Pages

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo

Hey everyone, I'm relatively recovered (not really) from the comicon on the weekend, so thought I'd give you a quick run down on how it all 'went down'. First of all, it was BUSY! The event was much larger than last year and STILL was bigger than the organizers expected. The largest draw was that the Star Trek-The Next Generation entire cast was there for a reunion and that of course had people coming from all over the province, the surrounding province, and I even saw some American plates in the parking lots. Final tallies are not in yet, but there were upwards of at least 50,000 people in attendance.

Between ebook and print sales, we did very well. The biggest winner for e-sales turned out to be TK Toppin, whose The Lancaster Rule was downloaded tons of times from our own website. I can't say how many vendor sales yet, since I won't know for a while. I attribute this to how wildly popular her autographed bookmarks were. I had stockpiled quite a few from the various mailings that she's sent, and ran out mid Saturday afternoon. Moral of the story here authors, autograph EVERYTHING you can possibly autograph when you create promo materials. It becomes collectable that way, rather than just a pretty colored piece of paper (as one 'collector' told me).

Print sales went well across the board so I won't list all the titles here. A charming 'devil' took notice of The Devil's Wife by Holly Hunt, and went so far as to ask how we could possibly know about 'his wife'. His costume was awesome, and I wish I could have had time to take his picture holding the book, however, I was busy selling some of K. M. Tolan's books. Oh, and Ashley Barnard had a fellow specifically come over to our table to get the second two books in the Shadow Fox series, since he loved the first one so much.

And even though this was a sci fi/fantasy type of event, I still took our other books along, because there is always a demand for them. For example, one fellow came by to get a book for himself, then said he wished we had what his wife read. Asked what that was, and he said mystery... Well, I happened to have a few of those under the table, so pulled them out. He sauntered away from our table with a book for himself and one for his wife. And so on and so on. It was great and we had a wonderful time. We don't know how big the expo will grow next year, but we have already pre-booked our booth for next year.

(whew)

Next up, Keycon-Winnipeg Manitoba May 18-20.

'til next time,

Ellen

1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete