Nice talking to you at the TCAF.

Michele

Interesting analysis and commentary of your experience at APE. I tend to prefer local fairs, Canzine and TCAF are both great for this, as I tend to hear back from people when I run into them in the street or whatnot. They’re not likely to email me, but I’ll say I’ve got a book coming out, they’ll say oh yeah I loved the sampler, and then they’ll come to the launch.

That said, the nurture stuff is fairly subjective, so here’s some hard numbers inspired by your approach. I have been thinking a fair bit about why the fuck we sold so many damn books, previously my previous record had been 20 books in one sitting, when we sold 50 on Sat and 40 on Sun at TCAF. Here are some suspicions I have as to why the increase:
-graphic novels trump prose novels for impulse buy — you can see you like the art, wherein with writing style it’s a bit harder
-post-Rapture is a catchy premise
-priced competitively: thanks to my pal Chris at the Beguiling I dropped from my usual $20 to a $16 retail, $15 con price for a 160 page gn
-we had a whole table in a good location dominated by one book
-we had a 2/3 page article in eye weekly, 1 of 2 artists featured
-I had a Neil Gaiman endorsement for a previous book displayed prominently

Anyway, thanks for the comment!

I’m going to quibble a bit with the Participate comment. I’ve done this a number of times (at both the Small Press Expo and the Alternative Press Expo) and have had extremely disappointing results. The lack of nurturing and support has actually been quite surprising. So surprising that I wrote a four part piece on it (part four is at http://vonandmoggy.livejournal.com/274196.html and the other three parts are linked in the first sentence of that post).

Part of the problem, I think, is that con goers (both attendees and exhibitors) are not quite as open as I thought they would be. That, of course, might be a reflection on my own expectations more than anything else, but I’ve attempted to participate quite extensively and have not enjoyed the results. While I suspect this is probably a “your mileage may vary” kinda thing, I thought I would point it out.

Von