Last weekend I attended Ret-Con, the local Durham specfic convention. It’s pleasantly close, maybe 6 miles up highway 54, which is nice, and I see a lot of people I know — fellow local author Samantha Bryant, Tera Fulbright of ConGregate, guest of honor Natania Barron and a few others.
I attended last year. This year, though, I had an author table.
It’s a small convention so everyone doing anything has to pass through Author’s Alley, plus my table was right in front of the dealer’s room. Plus I’m really good at bookselling — I used to do it for a day job — so any time I made eye contact with someone passing by, I asked if they’d like to buy a book. Sometimes they did.
The end result: $300 in sales. I feel quite pleased. There was a time I’d have treated this as special income and bought myself some sort of treat with a little of the money. These days it’s just income, plus my birthday’s approaching so I don’t want to buy myself anything yet. Still, the accomplishment is satisfying.
I sold copies of everything Behold the Book publishes except Atoms for Peace, which has been my best seller at other cons. Not that I mind, it’s just interesting to see the variation.
They like me. They really like me.
