My Wondercon Experience - Saturday

Saturday is always the biggest day at any of these conventions, so I pulled out all the stops.  I had two volunteers: Laura and Rachel, who took care of the booth.  I also had two models who I had hired to walk around the front area in costume.  I did this because I had noticed that tons of photographers take pictures of cosplayers who look great.  I wanted to take advantage of this, and am I ever glad I did.  The costumes cost a couple hundred dollars, and so did the models, but they really grabbed attention.  They had just arrived and I had just given them the flyers to give out when there a line of photographers formed.  Before I left, they were literally mobbed by photographers as though they were celebrities.  I had intended for them just to give out business cards and/or flyers to select photographers when they felt it would be beneficial, but they went above and beyond, giving out flyers every time, and sometimes to non-photographers.  They got really excited about the characters and posed in character.  And they even posed with the books.  They were phenomenal, and I realized I had gotten my money’s worth.

To be clear, I didn’t not make a profit off of them.  Laura and Rachel were selling books upstairs, (far more than I sold all day Friday,) but the sales didn’t come close to the $400 I put into the models and their costumes.  But that wasn’t the point of Saturday or the convention in general.  It was to get attention, and I definitely got it.  At one point I passed someone who was talking about our models when we weren’t anywhere around them.  At another time I saw someone in a different part of the convention who asked if I was the one with the volcano.  People were getting to know who we were, and they were beginning to learn the name Relic Worlds.

I had also signed up to put on a game in the gaming area during the day.  This one was actually in the convention center, so taking the miniatures was much easier.  This once again got a lot of attention as people saw me moving the volcano, and they got to see the whole, six foot diorama set up.  The best part was that there was a slow moving line right next to the gaming area, and people kept gawking at it.  The game itself only had a few kids, but a bunch of people took flyers because they wanted to learn more.

Part way during the day we started telling people that they could have a free drink if they signed up for the mailing list, which went over well.  We had twice as many people signed up than completed the treasure hunt, so the mailing list grew.  We also figured out how the booth itself should look.  (It helped to have a volunteer who was a designer.)  I learned that the best look for me was to have all the books and flyers on one side of the table, a diorama on the other side of the table, the horizontal banner at the front of the table, and the two vertical banners of the books in the back, with the name tag the convention provides hanging on the wall between them.

And prominently displayed all on its own either in the middle, or on the far side, is the all-important mailing list.

This setup was one of the most important things I learned that day.  I also learned that I need to have a separate person to run a game if I do that, (which is a good idea because it spreads out my exposure.)  It’s also a worthwhile expenditure to have cosplay models who catch a lot of attention at the front.  But it’s important to not just have them in the outfits of your story, but rather a mixture of something established, (one was in the Princess Leia slave outfit and the other was in steampunk.)

Next week I’ll conclude this story with Sunday at Wondercon.