love and support from everyone, even as I was home, and everyone else was home. And I don’t just mean the people who typed in the chat room and tagged me on Twitter and posted a selfie. This kind of event shows an organizer like me how people show up, in other ways, and maybe quietly, but they’re there. Thank you. (Eventually if you want to say hi you can do that!)
There are many conversations happening right now over what the future of publishing will look like, and I don’t mean for us to take away that it will now be this. This, actually, should have been an option we were offering people all along, concurrently with events that were held in Manila. If we continue to do this, it’s just us catching up and serving an entire set of people who wanted to try this out but didn’t have access to it. I’m going to think of this as we plan more events for the community.
I mean we totally miss actually being in the same space together and look forward to being able to do that again. Safely. But what we found here is valuable too. Or maybe, again, it’s because we did it for readers and fellow authors, for us, and when we focus on that, things really do have value. Thank you.
At the beginning of every event I do a quick introduction to #RomanceClass and what the event is for. Here’s that same thing (but a little different) because it’s for the 2020 online event:
And here are the end credits for the broadcast. The stream was directed by Miles Tan.
You can watch the full video at twitch.tv/romanceclass, and order print editions (in the Philippines) at kilig.pub/kiosk. For digital editions, the books are available worldwide, get the list of links here at romanceclassbooks.com.
