Flag of Convenience For the advancement of superb webcomics

Preparing for Webcomix Thing 2010 part 1

Well when I say, "preparing for the con", I meant just looking at the options.

Currently, we have booked tables number 63 & 64 which is just at the top. Behind us is Tom Siddell and the forever improving Gunnerkrigg Court and over in the corner is Canadian history maestro Kate Beaton.

But we'll focus on who is turning up later, for now we're going to talk about the initial stages of how the preparations for the convention are going.

Initial considerations

When I first sat down and thought about what to do, I couldn't think of anything so after consulting with The Coach (identity witheld) I split everything into three groups and these were:

1. Presentation - table, posters, covers, etc.
2. Giveaways - badges, postcards, book tokens, etc
3. Sellables - Books & merch.

The first two kind of interchange because they involve putting money down for stuff that you're either going to give away free or use for strictly promotional purposes only. After all, the main role of running a table at a convention is to promote your work and network with fans and other creators. So for the first two catagories I thought of basic things which would be pretty cheap combined:

1. Presentation - table cover,  poster with comic name on and stands to put books or free merch on.
2. Giveaways - badges & postcards.

The third isn't going to be covered until later so for now we're going to focus on posters, badges and postcards.

Posters

My thinking behind having a poster is that you can have something to grab people's attention with and then you can ply them with sweet talk and freebies and hopefully they'll follow you to the ends of the earth. Whether that works well for real I don't know but it is better than nothing.

A poster would be a standard 24 x 36 inch size (resolution 175 DPI) and after going to several UK sites (such as Zazzle.co.uk and Vistaprint) the basic price for such a large poster is about £25 (exluding P&P) which is very pricey for what is a very very big poster. Another idea would be to go for the smaller A2 size which weighs in at 594mm x 420mm (or 23 x 17 inches) which is cheaper. Another consideration is what kind of paper and print which I guess would depend on whether you want to reuse the poster at multiple conventions. Something like a basic print would damage and fade more quickly than one which is a matte or gloss print.

I used Zazzle to experiment and while it was very easy to set up your print it does look very expensive and could eat up my budget.

Badges

Come on, we all love badges and we can't get enough of them. Most gigs or conventions I go to have them. Even beer festivals give out free badges! So this seems like too much of a good idea to turn down.

Scanning the web produced much better results than anything in print with lots of UK based sites offering competetive deals on 25mm and 35mm badges. I may as well list them all for you all to check:

• Bestbadges.co.uk
• Badgeplanet.co.uk
• Simoney.co.uk
• Koolbadges.co.uk
• Awesome Merchandise
• Badges for Bands

All of the above sites make it relatively clear and easy to submit designs and to pay by card or paypal. No idea about delivery and quality but we will find out in due course. Prices for bulk (100 badges) are very cheap and if you bundle them in a kind of gift pack (badge & postcard) then it may have a better impact than just doing postcards or business cards on their own.

Postcards

This idea came to me relatively late and I took advantage of OptimalPrint's 10 free postcards offer. Using a basic B&W image from one of my comic's pages, I received the 10 postcards around 2 weeks after I had ordered them and P&P was about £5 (shipped from Sweden).

The quality of the postcard was outstanding and apart from one or two design issues (bigger domain name? Should it go on the front or back?) the initial test run was a success. The next step is now to take it into colour and decide how many I want to print. 100 postcards (double sided, glossy) would cost about £38 which is very good value.

In the next few weeks, we'll go over the books and the updated postcards. Until then, hope you found this interesting!