How to hand-sell your art at cons and markets

The money isn’t the point.

Photo by Beata Ratuszniak on Unsplash

Hey, friends. Welcome back to Poe Can Save Your Life, my occasional newsletter about art, writing, publishing, history-ing. I’ve had a bunch of new sign-ups in the last few weeks, and if that’s you, welcome. Glad to have you.

Last time out, I was talking about Fan Studies and how this obscure academic discipline could help you land a book deal—or just help you think through audiences for your work. If you missed that post, click here.

Since writing it, I’ve noticed how my three-year-old likes YouTube fan art even more than he likes the “original” media properties which the fan art riffs upon. That is, instead of watching Cars 2, he’d rather watch a random YouTuber toss toy cars one by one into a not particularly clean swimming pool. Please do not email me about very young children and screen time, I am worried enough already!!! This is just a way of saying that I expect fan culture to become even more important as my kiddo’s generation grows up, moving even closer to the absolute center of life. Usually I do not feel comfortable making guesses about what his life is going to look like. However, this is one limb I’ll clamber out on.

Today’s post is related. It’s my long-teased guide explaining how you can hand-sell your art at fan cons.

Below, there’s a step-by-step playbook, but first: what are some reasons for selling your art at cons, anyway?

• The whites of their eyes. Sitting there behind your rickety booth, you witness firsthand what happens when someone picks up your book, flips it over, and starts reading the back-cover copy. It’s excruciating, especially the first couple of times. But it’s also fascinating. I am just there basically levitating out of sheer awkwardness as people get the joke of my book—or don’t. Maybe around 50 percent get it right away, while the other 50 percent put it down posthaste, muttering something like, “Ugh. PASS.” It’s like I’m conducting a sociological experiment, the object of which is to find my people, which brings us to:

• Directly connecting with the fan populations most likely to like your work. Back when I sold my book to my publisher, I talked a big game about how Poe has 4 million fans on Facebook, and how these fans would yada yada yada buy my book. The issue is that many online Poe fan groups are tightly controlled, so you can’t just post whatever you want on their pages. Nor can you bring the human touch, the small talk, the connection that comes from inscribing the book to someone’s mom, or their friend Emily (“I hear you hate puns, SORRY!!!”). I think it’s a slow but valid way to build a platform, and one of the sheer greatest things about it is that it does not involve performing your personality online. Instead of doing hammy internet things, you’re just there, a person, talking to another person. In related news:

• Vending at cons is a good way to make friends. You meet the other artist-vendors sitting at the booths beside yours, and you meet con-goers, i.e., people who care so much about stories that they get up early on a Saturday, deck themselves out in anime cosplay (et all), and then stuff their bedecked selves into their buddy’s Sentra, trekking to some nearby convention center to shop for indie sci-fi novels and lightsabers before lunch! No one goes to a con because they’re too cool for such things, and this kind of self-selection at scale makes for a fun crowd. Kind people. Cool people. People who are passionate about something, people who are fun and interesting to chat to. If you ever want to feel like the kids who had a rough ride in high school ended up happy, living their best lives at least some of the time, you should go to a con. It’s like Burning Man for nerds, and I include myself in that population. 

It’s more about connection than money, I guess, if that is not too cheesy to say. So, if any of this sounds appealing, and like it could be the right fit for your art, how might you get started?

Where to find the cheapest booth + the equipment you’ll need

First, you should (probably) attend a fan con yourself. There are directories of these events where you can search for cons in your area. Here’s one I’ve used myself. It links to each con’s dedicated website.

Or, if you want to jump right into vending, you can click through the websites and look for the Vendor tab, under which you’ll find information about signing up. Often, you need to sign up a year or more in advance of the con’s scheduled date, i.e., you sign up now to vend at Whatever Con 2024. The bigger and more popular the con, the faster vendor spots get snapped up.

The cheapest vendor slots will be in the “Artists Alley.” This is the section of a con devoted to creators closer to the beginning of their careers, and to one-man shops who don’t necessarily need a ton of space to sell their wares.

Many cons provide a certain amount of equipment—tables and chairs, possibly electricity and Wi-Fi—to every vendor, which means all you need to bring are decorations for your table and, of course, enough stock of whatever you’re selling. In my case, I’m getting books from my publisher.

Pricing + payments

You might be interested to hear that, after a traditional publisher buys your book and gives you your advance, you have to pay for copies. The day your book is published, Hachette (or whoever) sends you 30 courtesy copies for you to give out to friends, or, I don’t know, pile on your bedside table so that every morning you wake up to the sight.

Beyond those 30 copies, you pay the same rate bookstores pay. In my case, my book retails for $18. My publisher sells it to bookstores for $9 a copy, and the bookstores sell it for $18, making their money on the spread. Amazon, with its volume and market power, can take a lower margin. They buy my book for $9 a copy from my publisher, and then they turn around and sell it for $13.59, pocketing that smaller spread but likely making more money via sheer volume.

