Saturday's events at the UK Webcomix THING was both great fun and a more than reasonable success.
l made enough from the sales of Odd-Fish stuff to cover expenses and a couple of quid extra.
But more importantly I got a helluva lot of positive comments, met a shed-load of lovely people and gained a huge pile of useful information, contacts and ideas.
I'm not a very sociable person and I'm not generally comfortable in large groups of strangers but at the THING I never felt uncomfortable or out of place and everyone was very friendly. I guess it's because everyone there was of a like mind and interested in the same thing.
Anyway, I managed to get all the stuff I was hoping to take completed with only one exception, the keyrings. I just didn't have the time to get them done, but I don't think it was any great loss. I'm not sure they would have sold well anyway.
What did and didn't sell well was actually somewhat of a surprise to me. I'd hoped that the Book would sell well and indeed it did, with several people making use of the voucher for £3 off that I put on this site a few days before the event. But what really surprised me was the badges. Having been to the THING the previous year as a visitor to 'scope out' the place and see what went down well I'd seen that badges seemed to be selling really well with pretty much everyone doing them and all at the same price. They seemed to be the 'default' merchandise. So this year I made sure I took a ton of badges in five different designs to make sure I was fully prepared to optimise the opportunity. I took a total of 400 badges in all! How many got bought? Six. Go figure.
What did sell well were the Lovecraft and Howard fuzzybugs (So cute!) and again very much to my surprise, the framed prints I'd made of several of the more popular Odd-Fish strips.
The mugs and the pens got many a comment but didn't do so well on the sales. Doesn't matter though, the whole point of the event was a learning exercise to see what went well with the public in person as opposed to over the 'net.
Before I arrived at the venue I had been a little worried that all the stuff I'd brought along wasn't going to be enough to fill the table I'd been given but once I started setting up (after a minor snag with the venue being locked and no one knowing who had the keys) I found that actually there was only just enough room even though I had inexplicably been given a larger table than many other exhibitors.
After a fair bit of re-arranging and jiggery-pokery I got everything just so and I have to say, I was very pleased with how it all turned out.Unfortunately, the only thing I had to take pictures with was my phone and the photos didn't come out too well but I'm sure you can get the gist of how things looked.
Here's to next year!

One last thing for those of you who have persevered this far down this long and rambling diatribe, over the next few days I'll be setting up an online shop on Odd-fish so that the poor people who weren't able to attend the THING can treat themselves to Odd-Fish goodies. Watch this space.