My Wondercon Experience - Sunday

Sunday is known as the dead day at any convention, but it’s a very overlooked day.  This is actually the day that people are most likely to buy.  The ones who are there for the whole convention spent Friday looking around, then Saturday making the big purchases from major companies.  Then Sunday is the day they’re buying everything else that they’ve been taking a look at.

That’s not exactly the way it worked for me.  I made a few sales on Sunday, but Saturday morning was the big one.  And on Saturday afternoon someone bought the whole series.  However, Sunday was the day when more people picked up the flyers and other things, and wanted to take it home to look at it.  So it’s a great networking day.

It’s also a good day to network with other vendors at the convention.  Since it’s the day the convention is wrapping up, they’re less busy.  I managed to talk with some people at the Nerdist, and they took a copy of one of the Relic Worlds books to consider it for a story or a review.  One of the people from Joss Whedon’s company came over and took a look at Relic Worlds.  He seemed to be considering something, but I don’t know what.

And I had a great personal moment as I reconnected with Amber Benson.  She had been the first person I cast in my project The American Game in 1996 when I was first trying to make it into a movie.  I brought her a copy of the book.  She was signing copies of her book, but I told her that this one was for her, and that… I got only part way through talking when she leaped from her chair and gave me a big hug with a huge smile.  She was super excited to see me, and I was excited to see her.  I gave her my card and said I’d like to reconnect, and she said she would.

At last, at the end, I had a lot of time to contemplate how the convention had gone, and what I would do differently.  I figured out a lot of what I have said in these past few posts, and in general about independent publishing.  I realized that the convention is not about selling, but about getting followers.  And you need to make that task as easy as possible.  You’re going to lose money doing a convention, but if you do it right, you’re going to build your numbers.

And when you combine this with online promotions, it will pay off.  In this case, I had a KDP free promotion going on during the same weekend, so one of the flyers I was giving away was a link to where one could download it for free.  I had also done social media marketing and advertisements regarding the free book promotion.  Next week, I’ll talk about that.

All in all, I would say that my experience at Wondercon overall was what I had expected, but not what I had hoped.  I had expected to grow awareness of the Relic Worlds brand, but I had hoped to have a few more sales.  Oh well.

But the bottom line is, if you do a convention to raise your numbers, and combine that with online social networking and promotions, as long as you’re doing a series in a niche market, you have a chance.

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.