Guerillas In The Mist - or just how effective are conventions, anyway?

This is part one of a two part essay.  Part two can be found right here.

I thought it would be interesting to break down the Alternative Press Expo from a bit of a different point of view. Many people have been writing on the show itself and the amazing art to be seen. That’s become a staple and helps make APE APE. That said, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to add my voice to the chorus. Besides, Moggy will do her write up on the show and I don’t want to tread on ground she might cover, too.

Instead, what I’m going to prattle on about is some of the numbers behind APE. The marketing I did before the show, what I was hoping to get out of it, and my overall thoughts on the dollars involved. Simply put: did I get out of it what I wanted? How do I measure it? 

First, let’s look over the key data for the show itself. The one thing we won’t know (and can never know) is exactly what the paid attendance is. There is no independent audit on these numbers so we really have no idea how accurate they are. That’s NOT to imply anyone is lying or being disingenuous about them. All I mean by an indy audit is that we don’t have a neutral third party verifying the numbers and catching mistakes. For all I know they are completely 100% accurate. So don’t jump all over me on this. I should add that these conclusions are mine and mine alone. They don’t reflect anything else save my quirky way of looking at things. Take what you will from them.

What do we know, then? Well, we know that APE ’07 had a total of 338 exhibitor tables in the entire convention space (see this link). Not exhibitors – tables. The cost of each full table, assuming each exhibitor took advantage of the early bird special, was $185.00. I’m going to ignore the half tables just to keep the math simpler. So, the total cost of ALL 338 tables was $62,530.00. Put another way, APE attendees would have to shell out this amount for all the exhibitors to cover their table costs. And more than this for exhibitors to make a profit.

APE claimed that 4800 people attended the 2006 edition of the Expo (1st page in the 2007 program book, 2nd paragraph) but most blogs/reports seem to agree that attendance was down in 2007. Let’s say that only 4200 people attended the show over the two days (remember, again, that this is impossible to verify). But call it 4200 ‘cuz we gotta work with something.

With 4200 attendees and the total table cost we calculated above, we know this: each attendee would have to be willing to shell out about $15.00 each over and above the cost of admission ($62530/4200). If they did, then all the table costs would be paid for on average. That’s not saying much, but y’know. The problem is this: how many attendees does each table (NOT each exhibitor) have to see to earn that money? If it’s totally equal, then we’re looking at about 13 people each (4200/338). Well, it’s obviously not going to be a “1 to 1” ratio. That just doesn’t happen. For the most part, the rule of thumb (and the one I’ll use) is the ol’ 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales will come from only 20% of your customers. If that’s the case, then only about 840 attendees (4200*20%) actually attend the con prepared to spend money over and above the cost of admission. The other 3360 attendees (the vast majority) are really there to take in some art, hook up with some friends, and maybe buy a mini-comic or some such. Most aren’t real buyers, though.

So, we now gotta revise the $15.00 per attendee number we came up with. If only 840 attendees come prepared to really spend money, how much do they plan to spend? Well, the answer is pretty simple: about $50,000.00 (62530*80%). The ol' 80/20 rule again. The vast majority of attendees (again, 3360 of 'em) will only spend a total of $12,530.00, or about $3.75 each. Not good. Each of the 840 other attendess has to drop $60.00 ($50000/840) to cover 80% of the total table costs. Put another way, each table needs to have three of these attendee angels drop $60.00 on their table. Figuring an average price of $20 per item (be it book, print, or whatnot), then each of these hypothetical attendees would need to buy 3 items each to make it work. Sounds pretty easy.

It’s not. Mainly because each exhibitor is competing with every other exhibitor and there are also a lot of larger publishers and a few retailers competing with you on top of it. Now, one could argue that the larger publishers (Fantagraphics, Oni, Slave Labor, etc…) may not be there to make money. They could be doing it for exposure and other obtuse marketing reasons. But the retailers are almost certainly there to make money. Or, at worst, break-even. I was a retailer and there’s no way in hell I’d set-up at a show like this if I wasn’t making a small profit. Both Comic Relief and Lee’s Comics had 5 tables each and, I suspect, would need to sell $5000.00 in books over the course of the show to make break-even (if anyone wants to know how I came up with this figure, just ask). Both retailers are regulars at APE so it’s unlikely that they exhibit at a loss. That just wouldn’t be in the cards. So I’m pretty confident with that total figure of $10,000.00.

Ok, so what does that do to us? Well, a couple of things happen. Some of our 840 attendees will spend their budget on the retailers. How many? If the retailers need to sell $10,000.00 worth in books and we figured each “angel” would spend $60, then we probably lose about 167 people ($10000/$60). Probably a bit less than that, 'cuz some of the other attendees might buy something, too. But it'll do. So we’re down to 673 buying attendees. If we adjust our total table revenue to account for the 10 tables the two retailers had, we’re down to needing $60,680.00. But with only 673 attendees accounting for 80% of that figure (the 80/20 rule), we now need each of these to spend $72.00 per remaining table ((60680*80%)/673).