I buy copies at $9 too, then sell them for whatever price I set. I’m not aiming to make money by vending, so I tend to price my book at $15 each or two copies for $20, which incentivizes people to buy more than one copy. This way I end up selling many more books, especially around the holidays when people are gift-shopping. I also tend to lower the price on the last day of the con, simply because I don’t want to lug copies out of the convention center and back to my crumb-ridden Ford Edge, where the stroller already vampires most of the trunk space. So, the last day of a con, I usually sell copies for $10, and this tends to get them moving pretty quickly.

I take payments in cash, via Venmo and Cash App, and credit card payments through the Square app on my phone. Speaking of, I remain completely amazed that I can tap someone’s card to the screen of my iPhone and suddenly the Square app will erupt in tiny stars while the whole device vibrates in my hand and $15 flies between somebody else’s bank account and mine. How is this not magic?? Thank God for STEM-brained people.

But back to payments. I will say that at very large, highly trafficked cons, you may struggle to get a signal, and/or the Wi-Fi may be super slow, such that your phone will take forever to process a payment. You might want to get a backup card reader that doesn’t require an internet connection. I’ve never gotten around to doing this, or I’d recommend one. When I can’t get a signal, I usually text the buyer a screenshot of my Venmo QR code and ask them to hit me later once they’ve got a signal. I’ve never had someone not pay—like I said, con-goers tend to be really nice.

Getting decked out + a few tips and tricks I learned by humiliating myself, per usual

To decorate my booth, I grab items from Party City (Christmas lights, giant gold letters spelling P-O-E, etc., cheesy of course), and display the award my book won. I get my signage from Vistaprint. There may be cheaper places to procure signage; I just find that site really straightforward. I bought my basic table-covering from Amazon. None of these are affiliate links. I’m just recommending what I use.

If you’re feeling stuck about how you might decorate your booth, google “booth decoration [con name].” There are usually examples, and these can help you idea-gen.

That said, there’s the usual learning curve to it all, and here again, people tend to be cool. Every con I’ve gone to, I’ve met vendors who volunteered tips about how they sell more or otherwise optimize their operations. For instance, a 21-year-old sticker magnate I met at Galaxy Con told me to tuck business cards into every copy I sell.

DUH. Obviously, I should’ve been doing that all along. He also advised me on a business-card design that is simply my name and a QR code which directs to my Linktree. The point is to make it easy for buyers to find and connect with you online.

It works, too. A portion of the people you meet start following you on Twitter or Instagram, or start emailing you, or friend you on Facebook. Yes, through a business card, which seems so 1982 and dumb, right! If it hadn’t been a 21-year-old—an honest to God young person—telling me to do this, I would never have done it. But he did tell me, and I appreciated it, and here we are.

Lastly, re: booths and setup, I keep a big bowl of candy in eyesight at all times. As you might imagine, this encourages people to stop at my booth. I don’t do this to pressure folks into feeling like they must buy my book because I gave them a tiny crinkly packet of Swedish Fish, although I’m aware of that sales trick. It’s the reason the dude at the car dealership tries to give you a “free” bottle of water as soon as he sees you. No, I do it because little kids reliably stop and talk to me while they snatch a Tootsie Pop, and often they’re in these adorable costumes, and it’s a reason to live. You end up talking to eight-year-olds who are writing 6-part fantasy series during their summer breaks and teenagers whose parents named them after a Buffy character or similar. I’ve met more than one Cordelia. It’s great. Thus far maybe five tweens/teens have also bought my book to give to their English teachers. I really love hearing that, it just makes me so happy, IIRC high school English teachers are the best.

Anyway, so those are the basics of con vending. If you decide to try it, break a leg! I’m no expert, but I’ll happily answer any questions you have in the comments or by email.

A word about the next post

Next up: I’m going to bring you an interview with Darius Antwan Stewart, whose absolutely beautiful memoir, Be Not Afraid of My Body, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing in 2024. He’s going to tell you what it’s like to get an acceptance from the Iowa Writers Workshop (apparently they call you), how he got a book deal for his memoir, and his experience of writing a book so intense, and so real, and did I mention so beautiful?

Peep my ecstatic blurb below, and in the meantime, here’s his website.

“Funny, sexy, sad, tender, poignant, brutal and heartbreaking, but always vivid, always alive—a major literary event that will justly draw comparisons to Baldwin and Styron. Do yourself a favor, and don't wait to read it.”

A good link

If, like me, you are also in a life-phase in which you’re finding deep meaning in Fleetwood Mac songs, then this episode of You’re Wrong About is probably very much your sort of thing. It’s two hours long and details the making of Rumours.

This essay—published a few years back—is about why it’s no longer worthwhile to be a freelance journalist writing for outlets. I think the guy is dead right, though I still find myself freelancing here and there. This essay by Sarah Rose Etter, “You don’t need to suffer to make art—but it can help,” is good, too, especially for those working on novels.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m wishing you the best with your efforts at selling books, paintings, stickers, and what not, on some lovely Saturday morning in 2024.

Cat