A Bittercon for Windycon
With all the crazy stuff going on this week (the election, the horror in Amsterdam), I'd completely forgotten that this weekend is Windycon. I'd intended to do a Bittercon for it, since we haven't been able to go to it since it lost money for us two years in a row, 2016 and 2017.
Back in the 1990's, when I was first doing conventions, I considered it one of the "big" conventions. If we could get tables (it had a very small dealers' room, and other than a few major dealers who were guaranteed tables, there was a sort of lottery by which the concom drew names), we were pretty much guaranteed financial success.
By the mid-2000's, it wasn't doing so well -- but then, neither were a lot of the conventions we'd been doing. After the disaster of the 2005 Windycon, in which we lost money and then had major vehicle trouble on the way home, we simply stopped going for almost a decade. I did Bittercon a few of them, but we could no longer justify going.
In 2013 we went back to another Chicago-area convention after there was a change in leadership and a person we had problems with was no longer running the dealers' room. While we were there, the dealers' room coordinator for Windycon suggested we give it another try, and we actually had some pretty good luck with our new lineup of merchandise, so we'd stayed there as long as it was profitable.
Even if it had been possible for us to continue going, we probably would've had to stop when Grand Rapids Comic Con moved to the same weekend. And while they're not the same weekend this year, I'd need a completely different mix of merchandise for each convention, and I just don't have the stamina to do one con, drive home, swap over the merchandise, then do the other.
Maybe if my indie publishing efforts take off, I might actually be able to justify a table at Windycon, and make sure that the sales copies of my books were where I could get at them at Windycon, then load them back up and be ready for Grand Rapids Comic Con. But at the rate things are going, that may be a few years -- and I'm not so young any more.
Back in the 1990's, when I was first doing conventions, I considered it one of the "big" conventions. If we could get tables (it had a very small dealers' room, and other than a few major dealers who were guaranteed tables, there was a sort of lottery by which the concom drew names), we were pretty much guaranteed financial success.
By the mid-2000's, it wasn't doing so well -- but then, neither were a lot of the conventions we'd been doing. After the disaster of the 2005 Windycon, in which we lost money and then had major vehicle trouble on the way home, we simply stopped going for almost a decade. I did Bittercon a few of them, but we could no longer justify going.
In 2013 we went back to another Chicago-area convention after there was a change in leadership and a person we had problems with was no longer running the dealers' room. While we were there, the dealers' room coordinator for Windycon suggested we give it another try, and we actually had some pretty good luck with our new lineup of merchandise, so we'd stayed there as long as it was profitable.
Even if it had been possible for us to continue going, we probably would've had to stop when Grand Rapids Comic Con moved to the same weekend. And while they're not the same weekend this year, I'd need a completely different mix of merchandise for each convention, and I just don't have the stamina to do one con, drive home, swap over the merchandise, then do the other.
Maybe if my indie publishing efforts take off, I might actually be able to justify a table at Windycon, and make sure that the sales copies of my books were where I could get at them at Windycon, then load them back up and be ready for Grand Rapids Comic Con. But at the rate things are going, that may be a few years -- and I'm not so young any more.