Put another way, we have a total of 328 tables left (accounting for the retailers) and only 673 attendees willing to spend real money (about $48,500.00 worth). We know, of course, that it won’t be spread this equally. If we go back to the 80/20 rule again, only 66 tables (328*20%) will see a great deal of action. If that’s even close to accurate, then these 66 tables will gobble up about 80% of the remaining money (so about $39,000.00 of the remaining $48,500.00), netting each of these 66 tables about $590.00. $590.00 is actually not a great deal of money. It covers the cost of the table, food, the hotel and transportation if the table owner is an out of towner. A number of publishers had 3 or more tables (including Slave Labor, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Oni Press, Last Gasp, Drawn & Quarterly, and a few others). Combined, this accounts for 29 of the 66 tables. The big guys, relatively speaking.

So, what do we have left? Well, 262 tables are fighting over about $9,500.00 (48500-39000). That's about 132 of the remaining buying attendees (9500/72). Or about $36 for each table. Then, 328 tables are fighting over that extra $12,530.00 that's kicking around in the vast majority of attendees (the remaining 3360). That's another $38 per table.

Think about that.

262 tables fighting for $9,500.00. 328 tables fighting over $12,530.00.

In total and on average, that’s $74.00 per table. It wouldn’t come close to covering the table cost let alone any additional expenses. Food, hotel fees, and on and on.

The questions each exhibitor really needs to ask themselves are these: is what you’re offering to attendees enticing enough to get more dollars from the 673 attendees than $74.00? Do you have a way of getting their attention? Is competing with all the other exhibitors an effective way of gaining traction at the con? Are cons right for you?

Are these numbers accurate? No, probably not. Without knowing what the paid attendance is, I have to make a guess. And it’s only a guess no matter how educated I think it is. In addition, I’ll never know what the actual buy rate is. While the rule of thumb is the 80/20 rule, it’s quite possible that far more attendees come to APE (and shows like APE) planning to spend money. Then again, the attendance figures could be lower. On top of it, even less people may be prepared to buy at the con then what I outline above.

So, why go? Well, as many of you know I’ve been trying to grow this book of mine in a slow and methodical fashion. Part of the reason is that this is really my first time doing comics and I want to make the book as strong as I possibly can. As a result, there’ve been a fair amount of corrections and refinements as things have gone along. I’ve been also hoping to build word of mouth about the book and get some early attention to it before the book is ever solicited. I’m under no illusions that the book will do well; that’s impossible to predict but the odds are stacked against that happening. First-time authors are notoriously difficult to sell and I’m certainly not naïve on this front. Cons, I’ve hoped, represent a chance to get my work “out there” and into the hands of exactly the kind of people I wanted. Indy fans and art lovers. Alternative publishers and cool retailers. And media types that are specifically keen on comics and graphic novels. Basically, people that love the form.

The whole approach for all four shows we’ve attended (two SPXs and two APEs) was to give out free samples to try and gain some traction. I don’t give a shit about sales at this point. Sales dollars don’t even enter into it. I could sell ashcans and whatnot but I’ve long thought that this would restrict the amount of hands I could get my stuff into. I really need exposure as I try and build an audience for my work; I’m fairly pragmatic about these things so it seemed the best way to go about it. On top of it, by not selling anything I avoid any chance of alienation. I can make edits and wholesale changes without the concern that someone who already bought my work will have to do it again to get the “complete package.” I also don’t tick off retailers. Some retailers feel that artists and/or publishers selling at cons (see Robert Scott’s thoughts, for example) is unfair competition. If they support your work and you debut a book at a local con, you wind up competing with them and potentially cost them sales. Lastly, by exhibiting at cons I hopefully show that I’m keen, eager and easy to work with. The rest of this post is gonna go into details of what I did, tried to do, and what I think the overall effect was.

So, a few weeks before APE I started sending out press kits to a number of “opinion formers” in the Bay area. Which people? Well, media types. Librarians. Other creators. That sort of thing. Each kit included a cover letter, a few bookmarks, the press release for my APE appearance, a “tip sheet” that goes into details about the story, art excerpts from the book itself, and a few interviews I’ve done over the past year or so. I had sent a number of query emails in advance of the kits so they weren’t going in cold (well, for the most part). In total, I sent 24 kits down in advance of the trip. Why kits? Well, I have to build exposure somehow and what I was trying to avoid (desperately!) was the feast or famine phenomenon that happens on the con floor. I was hoping that these people would come and see us at the show itself instead of stumbling across us by accident. Maybe they’d even seek us out. Or, if they did forgot us by the time the show started then their memory might be jarred when they saw our table. The only problem with this was that the table assignments weren’t ready in time for my snail mail deadline. I basically had to tell people to “look for us” instead of telling them exactly where we were going to be. Annoying.

