Using Conventions to Sell Books

I went to Wondercon last weekend, and will be going to the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend.  I have a space at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society booth where I sell books alongside two or three other authors.  Conventions are an important tool for the independent author/publisher, but it’s an often misunderstood one.  I certainly had difficulty with it for a while.

I was very discouraged at the first few conventions I went to.  I had almost no sales at any of them.  I gave away some flyers and bookmarks, but the sales themselves didn’t come anywhere close to the amount I spent just to get there, let alone pay for parking, the booth space, the copies of the books, etc.  I was, quite frankly, angry, and felt ripped off.  I was especially disgusted when I heard the people who sold the most number of books only sold about eight or ten.  When you consider the fact that you’re only making about $5 profit per sale, not even taking tax into account, you can see that you’re not even going to make back the $75 you spent to get the table space, let alone everything else.

But then I stopped and considered my gains.  I had given out tons of information about my books, and I saw the number of visitors to my websites grow.  People were willing to give my free stuff a chance after the convention was done.  I then did a little self-experiment.  I walked around the convention considering what books I would buy.  I found myself falling into the same pattern as everyone else.  I was willing to consider buying the big flashy things, or the books with brands with which I was already familiar, such as Dune.  Independent books made me nervous.  I had enough money to buy just one or two books, and I was afraid to take a chance with new products.

I realized what hypocrite I was being, but then came to accept that everyone is going to feel this way.  There was a time when even Dune was new, and people slowly took a chance on that.  But likely they saw a bit about it somewhere for free.  Most people don’t want to spend money on something with which they’re unfamiliar.  They need samples.  That’s perfectly reasonable.

And so I determined that the conventions have two uses.  First, for the brands that are already familiar to people to sell to them and give them a chance to see the authors and others involved in the projects they love.  Two, to introduce new products to the public for free so they’ll start getting into it.

This makes promoting Relic Worlds relatively easy because it’s a series, but other books, which are more difficult, rather hard.

I’m going to go into more detail about how I’m promoting Relic Worlds on my Relic Worlds blog as there is a LOT to tell about.  But here I’ll basically say I’m branching out into every part of the convention I can, including the game section, cosplay, flyers, a treasure hunt, even the panels.  As for the more tricky one-offs, here’s what I’m doing.

First, at the booth I have something relevant to the book I’m selling.  This year it will be Two Gun Hart and The Great Heist since they’re related to each other.  There were a lot of newspaper articles about these two stories, so I’ll have blown-up versions of them at the booth along with some photographs to attract people’s attention.  Also, to attract attention, I have one sheet that says “Al Capone’s brother was Prohibition Agent.”  I’m hoping that alone brings people over.

I will be giving away bookmarks with Two Gun on one side and a list of all my books on the other side along with the Bandwagon website.  I’ll also have flyers to give out which tells about Two Gun on one side, and The Great Heist on the other.  Each of these will have QR codes on them that lead the reader directly to their pages on the Bandwagon site.  I debated with myself on this one, considering whether to have the QR code go to Amazon, or to the site.  I finally chose the site because all the options of buying the book are there, along with more information than I can tell at the booth.

Even though my assumption is that these are what people will really be picking up, I’ll still have copies of all the books there to sell.  I may also have a sheet with the prologue written as well.  It’s always good to be able to give away a chapter to people.  This can either be done by printing it out, or by giving away a QR code which takes the person to a website with the chapter.  The print-outs are better, but can get very expensive.

I’ll try to report on how it goes, but I’ve not been very good at keeping promises on this blog.