Continued from Part 1

The Reality continues…

Thursday; time for drastic action. Witchcraft was called for and a passing practitioner, Valerie Frankel author of the VYA Henry Potty series came to the rescue. Unfortunately Valerie’s witches’ wimple collapsed as she cast her spell and her efforts only raised second day sales to $443, still selling single issues at $8.

By Friday Pete had set up the Transmissions from Beyond (nearest) and fix-online demonstrations and prices were down again with older issues sold at $5 but Pete brought in more stock with every trip so we had a boxes of magazines building up to worrying proportions behind us and you can see the result behind Robyn Gray, no relation, of Witches Wardrobe.

Sales were slow but we had many welcome visitors including a - - - - - - very photogenic Xena, Ben Jeapes, Andy Porter, Robert Silverberg, Tim Akers and James Van Pelt, Jeremiah Tolbert, Sheila Williams, (I never mentioned my rejected story) Mike Flynn, Joy Ward and her Kindle, a snakebitten Haley Garwood . We didn’t get photos of all these but some are here. Plus we had the mid morning trips to the smoothie booths, Black Raspberry and Strawberry is recommended.

Our gnome-free neighbour, Erle Korshak who started Shasta Publishing (1947 – 1957) had plenty of stories to fill the longuers. Erle’s lesson for small press publishers (like TTA?) is that he quit, trained as a lawyer and became a millionaire. Shasta published classics like; John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?�, “The Man Who Sold the Moon�, by Robert A. Heinlein (1950) and Alfred Bester’s “The Demolished Man� (1953) among others and still failed. Now 85 Erle uses Shasta to publish SF art books.
So Friday’s $567 was better but by Saturday we were desperate offering 3 issues for $10 and variants on that theme such as $5 for any issue and “make us an offer for anything else�. So we had more visitors and moved more stock but took less, leaving the day’s total at $559. However we did finish an hour early as Interzone was up for a Hugo again.

Andy is so shy and retiring that one of our perks is he gets invites - to all the pre and post Hugo events and parties etc - and we go in his place and meet all the nominees, former winners and SF celebrities.
We didn’t win the Hugo, Locus won again, but we came from well behind to give them a run for our second place. See page 7 and 20.

By Sunday my ‘Whinging Pom’ act on Saturday night made the locals so sorry for us that one volunteered to show us how American get up and go would sort out the slow sales problem.

True to her words Michelle Dane turned up Sunday morning and no one in the vicinity of our stand escaped her grasp. She stayed with us until her 2 pm panel and by packing up time that last day we had taken an extra $694, our best day’s sales.

The unsold stock, and there was plenty, was shipped to Pete’s place in Charlotte, NC for another $550. (£297?)

Our taxes contributed a further $124 (£66?) to the rescue of the Denver banking system

The Result
Total sales $2468. (£1234?) So TTA should have got $354 back but for one credit card subscription being refused. The final $270 (£146 to £135) tally does not include the production costs for the material we sold and Andy still has to fulfil the subscriptions. However we carried the flag and if the purchasers subscribe and the subscribers renew Interzone will be stronger in the long run.

Conclusion
Business was bad but not as bad as at Halifax Bank of Scotland and Pete, Jetse and I had a great time, thanks Andy.

Our thanks go, once again, to Pete Bullock (does he ever stop?) Jetse, Michelle Dane, Joy Ward, the Bartells, Jason Stoddard, the Hugo voters who almost got us to the podium, all the people who bought something from us and all those who trekked out to our stand.

In the background view along the length of the dealer’s space you can just see the lights on other side of the screen separating us from the art show and hence get a sense of the hall’s size.

Tags: Conventions • Denvention 3