Presenting My Game at Wondercon

I'll be going to Wondercon again this weekend, and this time I'm doing things a little differently.

Rather than getting a booth and trying to sell books that way, I've got a big table in the gaming area.  The main presentation there will, of course, be the Relic Worlds miniatures game, Relic Worlds Showdown.  The setup I made for this with the big volcano and everything (Breakup Mountain) always gets the most attention, so it's probably the best thing to grab attention for the series as a whole.

So I'll be putting on the game, but I'll also have flyers, and copies of the books.  I probably can't sell them since I don't have a booth, but I learned a while ago that I never make a profit at these conventions; it's about exposure.  So the whole point will be to get attention and to hand out flyers to get people into the Relic Worlds series.

Since part 1 of book 3 will have just released, I'm giving out business card sized flyers with a link for readers to download it for free.  Book 1 will also be available for free on Amazon Kindle that weekend as well, so there will be flyers for where they can find that as well.

And there will be presentations of the game all day, which recently released, and it more or less premiering at that convention.

If you're there, drop by our presentation in the game area.  You won't be able to miss the giant volcano!

Still Promoting at Conventions I Can't Make

The main reason I went to the Alamo City Comic Convention was because someone I met told me that you can make more money at conventions in Texas than anywhere else.  "Texans will buy anything," he said.  I needed that sort of a break, so I looked into getting a booth at the Alamo City Comic Con.  I chose that one because it's near Austin where my uncle lives, and I've been wanting to show Austin to my girlfriend Jamie for a while now.

When I saw the price of the booths, I was taken aback.  $600.  I looked for a small press area, and there was none.  I looked around at other conventions and it was the same story.  It seems Wondercon is unique in having a small press section for independent artists.  It's really a pity because I can't see us independent authors making back $600 plus all the other expenses.

I tried to get a list of vendors who would be at the event, but the website was never updated with their names.  (It said 'vendor list coming soon' all the way up to two weeks before the event, at which point I stopped looking.)  By this time I already had a plane ticket to Austin and Rotary club talks scheduled for another one of my books, so I just went and got a badge to the convention.

I met several vendors, all of whom said they maybe just barely make their money back, and that it's really about exposure.  I suggested the idea of renting table space from them next year, and a couple of them seemed to like the idea.  One of them called it "sublet renting."  I'm going to try it at that convention.  I'm also going to see about hiring a model to cosplay at the front and hand out flyers, and also offer a giveaway to attendees if they write down their email addresses.  This might be a good way to proxy myself into these conventions that are too expensive for me to go to.

Before I left the convention, I set out a bunch of flyers in the common area.  This only worked slightly as I got five new views the day I put them out, all of them around 7 pm, soon after the convention ended.  So the tiny spike was probably from that, but it wasn't enough to justify going out of my way for it.  I'm really coming to believe that the best solution is anything that involves building the mailing list where I can be certain to personally send people things rather than counting on them to check out my projects.

Sci Fi and Comic Book Conventions I Want to Attend

I’ve been talking recently about what worked and what didn’t when I released book 2 of the Relic Worlds series; and more importantly, what I learned.  In one weekend I released book 2, presented the Relic Worlds series at Wondercon, and gave away book 1 in a KDP Select free promotion.  The result was not a lot of immediate sales, but a lot of people who are now following the series.

As a result, I’ve begun to plan for more online promotions on Facebook and Twitter, I’m doing a newsletter campaign on Mail Chimp, and I’ll be doing another free book promotion in conjunction with the second book having a countdown deal.  These are all the online plans, and the other half of the equation is networking in person.  This is best accomplished by going to conventions, so I’ve made a list of the conventions I plan to go to.

I was told that Texans will buy anything.  In fact, I was told that Dallas has the best sales rate of any comic book/sci fi and fantasy convention in the country.  Denver is apparently a close second.  I’ve decided to make my trips to these conventions coincide with trips my girlfriend and I want to take, and since we want to see Austin, I’ve decided my next convention will be Alamo City, which takes place in San Antonio, (just an hour’s drive from Austin.)  San Antonio supposed to be a pretty fascinating city itself, so I’m looking forward to that one.

I plan to keep Wondercon as sort of my “home base” if you will, building a regular following there while I travel to other places just once each to build my following.  I also want to attend Emerald City, which is in Seattle, and Chicago’s C2E2 Pop Culture convention.  Unfortunately, both of those are right around Wondercon, and that might be too much intensity in too short a time, (not to mention the expense.)  So I might only do one of those two.  Finally, I want to do New York Comic Con, though that might be way too expensive.  However, it’s the largest Comic Book convention, even larger than San Diego Comic Con, so it might be worth it.  Or it might just swallow a small project like mine up whole.  Maybe I should do that one a little further down the line.

I’m also looking at Sac Con, which is in Sacramento, and Nerd Con in San Diego, since they’d be close.  I did Loscon, and they want me back, but SO FEW of the people at that convention go into the dealer’s room that it’s not really worth it.

I’ll be looking at more conventions, and I’ll be going to as many as I can afford.

http://alamocitycomiccon.com/

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.