Some scattered thoughts about ECCC.
Best cosplay: the guy as Scarlet Witch. Headpiece, cape, tights, and very very filled bikini bottom. Nothing else. I think I lost a sale by pausing in the middle of my pitch to whoop my approval at him. Did not care. Was so worth it.
Weirdest question: someone passing my table asked “do you have any Final Fantasy fan art?”. The idea of going to a con and looking for fan art of a specific franchise just feels so alien to me.
I wish I was better at socializing.
That was a pretty damn good con.
At the end of ECCC2014, I impulsively got together a few friends to share two booths this year. I asked for a location either in the middle of the second hall, or in the first hall.
We got into the first hall. This meant that a huge percentage of the 80k people attending the show passed by our booths. Not all of them did, and only some of them stopped, and only some of them spent money. But I made back my portion of the booth on the first day, and did at least similarly well each of the next days. And I went through a little more than 300 business cards. I don’t expect more than a small percentage of the people who picked those up to come visit my site, let alone give me money in the future, but I’ve still definitely expanded my audience. Which is my primary reason to go to these things right now.
That said, the money I got at this con plus the money I’m making from Patreon this month is going to be able to pay my rent. And I’m pretty goddamn happy about that! I am finally a Pro Artist.
Things I need to do for next year:
– amend my signage to include the blurb Phil Foglio was gracious enough to give me – I was about one diagonal block away from his booth and saw a lot more people sporting Girl Genius shirts than I have before.
– add some Rita prints to the print book (at the suggestion of some fans who wanted to buy just that, and were kind enough to point out panels they thought would work well)
– have some stickers/buttons/some kind of cheap little purchase, both for returning fans who I can’t quite give a new book to yet, and for people who’re in the Just Curious stage. Probably stickers; they’re very flat. I like flat things. They’re compact.
Also I think I need to replace my sign with a taller one. I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.
Only half of the folks at my pair of booths made a profit, but everyone is down for doing this next year. So I signed up for two booths again. Here’s hoping I can still have the same awesome placement.
(Protip: When applying for a con, look at the map of last year and ask for a good location. You might not get it but you sure won’t get it if you don’t ask.)
And now I am going to sit in the living room and play Bloodborne for a couple of days.
This year at ECCC, phone reception was abysmal. And the Internet was usurious – $150 per device for the weekend, not too good when you have six people in one booth. Or $2400 for them to drop a wireless repeater in your booth. Or $3500 for them to run a dedicated line to a hotspot in your booth. Neither of these two options were attractive either.
But then again, neither is trying to use Square’s offline mode and discovering that it drops everything it’s cached when your phone runs out of juice. Which is more likely to happen when it’s trying to get signal in a crowded environment like a con. So that’s a hundred or two of card payments I’m out from today. The rest of the con is gonna be cash only, I think.
I’m probably going to do a group booth again next year. I’d like to have something in my bag to let me connect to the convention center internet and only pay once, then act as a hotspot so everyone in my booth can happily take credit cards all day. Is there a good way to do this? It’ll have to have some way of browsing the web, to log into the portal and pay their $$$. It’ll also need to run on batteries, ideally for about 8-10 hours without a recharge…
Any other suggestions for ways to get internet in the middle of ~80k people tweeting instagramming vining etc their con without spending more money than we can reliably expect to take in are welcome.
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edit. AHA, I did some digging and found MyWi which lets a jailbroken iPhone do what I am looking for. Now to get EVERYONE to bring spare USB batteries tomorrow, especially since I am a moron who left her emptied-out battery at the table…
Edit again, after the con: it turns out that Square’s offline mode DOES keep everything, it just takes a little while to show up in the recent transactions tab. And it also turned out that the convention center’s wifi is wise to my wifi-sharing tricks and refused to work, boooo. I’ll be doing ECCC2016 in Square’s offline mode unless I can hook up with like 8 other people besides my crew to split the $2400 cost of an official repeater down to almost sane levels.