Monday 30 March 2009

The weekend...

...was a bit up and down for me. A wonderful sunny Sunday spent selling comics at the Cumberland Arms. Bit o' Class. However, the room we were in was cold and dark and miserable. Boo! However, there was a really good atmosphere around our table. Yay! But it didn't really yield many sales. Rubbish! Then I went home. Woo-hoo! Then I made a couple of sales without even being there. Oh, misery!

Or something like that. What the event showed was a dramatic gap in my defences, people don't like comics, or at least, they don't seem to buy them; they do like free stuff and postcards, so perhaps that's where I should concentrate some of my efforts. So I've got plenty of stuff to get on with over Easter. Expect more updates with pictures, but the same constant air of disappointment.

Andy has some photos and better analysis.

3 comments:

thismeanswaugh said...

Don't be disheartened mate. As a stall we still sold more than most of the other stalls combined.

Gary said...

Ah, I just like a whinge. Or existential crisis as I should call them.

And, yes, we did beat everyone else. Not that it's a competition or anything...

Michael Duckett said...

I find pretty much every zine or small press stall does poorly on sales - with the one exception of the London Zine Symposium.
Which is why there aren't many super-capitalists drawing their own comics. But I do love the interactions, and isn't it an amazing feeling when someone says they love something you did!

I'm sharing a stall at the star & shadow market on 3rd May if you (or anyone) wants to put a couple of comics on it for sale-or-return. There's also scope at the 'DIY Aye!' event at the same venue on 16th May for a stall - I'd love to have a few things available there so would happily 'run' a little table. But I wouldn't sit all day in a poky room on my own for anything!

I think one wonderful thing we as a local small press community could do is shared stalls, or some kind of system of having each others' productions with us whenever we do one. It could be as simple as a cardboard display stand with two copies of everything which gets passed round us one by one.