ConCarolinas Day Two
No, there wasn’t a Day One report, mainly because there wasn’t a whole lot to say. Can you guess how discouraging it is for a bookseller or any other vendor to man the tables for 6 hours and end up with hardly any sales? Seriously, folks, we didn’t even cover our Thursday night dinner bill on Friday. Now, no dealer with any sense at all expects Friday (or the first day, whatever that might be) to be a good sales day, mainly because most potential buyers use Friday as “drool day”, to borrow a perfect term from one of those potential buyers. You know, the day when you stroll through the room to see what wares everybody has so you can budget your buying. Then, we dealers all look forward to really good sales on Saturday, traditionally the big day.
To go off on a tangent, this is a nice con and is generally well-run although we have a couple of serious issues that we didn’t know about until very VERY recently, too late to change our game plan. The hotel is beautiful and is situated in a lovely office and commercial park with wonderful vistas. It has a large body of water filled with ducks, geese, swans, turtles and at least one great blue heron. There are some very good restaurants, especially a place called Boardwalk Billy’s, obviously a favorite hangout for the locals judging by the crowd there on Saturday night when we made a return trip just to get dessert.
So, anyway, we looked forward to a day of brisk sales on Saturday.
Not happenin’.
Today, Sunday, won’t be a good day—never is because everybody has already spent their money by then. So, we will leave this con having paid for our hotel room and MAYBE all our meals. Forget covering our mileage/gas or tips we’ve shelled out or our costs to get books to sell at the con.
Why do we bother with cons? Well, this one is really different in a lot of ways from some we’ve done before—more about this one later—and they can be profitable, as well as entertaining, so we’ll keep searching for the ones that are right for us.
Besides, if we hadn’t come to ConCarolinas, we would have missed the great wildlife…
June 6, 2010
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
Loading ...
Leave a Reply