New Year's Day is a new beginning, so it's a good time to take stock of the past year and plan for the future.

The past year has been frustrating. It wasn't horrible like 2020 when everything shut down, or 2017 and 2014 when loss cast a pall over the whole year. But it just seemed like things refused to go right. Convention sales were mediocre at ( Read more... )

This weekend, we're at Grand Rapids Comic Con at DeVos Place in downtown Grand Rapids. This is our last event of 2024, and we're hoping for a strong finish.

If you're in the Grand Rapids area, we'd love to see you. We're in booths 806-810.

It’s always interesting to see how long it takes to get everything loaded in at a given convention-and how it differs both from other years of that con, and from other conventions both at the same venue and at other venues. For a business, this can make a huge difference-being ready to sell when the doors open, vs scrambling to get things out of ( Read more... )

This is the second year of this new anime convention, put on by the people who run Planet Comic Con. The Kansas City Convention Center (Bartle Hall) is an expensive venue, so the booths are priced proportionately, and this is an election year, which means that people are less willing to spend. Also, we were somewhat down on our merchandise -- and ( Read more... )

We're in Collinsville, Illinois this weekend for Archon, which is the St. Louis area's oldest science fiction convention. However, the trip down to it became Interesting in a way I could've done without -- the van began to vibrate as we headed down I-55 on the second day of the journey (after a visit to family Wednesday night). I was glad to get ( Read more... )

A number of stores are going to digital price tags on their store shelves. This would relieve them of the expense of having an employee go around the store and replace the printed price tags each time they need to change a price ( Read more... )

Today as I was driving the van home after its oil change and general maintenance, I realized that if we hadn't been waitlisted for vendor hall space at AnimeIowa, we'd be somewhere on I-80 or I-74, heading back from Coralville, Iowa. Given that AnimeIowa has relatively low booth costs, it's quite possible that we could've turned a decent profit -- ( Read more... )

We had actually not even planned to sell at InConJunction. When we saw that three other conventions were going to be lined up in the three previous weeks, we figured that four cons in a row would simply be too much. We'd just be panelists and otherwise hang out ( Read more... )

Load-out wasn’t that difficult, but it took more out of me than I’d expected. I started falling asleep right after supper. I’m going to bed early and will do Sunday writing challenges tomorrow.

JAFAX is a smaller convention, so we have to adjust our expectations accordingly. However, in previous years, it's been a cheerfully busy convention and we've always been able to make a profit, if only a small one ( Read more... )