So this was a great con. I wanna start off by outlining some of the new goals I've set for myself. My goal has ALWAYS been to at least be making my table money back. I think anyone who's frequented conventions like this knows how important THAT goal is! Over time, that goal evolved into making my table money back on the first day, which, you know, could be stressful, but even that got a lot easier over time. In fact, it got a LOT easier once I released my graphic novel. Once I realized i was consistently clearing that goal, I decided to set a new one for myself, and this was the first con I've tried implementing it.
What is that goal? I am trying my best to be making as much, if not more money, per day, than I would at my regular job. I was worried at first, because sales can be... unpredictable! But I was very pleasantly surprised that I juuuust cleared my goal for the first day, the second day i did more than twice as well as I woulda have done at work, and the last day I juuuust about cleared it again.
That already sounds good, but it's even better knowing that of the days I was at the con, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Friday is the only FULL day I spend at work, and on Saturday I only show up for half a day. So really, I didn't do twice as well on Saturday, I did FOUR TIMES as well! and on Sunday i don't show up for work at all, so... yeah, even better!
So I think this is how I'm gonna be doing business at cons from now on. this is real, hard data, that I'm doing better at this, and it gives me hope that I can in fact do EVEN BETTER! So... let's see if I can keep my winning streaking going for this year, and maybe by the time I get my next LARGE book out, I might consider upping my goals.
Let's talk about the actual con, and what I did there.
This was a pretty sedate con, honestly. I spent most of my time at the table, being a saleswoman and taking photos. I was kinda low energy, the drive up was long and ...early, and the week before I was out the house a lot taking care of some friends' animals while they were outta town, so i wasn't looking to get up and walk around a lot. I just let people come to me. I DID go out hunting on the first day because there was a toy I had in mind that I really wanted to find that I unfortunately did NOT find! Storm Collectibles put out a line of Street Fighter figures last year or so, and one of them was Zangief. now, I passed on Zangief because I had one already, the one that SOTA Toys put out in the early 2000's, and i was super happy to have found that one, because it was SO expensive and SO rare, but what it also was... was FRAGILE... and I saw "was", because, well.. you guess it, he broke :P My cat got a little too curious one day and jumped up on my shelf to go exploring. Sadly, there wasn't enough room up there for both her AND my Street Fighter dudes, so down came poor Zangief AND Dhalsim, sadly. Dhalsim is not nearly as rare or expensive as Zangief so I found a new one of him on Ebay. But I knew the Storm Collectibles Zangief was out and far BETTER than the dainty, fragile SOTA Toys one from yesteryear. I could have gotten one on Ebay as well, but i wasn't looking to spend the cash at the time. I thought maybe getting one in person at a con would be a lot easier, and would save me a lotta money on shipping.
WRONG! Though... apparently. I combed that whole dealers hall and nary a Zangief to be found! One dealer I saw who did have Street Fighter toys was like "oh yeah, we sold outta him... awhile ago!" Bear in mind these toys are not that old! I had one friend who said she might be able to help me track him down, but barring that, I might need to resort to ebay a second time to undo my bad, bad kitty's handiwork >:P
I DID however find a Chun Li from the same line, in her "arrange" costume, as they call it. Really tough, its just her extra sexy costume, which i'm not gonna complain about at ALL. The same company is making Mortal Kombat toys at the moment as well, and when I was at Comic-Con they were teasing a Kitana action figure so like... yeah, I might start collecting those too~
I also almost got a great big Itabag, but unfortunatley I could not find one that was big ENOUGH! If I'm getting a itabag, i'm gonna get one I can fit my laptop inside of, and so far I just have not found that one yet. There was one that was CLOSE! The lady I spoke to gave me a card and said there were bigger ones they had on their online shop, so that's something I can look into.
Less talk about other people's products, more talk about MINE!
So this show was the debut of TransCat Issue #9, and it did really well there! Naturally Issue #1 and the graphic novel are the two most bought things at every show, cuz even though i'm all big and famous, there's still a lotta people out there who are only now hearing of me for the first time, and naturally they wanna start at.... the beginning!
The Graphic novel is STILL going really strong. I have not done a checklist yet, but i might have to re-order soon. We'll see.
When I wasn't at the con, I was hanging out with my friends Danielle and her very good boi, Joshua, plus Edgar and Max, plus Joen Jien and Conor came up to hang out too! Together we FINALLY got caught up on Steven Universe, to prepare for the new episodes that are (supposedly) coming up. also there were hamburgers and burritos that got ate up, so that's pretty rad.
On the way HOME form the convention, there was like a goddamn hurricane or something. It had been rainy and windy a little bit during the con, but on sunday it really picked up. There were some parts of downtown Sac that had their traffic and street lights knocked out, so getting home was a little challenging. I did make a quick detour to Richmond to see my friend john on the way home, we don't get to see eachother often enough and that's a problem.
I'm gonna be taking another little break for awhile, gonna try and focus on making more stuff. I'll be at ClexaCon in April, and Fanime at the end of May. No more solid plans yet, but i'll be keeping you all updated.
No comments:
Post a Comment