In addition, I decided to take out a full page ad in the program book. I wanted to see if I could get any extra traffic to our table with an ad and I was also curious to know if the powers that be would give us a better table location then last year (where we were in the equivalent of the nose bleeds). A full pager is $100 so it’s not cheap. But it seemed like an educated risk to take. The table assignments weren't ready for the ad, either, so I had to do a second "look for us" instead of a direct pointer. Grrrr...

How effective was it? On this point there’s no doubt: with one single exception, every exhibitor who took out a full page ad in the program book was on the main floor (the exception was the guys with Super-Con, who were there only to advertise the con with flyers). The half page ad folks were way more scattered – some were on the main floor, some weren’t. But if you’re relatively unknown and want a good spot, take out a full page ad in the APE program book. It’ll get you on the main floor where the big boys play.

The main giveaway item we brought down to APE was 300 ashcans of a little short story I did called “Li’l Kids.” Featuring characters from my bookie in a little short story seemed like a good way to go. Readers get a beginning, middle and end story that stands on it’s own but also ties into the book itself. The ashcan is also a nice little introduction to my work in general. On top of it, I brought down 55 galleys of my book that I had done up through Lulu.com. This is the complete book - all 143 pages of it. These were going to be given away to key people (folks who got my press kit, retailers, publishers at the show, people who seemed really keen on my stuff, etc…). On top of it, I had done up a number of giclee prints (measuring 11” by 17”) to give out to really interested people. These helped on another front: since I wasn’t super happy with how the Lulu.com books turned out, the prints helped reinforce what the final pages will look like. Lastly, we had some candy and bookmarks to hand out, too. Good group of swag, all for free, and all done in the interest in drumming up support.

The good news is that we distributed all 300 copies of the ashcan. I figure that we had about 215 at our table with the rest either at the freebie tables or given out to a few retailers. Not everyone wants a freebie, of course, but my “back of the envelope” calculations figure that we probably gave it away to 90% of the attendees we saw. That gives us around 240 visitors to our table over the course of the show. Some stopped just long enough to grab a freebie and scooted. Others would stop, chat, flip through my portfolio, look at the galley and generally act civilized before moving on. I figure the time each attendee stayed could range from 20 seconds to 10 minutes with the average probably being around 3 minutes. I really wish we could drive that up, but I’ll take what I can get.

Now, if I’m right about that average of 3 minutes and also right with the 240 visitors, then we had about 720 minutes of total attendee visits for the show. Or about 12 hours (720/60). APE lasted about 15 hours (11-7 on Saturday and 11-6 on Sunday) so we had about 3 hours of lull time for the entire show. I can’t completely verify that, but it feels about right. This is partially why I think that the attendance for the show was on the low side. There were obvious lags when there was just no traffic at all. You could see the “bald spots” in the corridors when there were few people wandering around. I wonder how exhibitors on each side of the main floor found it?

On the galley front, I came home with 10 left over. Cool beans. Most of the 45 were given out at the show itself but the problem here is that a good chunk of these galleys were already spoken for. They had nothing to do with visitors to our table. These were the copies I wanted to get into specific hands. When I adjust for that, I probably had about 20 that I gave to “keen” people at our table directly. That puts our “keenness” rate at around 8% (20/240). That's actually 12% less than the 80/20 rule, but I was still fairly pleased.

This is where it gets interesting (well, at least if you’re me). If that 8% would have turned into actual sales, I would have sold about $400 worth of books for the weekend (20 copies times $20 – the $20 retail price I’m pulling out of thin air but it’s around right for my book). That’s a big assumption, I know. From a dollars and cents point of view, it would have paid for the table and covered some of ye olde cost of goods sold. Not great, but something. The catch is that we really don’t know. Someone can be incredibly enthusiastic about your work but still stop cold when it comes to shelling out $20. Odds are some of these people would have balked at the $20 and just grabbed an ashcan instead. How many? Who knows?

Since we weren’t selling anything, how did it go? Well, pretty much every single person who got an ashcan at our table (again, since about 215 ashcans were given away, we probably chatted with 200 of these people) were asked to give us some feedback. So far, that hasn’t happened. Now it’s only been a week, but I haven’t received any email from anyone who got one. Not a single one. Sigh. Yes, you could argue that this has really been a short period of time so there’s no reason to worry. But…this is exactly what’s happened with the previous three cons. No news, unfortunately, has not proven to be good news. It could change and the jury’s still out, but I’m not optimistic that I’m going to get the feedback I had hoped for.

