I will show your site to my son who has the Scottish national trait of being reserved. I have no doubt that he will end up attending similar things in his future and needs to learn from you.

Got to go will be back to read your web comic tips although I do cartoons. I’m busy transferring my static xhtml Scottish cartoon site into Wordpress.

See my old comics at http://www.ascottillustration.com/comics if you want – done a longish time ago.

In terms of a cheapo, I’d highly recommend buttons. You know? the little round ones that pin onto stuff? Yeah, they seem to be insanely popular, especially if you take the same approach you did with the shirts. Most people do sort of random funny/kitchy/themed stuff with them and people actively collect them. They seem to sell universally well at most conventions I’ve ever been at (even not being in). Be careful if you intend to do Artist Alleys rather than buy a full on vendor booth. Sometimes they restrict the type of merchandise you can sell. Make sure you read the rules of different conventions and from year to year. Sometimes commercially produced items, like shotglasses or blankets are not permitted in anything but the dealers booths. I also found sharing a table with another artist with a similar theme or at least friendly with was really awesome. Its also cheaper that way.

I don’t think I’ve ever broken even at a convention at an AA, although I’ve made hundreds of dollars. I think if I did more local stuff, it would be okay, but I have never made more than 600$ USD. Which doesn’t cover the cost of travel/accommodation/product/table for me to the US. I think in part it had to do with some bad luck (where the AA is in the convention can make or break you) and merch choices. Like you, I’ve learned I will never go back to a con without certain things.. like a printed book, and more werewolf art prints/posters. (one of my best sellers.) Probably do shirts this time as well.

As you mentioned, and it can’t be impressed enough, if you want to make the most of your con time, you have to ACTIVELY ENGAGE the people going by. You have to smile and talk to people. You can’t just sit in the booth and be sour. You gotta look, smile, engage, and say “Hi! Wanna check out my stuff?”. Also like you said, you have to kinda work out a brief spiel, you can’t linger too long or people do lose interest, and you have a lot of people to engage, you can’t spend too much time lollygagging with people who aren’t going to buy; if selling is your primary goal. But you want to be polite and still leave them feeling like they’ve been treated well and you are a cool person. So its a fine line.

I was looking at your comic pages, and I think you could output them fairly well on 11×17 pages as is, and put them in a portfolio book of same size to display them. You can have this done digitally through color photocopiers fairly cheaply. I actually had some ideas on how they could be broken up to be printed in a book, but would require a large focus on spreads and some of the panels might need to be broken up and rearranged slightly. Some pages would be more challenging than others, but printing them on larger paper would solve some of the problems. Not all of them, they’d still need some rejigging, but I could see how it could be done. If you are interested I could give you a hand. As a print designer, solving problems like this for printing is what i do for a living. XD

Drop me a line if you are interested. ^^ Otherwise, great article.