Newb Successfully Tables At A Festival For The First Time

What a great experience I had yesterday, tabling for the first time at a comics festival (or at any event)!

And you could not have asked for a better event to start your comics exhibiting journey with than Short Run Comix Festival.

It was a great crowd with tons of foot traffic and people who were interested in comics and there to buy comics and find new stories and artists to follow. I feel fortunate to have gotten to do this. And hopefully more in the future.

Thank you to everyone for stopping by my table, buying a copy of Phased, and checking out Blood of My Blood!

And special thanks to those who stopped by to say “hi” even though they may already have had a copy (or two!) of Phased!

With Short Run now in the books, it’s time for me to turn back to illustrating Blood of My Blood.

Below, I’ll share:

1. Lessons about exhibiting that I confirmed and learned

2. How exhibiting is like being a Non-Player Character (NPC)

3. How I pulled off a Houdini to start the day

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Lessons Confirmed and Learned

I benefited a lot from a couple key tips that experienced exhibitors have shared (I don’t remember where I heard these particular points…but they’re well-worn best practices). I’ve also added a little of my own findings/thoughts:

1. Stand as much as you can rather than sit. It’s much easier to engage people who are wandering by when it looks like you are engaged, yourself. Also, standing will give you more energy to engage people just by nature of your pose.

2. Proactively talk to people and invite them in. A lot of people feel a little awkward approaching tables (or is that just me?) even if they’re interested in what you’re presenting. You can start with just saying “hi, how are you?” If they’re not interested, they’ll keep moving. But if they are interested or might be, then you’ve made it clear that they are welcome and started a conversation.

And this one’s from me:

3. Don’t put the expectation or pressure on yourself that everyone who considers your wares must make a purchase or else it’s a failure. Just approach each interaction with the intent to share your enthusiasm for the craft and what you’ve created (hopefully you do feel good about what you’ve created and are selling!) with your conversation partner. If what you’re offering isn’t what one customer is looking for, that’s ok, maybe it is what the next customer is looking for. I find it’s much more enjoyable to approach the activity like tending a garden and building connection with people rather than trying to “sell” things. But then, I’ve never been very motivated by or good at the whole “make as much money as you can” thing. The freedom to take my approach is one of the benefits of having a day job that pays the bills rather than needing your art to support you.

How Exhibiting Is Like Being A Non-Player Character (NPC)

You end up saying the same things over and over again to different people when you’re exhibiting.

With Short Run, it’s a manageable enough size (although packed with exhibitors) that people like to walk around the whole show (some of them many times) before deciding what they want to buy.

After several hours, when I started to see some of the same faces walking by, I started to worry that I might be repeating myself to someone who may have stopped at my table earlier (more so with people wearing masks), like an NPC running ye olde shoppe in a role-playing game… Or this quest giver in the Jumanji reboot.

A *ahem* Comical Start to the Day

Things got off to a rough start when I utterly jammed my jacket zipper on my neck gaiter on my way out in the morning. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out what was going on with the jam, which direction it was in, and pulling the fabric out of the zipper becuase it was in the jacket close to my neck.

Though, even in the moment I could see the humor to being stuck in your jacket.

I hoped the event hall would be cool, in which case it would be ok to be trapped in extra layers.

Alas, it was not. Felt like mid-70’s in there, and I quickly started to feel too warm.

Here I am after setting my booth up before doors opened, still in my straightjacket with a fleece underneath:

I considered trying to pull my jacket off like a sweater, but the zipper was stuck too close to my chin and that wasn’t an option.

I figured if I couldn’t get it unstuck when I got home, I could always be cut out of the jacket. But in the meantime, I had 7 hours of tabling in a warm space to get through, and all the extra bodies of the visitors had yet to arrive.

People like sweaty salesmen, right?

Fortunately, I managed to figure out that the direction of the jam had actually been on a downward tug rather than an upward one as one might have assumed since I was putting on the jacket when it happened—but a slight snag had cause me to jerk the zipper back down, which must have been what cause the big jam.

Some awkward and persistent finagling of the zipper with the neck gaiter pulled off of my neck and hanging down inside my jacket and one hand working that down from inside my jacket with the other holding the zipper upward from the outside finally dislodged the fabric.

I was free!

And that’s why I’m in just a t-shirt in the pic of me grinning behind my table, having a great comics fest at room temperature. Harry Houdini would be proud of me.