CSSF Tour of the Lost Genre Guild: Reflections

It was a busy 3 last days in 2009 for the tour members of the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour as they featured the Lost Genre Guild. We at the LGG would like to thank the CSFF bloggers for their time and efforts!

Some stats and reflections:

• 37 bloggers participated in the Lost Genre Guild tour with 40+ posts! Grace did a great job of noting some memorable posts earlier in the week and I'd like to give a special shout-out to a couple of people:

Make sure to read Stephen Rice's 3 days of posts. He makes good use of his characters to provide information, good laughs and truths.

Timothy Hicks' posts give some great insight into the guild as he interviewed Frank Creed.

Two guild members, Karina Fabian and Terri Main deserve special attention. Karina interviewed a few guild members on what the LGG means to them and Terri wrote a beautiful essay about the impact of the LGG on her writing life.

And finally, a nod D.G.D. Davidson's direction for gathering the most interesting responses that veered off into discussions of speculative fiction and even romance!

• The LGG Blog visits were up ~60% from the previous week.
• The Lost Genre Guild site hits doubled over the tour days (up to ~1300 hits)
• 21 new members have joined the LGG in the past 30 days and we've received 10 new requests since the beginning of the tour.
• The LGG now has 143 members.

Some Reflections:

• We received some very complimentary posts and thank people for promoting the guild and its goals. While promoting the guild, please remember y'all are promoting the entire industry of Speculative fiction respectful of a Christian worldview!
• We received great feedback about our site, even though lostgenreguild.com is NOT the whole of the guild's raison d'etre.
• Some criticism we received about the website was very useful and constructive; others not so much.

I am afraid that the LGG website is not about glitz and fancy stuff—it is simple and yes, amateur (just like we are!). We want to disseminate information, we want our pages to load quickly. CNN and Yahoo!, for example, are Web 1.0 AND are user-friendly.

However there are some really good ideas that we will implement (or have implemented):

• dead link from site to Mentors bulletin board (fixed! and thanks for pointing this out)
• a page with a range of graphic buttons for others to use to promote the guildthe LGG shield is out of sync with the overall look of the site (yes, it is, and it is a matter of debate about what to do about it since there is sentimental value attached to it)
• fonts in the LGG catalogue are often difficult to read (thank you to Robert Treskillard for the last 3)
• embed the blog in the website so that the navigation bar links directly to the blog html site description tips for better browser presence (Phyllis Wheeler, thank you for this idea; Phyllis even gave us an example of a good description for the site!)
• update the speculative fiction subgenre list (as a result of Rebecca Miller's post) mission statements on both the LGG site and Guild Review that makes it clear that the LGG is not an elitist organization—that we support ALL Christian spec-fic no matter who the publisher is (thanks to posts made by Rebecca Miller, Jason Joyner, and more! obviously we haven't been clear about our mission).

And, that's all folks! All Christian spec-fic writers, published or unpublished, thank you for helping promote the genre.

cyn