Home » Readers, Authors, Book Covers & BINGO!

Readers, Authors, Book Covers & BINGO!

This conference we’re hosting a Readers’ Event, Book Bingo. The cards are beautiful, and have required the dedication of one volunteer and oodles of hours of hard work. Why? Because to make sure that there aren’t several winners, the cards have to be “different,” from each other in a mathematical way.

Think about that for just one second – this is a writers’ conference. The people putting it on are all writers. Generally speaking, writers aren’t “math people.” This card required math and graphic skills. My head swims just thinking about it.

Where did Bingo come from anyway? Italy. Yep, Bingo as played in America, traces its roots back to Lo Guiocco del Lotto d’Italia or the Italian National Lottery. The Italian National Lottery began in 1530 and has been held at weekly intervals almost continuously. Although some people, trace it to Mexico and a game called La Lotteria played around the 1830s.

The Italian version traveled throughout Europe as a way for governments to raise revenue – not much different from our current state-sanctioned lotteries, like Super Lotto, Mega Millions and Power Ball – and was finally brought to America by a Carnival worker who ran across a game at a carnival in Germany, and thought it would make a good tent or carnival game in America.

In 1929, Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival in Jacksonville, Georgia. He’d started his own toy company right before the stock market crashed and America entered the Great Depression. It became BINGO when one of his friends during a test run accidentally shouted out, “BINGO!” rather than Beano when she won. Thanks to that lucky stop, Lowe Bingo saved the company.

It was a priest from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania area, who needed more cards than the home game could supply that brought BINGO as we know it today into being. Mr. Lowe found a professor of mathematics, Carl Leffler, who created 6,000 new Bingo cards with non-repeating number groups. Each card creation made it more difficult to create the next because it couldn’t repeat any of the prior cards, and Professor Leffler didn’t have a computer to help. It almost makes creating Goal, Motivation and Conflict seem easy.

We won’t have 6,000 cards, and I know that our very own Cami Brite is grateful for it. She’s spent 60 hours creating the cards for the California Readin’ event. If you see her at the conference, remember to bow down to her to thank her. We wouldn’t have the fabulous BINGO cards without her talents and her intelligence.

There are still some tickets left for the reader event, but they are going fast. While the book signing after the event is open to the public, every reader will have wished they’d been at the reader event to sit with their favorite authors, and more importantly to play Book Cover Bingo with other readers for fun and prizes.

Saturday Book Bingo with Authors – Click for more info – TICKET REQUIRED

Saturday Book Signing with Authors – Click for more info – FREE


Cami Brite grew up with a camera in one hand. Maybe it’s because she wore glasses from an early age and was comfortable with lenses. In her other hand, there was usually a book. So it makes sense that her road led to the marriage of her two favorite things: images and books.

At Brite Designs, she loves using her photography background and visual structure training to create eye-catching book covers and graphics for authors. As a lifelong reader who’s seen and critiqued her fair share of book covers, she’s particularly excited about helping authors create quality book covers that get noticed.

Cami is currently writing a contemporary romance and co-authoring a young adult series when not working at her day job or busy with Brite Designs. She also volunteers at her local RWA chapter because helping others makes us better humans. When not working, writing, or reading, she enjoys travel, photography, movies, and the occasional PS3 binge. She also lacks sleep. Since she doesn’t drink coffee, feel free to pity her.

You can find Cami online at her website or Brite Designs where she blogs every other Tuesday…or irregularly when extremely busy.


Maria Powers grew up in Southern California. She graduated with a degree in English and promptly entered the Business world. By day she works in Real Estate wrangling contracts and agreements, and by night she writes kick ass heroines and tough heroes with sensitive hearts ready to be tamed by the girl next door or beaten into submission by the witch on the corner, whatever works. Maria’s current work in progress is a Paranormal Romance series set in the San Gabriel Valley. The first book in the series, Coyote Walks, was a finalist in the Golden Heart® contest in 2015. She also writes under a nom de plume in erotica. Her first novella in this genre was self-published in July 2015. She’s currently working on a series of novellas set in the same world.

She is the blog master for the California Dreamin’ Writers Conference, and the 2017 President of the Los Angeles Romance Authors.