Wil Wheaton via Eventful Demand

Brian Dear of Eventful writes: "Thought you guys might be interested to know that an O'Reilly author is the first "performer" in Eventful Demand to schedule a real live event based on the "demands" from fans. The author? Wil Wheaton, but of course :-) We've had over 6000 people sign up for demands in the two months since launching at ETech. Over 2700 people have signed up for Wil Wheaton alone, demanding him in 135 cities worldwide. Lately, Wil's been agreeing to some of the demands, indicating to the fans that they've reached 'critical mass'."

Brian continued:

The first Wil event to be scheduled is, interestingly, going to happen at a bookstore -- Booksmith in Brookline, MA, on July 2nd. Over 200 people have signed up for it so far, without any media coverage (I suspect there will be some and as a result more than 200 will attend). The bookstore is planning to move the crowd across the street to a theatre where there's more room. Amazingly, the bookstore had nothing to do with putting on this event -- this was purely fan-driven. But I'm sure they're happy to have the traffic. You might wanna encourage 'em to have a bunch of "Just a Geek" copies on hand. Here's a link to this Boston-area demand for Wheaton.

This is the first of what we hope to be thousands of events that come about purely due to grassroots demand and local efforts to petition the desired author, musician, etc., to come to a certain town and do an interview, performance, signing, etc.

Another interesting thing: once the Boston-area event was announced, fans in other cities have gotten more competitive, doubling their efforts to get the word out and trying to convince Wil that their town offers more than the other towns. We've got cities competing with each other for events! I love it.

One thing I'd love to see is adoption of Eventful Demand by publishers: one idea would be to include a flyer in each sold book saying, "If you like this author and would like to hear them speak and sign books in your town or at your company, join or start an Eventful Demand and make it happen!" There are a bunch of O'Reilly authors I'd love to see speak in San Diego, for instance.

Including a flyer isn't a cheap option and even if it were free, would take time to propagate out to the millions of books in the channel. However, I love the idea of Eventful Demand for author events, and will pass this idea along to our marketing team. And by this posting, I'm encouraging the readers of this blog to go give Eventful Demand a try. If you want to hear from one of our authors, go start an eventful demand for that person or topic. User groups in particular could use this mechanism to recruit visiting authors. (Marsee take notice!)