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Well, I must admit that so far it hasn’t been a great year for us at conventions. The Long Beach Expo seemed to have very little in the way of people buying, and then the bottom line similarly dropped out on WonderCon, which for the last four years has been rock solid for us from a sales standpoint.
We weren’t the only ones to suffer a surprising setback, and sometimes, when it’s five o’ clock on a Saturday and you’re at half the total you made at that same time last year (and you hope Sunday will somehow make up for it but you know that’s not going to be true) — sometimes the only comfort you get is the shared disappointment of your peers reporting they’re not doing so well either. Meanwhile you square your shoulders and just have to hope the next show will be better.
Theories will fly at these times. Is the local economy just down for some reason? Were the admission and parking fees so steep people had no money left for purchases? Is the market for what you’re offering saturated? Was your booth in a bad place? Or maybe your entire section of booths?
But unless a convention is so bad as to have no crowd, period, there’s usually at least someone who does okay. Or even phenomenally. I didn’t see it until I got home but two exhibitors I know (but didn’t get around to saying hi to at the show) posted that they’d had their best WonderCon ever, complete with exclamation points.
Were they exaggerating? Were their previous outings so bad as to make 2017 look great by comparison? I mean it’s true, we still sold quite a few things, enough so our total would have been quite decent or even excellent for, say, a Long Beach outing. But on a WonderCon scale by our past experiences, it was bizarrely low.
There’s of course a third option. I talked to one peer where the bottom dropped out of WonderCon for them last year, which didn’t happen to us. There were reports of an Artist’s Alley table being swamped with people seeking its product while the ones on either side were idle, and it wasn’t due to that middle table housing George Perez or some other luminary. Big booths and small reported feeling things were off, but there were probably still some of the big guys that won the jackpot or at least achieved their usual sales goals.
Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, like how tornadoes have been known to destroy one side of the street and leave the other side perfectly intact. Sometimes people call tornadoes “the finger of god” because of this phenomenon, like some unknowable higher power is guiding them according to an algorithm mere mortals can’t understand, and would go insane trying.
When Artist’s Alley becomes Tornado Alley, there’s not much you can do in the face of what feels like human consumer habits rendered into a force of nature. Hard sell, soft sell, it doesn’t seem to matter. You just have to ride out the storm and hope that next time, the good side of the street is the one you happen to be on.