Here are some articles I found on preparing for a convention:

Convention Travel Kit
5 Habits of Good Artist-Marketers
Convention Checklist

These are all links to WebcomicMarketing.com which is pretty new but has some great info on the subject. If anyone else has good articles on this or first hand advice then please add to this. PLEASE!!!

convention selling is an art in it's self.

I have done extremely well for that last 5 years at conventions, but it is because I actually have a working crew that makes the shows productive and very profitable.

The key is to know your audience, engage with them and always have something new a credit card machine helps as well:) There is much more as well. But our shows pay for themselves and lets us do more shows the following year.

Thanks, Jason.

http://www.webcomicmarketing is my site.

It's not really supposed to be an exhaustive resource, but I do like to put articles there from time to time.

Glad you found it useful.

SteamCrow - Thanks for joining the forum! It was fun meeting you briefly at the Comic Con too. You have a massive amount of amazing stuff!. The webcomicmarketing site is a great start to what could become a massive resource. Thanks for putting it together!

SteamCrow, your site is MASSIVELY useful. My gosh! I'll be taking it apart to study all these resources. AND I have to add it to my page of resources for comickers.

Hey, thanks!

I update it when I've got something more to share.

Glad you found it useful.

Let me post this question here:

How much is a reasonable assumption for small press sales at a big convention? The Tower is getting ready to head out to C2E2 in March and I wanted to get a sense for how many copies one can expect to sell at these things. The con estimates about 28,000 people will attend throughout the weekend. 300 copies would be just over 1% of the population and looks doable.

If could lend any experience here. I'm assuming a lot depends on pre-promotion, banners, existing fans etc, so I'm really looking for some ball park estimates for a first show. We're doing print-on-demand so would rather not have a whole lot of expensive books lying around.

Thanks a bundle

John

Unless you have an audience waiting for you there, 300 sounds extremely optimistic! How many others are attending with their books?

John, are you going to be in AA or do you have a booth? Or something else?

And, hey! I'll be there too.

@cedarseed. you think? it'd be expensive too. That's what I wanted to hear to get a better sense of expectations. I'm sure there will be hundreds of other exhibitors too.

@albone: We've got a booth (and a panel discussion!). Don't have the location yet, but I'm sure we'lll be able to catch up at the show.

John, to be honest I've never personally been to such large comic conventions. My reaction to your post is based on experience with personal book launches and smaller book fairs, and on all that I've been reading about convention-going recently in preparation for one. So it's really a personal impression, but based on it, if I were in your place I wouldn't take 300 books with me. I would take 100 and still not expect to sell them all, but it would make nice big piles and be more affordable. Based on all the testimonies I read and on the excellent advice I found on this forum, I would have a relatively smaller number of books and add some merch instead, such as art prints and the like, not even necessarily related to my GN. By all means don't take my word for it, just giving you my sincere take on things

From our experience of when we gave stuff away from free, 10% of the convention was a fair saturation rate. If your book costs 10 times as much as free, then 1% would be a great goal. As far as selling boxes of books for more than the cost of free... might want to trim it down a bit.

I think 100 would be plenty. I'm thinking we'll only bring 150 books to SDCC next summer.

Legit.
That's good advice. We'll target that range. They'll be plenty of promotional stuff that will go along with the book. There will be plenty to learn especially after this foray. Next we'll have to think about ISBN, proper citations etc etc.