stickers

Recently, I decided to try an experiment. I bought a bunch of stickers from Moo. Just simple rectangular ones, with an assortment of my art on them (and my URL of course) – nothing fancy. My plan was to put them on my table at cons and sell them; I’d also give one or two away with every purchase, or to fans who already have everything I have on offer.

I bought 200 for about $66 with shipping. I just counted: I sold or gave away 77 of them at SPX. Mostly gave them away; I made like $20 off of them according to Square. That’s pretty good for something I’d mostly gotten for promotional purposes. I think I’ll be getting another shipment of a wider selection soon. Probably after APE and Geek Girl Con. Unless I completely run out at one of those.

In the long run I may even replace my business cards with these things. One for free to everyone, pay for more.

(And while I was running numbers, I added everything up for SPX. I’m about $300 in the red – but am pretty sure I’d be in the black if I hadn’t run out of stuff to sell by the end of the first day. Definitely applying for next year.)

sequel sales

Well. This is interesting. I just looked through my records to get an idea of how many copies of Rita 1 and 2 to stick in my suitcase for SPX.

ECCC 2014: 20/ na (R2 wasn’t printed yet)
RCCC 2014: 12/7 (5 bundles)
APE 2014: 11/6 (6 bundles)
Sasquan: 12/12 (8 bundles)
ECCC 2015: 13/14 (9 bundles)

And that tells me two things. One, that at most cons I sell about twice as many copies of book 1 as I do book 2. Unsurprising, as I’m not the only person who’s seen that kind of drop-off for sequel sales.

But wow. Sasquan moved the same amount of both books. And Emerald City is amazing: I moved more copies of book 2 there than 1. And a third of those were either returning fans, or folks who bought book 1, then came back the next day and got 2 after loving 1 overnight – I get that every other con or so.

I’m definitely doing something right here. I think I’ll bring about 20 of each book to SPX.