Comikaze was a bust this year, and we haven't yet figured out why. A little background: I've been an exhibitor at Comikaze since it began; it was my first convention as Foxwise, so even though we didn't do all that well last year (I think we sort of broke even; at any rate, we didn't make much more than the booth cost, but we did cover it and I was able to fling a few bucks at my poor underpaid assistants) and this year we're doing things like printing receipt pages on old notebook paper and conducting a long-running experiment to determine the smallest possible amount of burnishing liquid you can add to a gallon of water and still get metal (mostly) polished in the tumbler, I scrounged up the money for a corner booth, reasoning that we didn't do as well last year because we were crowded into a regular booth and people couldn't fully appreciate the awesomeness and variety of our wares. Our booth setup was really quite good this year, I thought (no credit to me; I wasn't even there for load-in); certainly better than last year's, which was pretty disastrous and made worse by the fact that too many of us were there. I suspect more than a few of last year's attendees saw our booth and believed we had gotten lost on our way to the flea market. (Not theRose Bowl flea market-- more like the Pacoima flea market).
Anyway, our booth looked good, our wares were, all modesty aside, kick-ass as well as varied and well-priced, the booth was manned by my three best and most experienced minions...and we made less than half the cost of the booth. Gross.
The powers that be had decided it'd be a swell idea to have all the exhibitors stuffed into a separate room away from all the celebrities and events, and to be fair, at first this seemed like a fairly swell-ish idea to me also -- no more crowds of autograph hounds charging past our both and distracting would-be customers, no more groups of people clustered right in front of our booth arguing over where to go next...just lots of people strolling up and down the aisles looking for things to buy. Except apparently, people decided to be thrifty this year by staying away from the booths, and you can't entice someone away from their budget when you're not even in the same hall.
I filled out a post-convention survey the Comikaze folks sent out, and asked them to please reconsider the 'separate the exhibitors from the rest of the convention' idea next year. And also to get rid of Fridays, which as far as I've been able to determine are never profitable for ANY of the exhibitors.
