My Experience at Wondercon - Sunday

Sunday is known as the dead day at any convention, but it’s a very overlooked day.  This is actually the day that people are most likely to buy.  The ones who are there for the whole convention spent Friday looking around, then Saturday making the big purchases from major companies.  Then Sunday is the day they’re buying everything else that they’ve been taking a look at.

That’s not exactly the way it worked for me.  I made a few sales on Sunday, but Saturday morning was the big one.  And on Saturday afternoon someone bought the whole series.  However, Sunday was the day when more people picked up the flyers and other things, and wanted to take it home to look at it.  So it’s a great networking day.

It’s also a good day to network with other vendors at the convention.  Since it’s the day the convention is wrapping up, they’re less busy.  I managed to talk with some people at the Nerdist, and they took a copy of one of the Relic Worlds books to consider it for a story or a review.  One of the people from Joss Whedon’s company came over and took a look at Relic Worlds.  He seemed to be considering something, but I don’t know what.

And I had a great personal moment as I reconnected with Amber Benson.  She had been the first person I cast in my project The American Game in 1996 when I was first trying to make it into a movie.  I brought her a copy of the book.  She was signing copies of her book, but I told her that this one was for her, and that… I got only part way through talking when she leaped from her chair and gave me a big hug with a huge smile.  She was super excited to see me, and I was excited to see her.  I gave her my card and said I’d like to reconnect, and she said she would.

At last, at the end, I had a lot of time to contemplate how the convention had gone, and what I would do differently.  I figured out a lot of what I have said in these past few posts, and in general about independent publishing.  I realized that the convention is not about selling, but about getting followers.  And you need to make that task as easy as possible.  You’re going to lose money doing a convention, but if you do it right, you’re going to build your numbers.

And when you combine this with online promotions, it will pay off.  In this case, I had a KDP free promotion going on during the same weekend, so one of the flyers I was giving away was a link to where one could download it for free.  I had also done social media marketing and advertisements regarding the free book promotion.  Next week, I’ll talk about that.

All in all, I would say that my experience at Wondercon overall was what I had expected, but not what I had hoped.  I had expected to grow awareness of the Relic Worlds brand, but I had hoped to have a few more sales.  Oh well.

But the bottom line is, if you do a convention to raise your numbers, and combine that with online social networking and promotions, as long as you’re doing a series in a niche market, you have a chance.