Tales and thoughts from the trenches - story of a rookie con seller.

[Azkaban]

Great report now the pictures

[1Cool]

As promised, here are the pictures!

 

Here is a picture of what you will see when you enter the con. Full of excitement and ready to go:

 

 

Lots and lots of waiting in line. This the same image you will see when you go to leave on Sunday.

[1Cool]

Here is the van pretty well packed and ready to go. The 15 short boxes pretty well filled the entire back of the van - love that thing.

 

[1Cool]

Here is a picture of my first sale of the Con on Thursday. This guy sure was full of energy!

 

[1Cool]

My booth slowly coming together:

 

 

[1Cool]

I only got a few pictures of other booths since I always was in a rush to get books and get back to my booth:

 

[1Cool]

My first big sale of the Con:

 

[1Cool]

Couple board members hanging out in front of the booth. Greggy kept moving so I couldn't take his picture with the group:

 

[1Cool]

Loved downtown Charlotte:

 

[1Cool]

Last but not least is a nice picture of Zeck signing my print. Only $3 for a sig and the print was half price on Sunday. His sig is right up there with Steranko in terms of coolness factor to me.

[1Cool]

That's all I took. Much better pictures this time around but I'll work on upping the blurry factor next time.

[1Cool]

More importantly I think is how did you do vs how you thought you would do. Its obvious that you cant bring $1000 worth of inventory and sell $10000, but it almost seems that in order to make $1000 you'll need to bring 10k worth of books

 

I brought about 30k worth of books with me and ended up selling 5k. I was hoping for 7K but selling 1/6th of what I brought (dollar wise) was a good first attempt.

[Noble Nostalgia aka Nikelspot]

Andy, great meeting you in person. I hope it was an overall blast for you. Definitely reconsider coming back next year. And yeah, me and brother are five years apart. I'm older, so I guess he's aging faster than me

[Doc McCoy]

Nice report, Andrew! (thumbs u

[blazingbob]

The guy behind Joe Grisola looks like he is ready to draw.

 

What's sticking out of his pocket?

[hogations]

Excellent report Andrew! Thanks for sharing!

[1Cool]

Sounds like a fun time, if exhausting.

 

Seems to me that unless one has a solid combination of quantity and quality, it's hard to make a profit at conventions. It probably also helps if you look at them as buying as well as selling opportunities from a dealers perspective, as well as building client relations. Even if one doesn't add the considerable time invested, it looks like the cost of booth and travel was a round 20% of sales in your case.

 

It's along way from when I was a teenager in the 70s setting up at local one day cons for a $15 table fee and about a bucks worth of gas. Of course a good con was rarely more than $200 in sales, and frequently less, so the ratios weren't much different.

 

I thought about this and there are a lot of good stuff in your post. You do get first shot at some deals when you have a booth but I'd say the buying opportunities are better overall when you are not selling books just due to the ability to spend so much time working the floor for gems. This may be different for the bigger more well known buyers like Gator but the guy walking in with a box full of key books for sale doesn't usually pick the small booths in the middle to sell their books. You have to pay your dues to get in the nice locations and get a name so people will search you out.

 

Making money at Cons appears to come down to buying whole collections and using the Cons to sell a few bigger books and blow out a ton of lesser books that you basically got for free when you bought the collection. I usually buy here on the boards, going to Cons and the occasional purchase on Craigslist or E-Bay so my margin between purchase price and possible sale price is usually not more then 40% if I'm lucky. I'd love to buy a huge collection but I've not been lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time.

 

 

 

 

[1Cool]

Andy, great meeting you in person. I hope it was an overall blast for you. Definitely reconsider coming back next year. And yeah, me and brother are five years apart. I'm older, so I guess he's aging faster than me

 

I did have someone PM me and ask if I would do it again and I really did not have a good answer for that one. I'm set to sell at a small local Con later this year and I'm locked in to sell next year at the growing Akron Comic Con so those two are set. I think the only way I'll come back to sell at Heroes next year is if I find a huge collection of books that I can buy. In that case I'll need to move a ton of books and most of the cash at the con will be all profits (I'll definitely be back to be a buyer since I can stay with family and only have to pay for gas and tolls).

 

If I would have paid full price for the booth, full price for the van, paid for a hotel for 3 nights I would have sold 5K in books with virtually no profits at the end of the day.

[1Cool]

I don't want to sound like a downer about the trip because it was a ton of fun along with the work. I finally signed up with CGC and I put in my first solo submission of 20 books. I got a couple SS books done of the variants from the show including a cool head sketch from the Spidey Gwen artist. But pretty much all of that stuff I could have done from a strictly buyer standpoint and Jeff (Junk Donkey) sure seemed to be having a ton of fun running around getting sketches and probably making way more money then me as a seller.

[ChasingKingKirby]

As promised, here are the pictures!

 

Here is a picture of what you will see when you enter the con. Full of excitement and ready to go:

 

 

Lots and lots of waiting in line. This the same image you will see when you go to leave on Sunday.

 

That's me ahead of you I believe.