Monday, August 17, 2009

HELPER ARTS FESTIVAL

Here's my "booth" at the Helper Arts Festival.

Here's the low down: I sold 5 books in two days. 2 the first, 3 the second. I don't think that I was at the right venue. It was more of a "western jewelry festival" more than an "arts" festival. (not that jewelry isn't art). There were some painters and stuff, but not as much as I thought. But, considering the extremely LOW number of my target audience, young families with boys 5-9, I actually did pretty good. A HUGE majority of the foot traffic there was females 18-25 looking for jewelry.

My first event, I learned A LOT! From now on, I think I'm only going to do book fairs. Also, I think I will only do INDOOR events.

First day - I'd been set up for 20 minutes and it started the HAIL the size of quarters! My wife and I ducked under our table along with our books trying to stay dry, which failed. The second day, wind gusts kept blowing everything over. Let me ask you something blog readers: Is it a rule that your first show has to go terrible?

The one shining star at this show was a little boy named Paul and his mom. They were the first to buy my book. The mom was flipping through book saying, "Wow, this book has ninjas, pirates, dinosaurs, everything. Do you want this book Paul?" Then his eyes got really big with a great smile on his face and said "YEAH!" It was awesome. I almost got a little teary eyed. Thank you Paul and Paul's mom. You guys are awesome!

2 comments:

linuxmd said...

sorry to hear that your first show didn't got that great. Glad you sold 5 books though!

Bruce Almighty said...

Yeah, finding your right demographic will boost things. Its cool about the kid tho. There's your target audience