Hello people that randomly look at my posts!

It’s time for a long overdue update regarding the conventions this year and the lessons learned and i will attempt to stay positive all the way through though i promise nothing but honest truth either way.

I want to say for the most part i am happy to report that the conventions i chose to go to this year overall were good having an eye for things and knowing people is a tremendous help in that regard, Midwest Gamefest was awesome as it is every year, the other small cons i went to i at least made table and some extra but nothing major was an issue with them , i did however learn that i wont be working on my birthday ever again … as much as i love the spooky kid community that one day event was not a great start to the day.

Kantcon which normally is awesome had the hiccup of using a new venue that unfortunately split the vendors into upstairs and downstairs and that didn’t do super awesome for some folks though from what i hear vendors in general did so so at this years event so i guess maybe there were more factors involved so i wont put too much blame on the vendors cause it was busy, just people weren’t in the spending mood i guess.

Finally we wander into this last weekends event and i will be honest and blunt. I did the convention last year (well a version of it run by one of the major names attached to this one) and it was ok, i made table and some last year so when they teamed up with another group this year to bring in more traffic i figured why not give them one more chance since i had Kanimacon cancel on me and i had a spot to fill i decided why not. I did my due diligence and asked questions cause i was skeptical and its always a little weird when a convention has to reach out to folks to get vendors there, so i asked what kind of advertising they had done cause i didn’t even know they were doing anything this year, they assured me they had done plenty of advertising and said via message “We’ve sold more tickets ahead of time than usual for (convention name). (Convention name) grows at least 20% every year, so this year we anticipate 3800 tickets sold!”
And let me tell you, no… that was absolutely false, i mean maybe i could blame the venue location change, the fact that it was in downtown KC (which is a nightmare to navigate and free parking is a myth) unless they all came in, ignored our row and/or i was sleeping the whole time … no… this convention was smaller then i was led to believe, their advertising was in fact just them sending out blasts to their respective communities (and not getting new folks) and just an overall mess… i count myself lucky that i made $18 after table and parking costs.

Moral of the story and the TLDR Lessons here:
Know your audience, don’t do conventions without research, and don’t trust numbers unless you can verify them from a trusted source that has gone there before.

I had a bad convention, i learned a lesson, I’m thankful it wasn’t a harder one.

~ John aka Mr. Biscuits