Loading ...
Usually the above phrase is used in strictly karmic terms, such as a politician passing harsh anti-drug laws getting arrested for possession. I am here to report a much happier and more literal interpretation.
This last weekend was, of course, WonderCon 2016, and we had some good sales. Mind you, we had a great sale last month at the Long Beach Expo when Amanda Conner bought a copy of our Zombie Ranch trade, but one particular WonderCon sale was interesting for different reasons. We had a flyer sale.
What do I mean by that? Well, over the course of our exhibiting existence we have given out hundreds — no check that, thousands — of postcard-sized flyers advertising the comic and website. We’ve taken them to parties, dumped them on freebie tables, and always make sure to have a stack at our own booth. They’re quite nice looking — good color on good cardstock, laminated — but the price per card is low enough that we can afford to spread them around in semi-frivolous manner. I say semi-frivolous because there’s still money involved and I like to have some discretion in where to “spend” them, for instance I probably won’t ever bother with the San Diego Comic-Con freebie table again, where you have to go through an application and approval process, at the end of which 1000 cards can go bye-bye in a single afternoon and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to stand out amongst the dozens of other swag items that will end up in someone’s bag by the end of the day. Which is assuming they ever got placed out at all — all I know is I handed over the box on Thursday morning and Thursday evening there were none around, with the staff shrugging when I asked. Since there was no appreciable bump on site visits that day or any of the days in the next week following the convention, all I could tell was that it didn’t seem to work out. Maybe if we’d handed over 10,000 flyers? But okay, at that point even when you’ve got cards costing less than a nickel a pop, that’s too much for a small outfit like ours to pour into a “maybe”.
Still, it doesn’t mean there’s no point at all, because there was a man at WonderCon who walked up to our table and introduced himself, saying he’d successfully “found us”. No, he didn’t pull a gun at that point to erase us from the timeline. Instead he allowed that he’d seen one of our flyers. At a convention? No, at his school, Riverside City College. His memory wasn’t precise since it had been a few months before, but he thought one of his instructors might have had a small stack. He picked one up and thought Zombie Ranch sounded pretty cool, and found the site, and then a few months later while walking WonderCon decided to see if we might be there and spied our banner (banners… there’s a post for another day…). And then he bought a copy of our trade.
Funky how in this digital world, some of the older analog methods can still pay off from time to time. What goes around comes around, indeed.