The ashcan actually put us in a tricky situation: I had talked a lot with a few friends leading up to APE about changing our giveaway strategy. Instead of just giving them away, one option was to specifically ask attendees for contact information in exchange for an ashcan. Normally, we passively collect email addresses on our mailing list but that hasn’t been extremely effective (we got maybe 10 new names this time around). Instead, we could have tried this new approach and then done follow-up directly with each recipient. It sounds easy to say as I write this (and was, when we talked about it before APE) but when we were actually on the floor it was a far different thing. It seemed extremely pushy. Aggressive, even. Moggy and I kinda decided mutually to pass on it for now and take our chances with asking people to get back to us. Unfortunately, when the entire reason we’ve gone to a con is to get feedback, this may not have been the smartest thing in the world to do. Double sigh.

I’m also quite interested to know what people thought of the galley. The story, of course, won’t work for everyone. It’s tricky subject matter and that will create problems for some. Not everyone digs my style and that’s ok, too. On top of it, it’s a smidgen rough. As I mentioned above, Lulu.com doesn’t seem to be able to handle my washes all that well. They print extremely muted and I’m really thankful I had the prints and portfolio samples to show how the pages are meant to look. I’m also lucky that I do have a lot of contact info regarding who got these and I can (and will) do follow-up. We'll see how that goes.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment, when I look back on it, was the lack of success with the press kits. Despite the fact that I had an email exchanges before the kits were mailed, very few people actually sought us out on the convention floor. Take, for example, librarians. I had specifically contacted a number of Bay area librarians who I know (from research, folks!) are keen on graphic novels. Despite the fact that the email feedback was quite positive, not a one swung by our table. ‘Course, I have no idea if they actually attended APE so it’s a smidgen hard to judge. I went to a great deal of effort contacting them and I’m (understandably) disappointed that I couldn’t chat with any in person. My book won’t set the retail world on fire and it’ll take librarians to help push it over the hump. Not being able to get galleys into the hands of these people was quite frustrating. It’ll come, but I’ll have to do it through direct mail instead. And I lose out on what I was hoping for the most – the chance to talk in person and hopefully get them fired up about it. Hearts and minds is what I need.

On a broader level, we really weren’t able to network all that well, despite the better table placement. One concern I’ve long had with conventions in general is that the key people I would hope to talk to don’t know I exist. On top of it, I don’t know they’re there, either. What do I mean? Well, here’s a “fer instance”: it turns out that Gina Gagliano, one of the high muckety-mucks at First Second Books, was at APE. I had no idea. It would have been fantastic to give her a galley, especially since I would love to freakin’ talk with these folks about this book or perhaps another one down the road. I just don’t have an “in.” One hopes that being at a con will help pave the way for this type of networking, but time after time that hasn't happened for us. In addition, other media were there covering the event (hell, even Wizard and Newsarama were there and did some stuff on Hope Larson, Gene Yang, and whatnot) but we didn’t see any of these people. Quite honestly, we have no pull at all. As a result, you’re totally reliant on people finding you (I should add that I tried quite hard to get a list of media contacts from the APE powers that be. I really wanted to know who would be there, at least on the media front, so I could contact them directly myself. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given that info).

Again, the whole reason we went was to try and build awareness for my work. That’s the only reason for us to go to a con. Give out stuff and try and create a groundswell for the book. Create a buzz and get people talking. It costs a huge chunk of change to go to these things (remember that we came down from Canada) and the only “return on investment” I’m looking for is some love. Emails and blog mentions. Hell, I'd even take negative reviews as long as it was something (it's the ol' Oscar Wilde line, "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about"). Simply put, no word of mouth equals a pretty big failure from where I sit. On top of it, I was actually a bit stunned to realize that we didn’t have any one come up remembering us from last year. Hell, at SPX last fall we at least had a few familiar faces swing by. I think this time around we had one guy who remembered my stuff. That either says one of two things: the memories of APE attendees are too short. Or APE isn’t doing a great job getting repeat visitors on an annual basis (this is another good argument for a survey by Comic Con. It would be really interesting to know how many people attend APE annually).

So that pretty sums up my own experiences. So far, we haven’t gotten what I wanted at all from APE...or even SPX. Again, it’s not dollars that I’m looking for. We had nothing for sale. It’s buzz and feedback and love. With four cons under our belt, I haven’t gotten a sense that any of this is happening. Put it another way: if it wasn’t for this blog, would you have ever heard of me or my book?

Exactly.

The last post will cover my thoughts on APE in general. How much did we spend? What the hell do I think of the whole art con thing? Was it a good vacation?  All of this will be covered in the second part of this essay!