thread: 2012-03-15 : Monster Mania Con
On 2012-03-15, Ewen Cluney wrote:
Last year I did booths at two different cons, and the difference was pretty much night and day.
Kin-Yoobi Con is a very, very small anime con (maybe 200 people total) in Hayward, CA, and I went with copies of Maid RPG and some stuff from my webcomic. We sold 5 copies of Maid RPG, which was pretty damn good considering that that was 1 copy sold per 40 attendees.
Then I did a booth at the Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco. I brought Maid RPG and my webcomic stuff again, and Ben brought a bunch of Cel*Style games. We sold a smattering of webcomic and Cel*Style stuff, but zero copies of Maid RPG, and took in less money total than at Kin-Yoobi Con. APE is a great event for indie comics and artsy stuff, but it was frustrating in that the more we had to explain what an RPG is, the less likely they were to buy any. (On the plus side, I did meet a few Maid RPG fans.)
I had left Kin-Yoobi Con thinking that anime fans were more into stuff with characters they already know (as evidenced by how well that kind of thing sells in the Artists Alley) while the APE crowd would want more original stuff, except that stuff like the "Doctor Mew" prints (with Doctor Who drawn as cats) were selling like hotcakes at APE. On the other hand, anime fans were definitely a minority at APE.
Of the two I definitely do feel more inclined to give selling RPGs to anime fans another try, and I may end up doing just that some time this year.
