One week before Lavender Con, I received notice that I'd been placed on a panel.
But I could have SWORN I had, when I applied for this convention, opted not to do a panel. Unless my memory is simply escaping me? Maybe all authors were required to be on a panel, and I just forgot about that. Maybe the organizers overlooked something and put me on one. Regardless, I was on a panel!
I took it in stride. Even if I hadn't initially planned on it, after the brief panic phase waned, I was on board. Why not? Could be fun! I'd never done a panel before. Time to try something new!
My panel was titled "Let's Go On An Adventure: Building Engaging Plots"—and on that panel, I got the opportunity not only to shill my book to the masses (masses being a small, hot room with maybe 30-40 total chairs, 2/3 full), as well as give some good advice and insight based on my own writing process.
I learned a few really neat things in doing a panel!
1) It feels really, REALLY good when you crack a joke and everyone in the audience laughs.
The audience at Lavender Con was so receptive, and brought a great energy! Partway through my panel, I told one of my favorite stories regarding Blood of the Gods. The question was, "how does queerness affect your plot and character writing?" We all got into a pretty good conversation about writing queer characters. And then I said:
When I was working toward publication, I gave my parents a copy of my book. My mom came back to me after reading and said, "I really enjoyed this book, but are there ANY straight people in it?"
And I replied, "There's one."
The panel audience got a kick out of that one. And it was a nice little moment, because I sat there like, wow! People are enjoying this!
2) I learned that panels aren't scary.
As I mentioned earlier, I was SO SURE I'd declined the option to be on a panel. I honestly still haven't figured out the whole "author events" thing, so a panel was intimidating! I'm notoriously rather sparse with words—I'm not the most conversational person on the planet, and as an autistic person it takes a concerted effort to verbalize my thoughts, sometimes. I feared the worst: that I'd end up sitting silently through the whole panel, the way I often do when with my friends, as I'm usually content to just listen to them yap. And THAT would be embarrassing, in front of an audience. I was afraid of being a vestigial limb. I was afraid of contributing nothing.
But in reality, especially since I got to read the questions beforehand, I had no problem. It helped that there was a very easy flow to the conversation—the moderator asked a question, then we went down the line and answered it. And it helped that there was only one microphone for the panelists, because when I had the mic in my hands, the floor was all mine.
3) Speaking to strangers isn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.
This extends past the panel, too! It usually takes me a bit to warm up to someone. But at the convention, I was gettting along really well with everyone I spoke to. People were so friendly, and it felt so seamless to make new friends & connections when we all had the same shared interest: telling queer stories!!
Some folks even came to my table after my panel to discuss it with me. They said things like, "I really liked comment you made about depicting queerness as inherently holy in your book," and "I really enjoyed the panel, thank you so much for talking about your process!" And that was so, so nice.
The Stats
Selling books is hard. Sitting in a hot, crowded room and trying to get people's attention and interest is hard. Everyone wants to be a writer, but nobody wants to be a marketer. It's rough!
I've heard that the typical rule of thumb is, 5% of the convention attendees will buy your book.
I'm not sure how accurate that is, but mostly just because I don't know how many attendees came to Lavender Con, so there's no real way to map it out. Here's what I will say, though.
For full transparency, since as far as I can tell people enjoy seeing the real numbers behind things like this, I made approximately $235 over that weekend. $170 of which were my own sales, and $65 in consignment sales.
Most sales were on Saturday. Far fewer were on Sunday. I would have probably made more if I'd had a permanent table, but I was only tabling for 3 hours a day, on a predetermined schedule. I honestly liked that setup, because then I had the opportunity to wander the convention and attend panels I would have otherwise missed! The biggest downside to having a limited sales window was that once a panel started, all the attendees were focused on that, not on buying books. So there were looooong stretches of downtime where nobody was buying.
Out of my direct sales, I sold ten books. But I also sold four additional through the onsite bookstore, where I consigned a stack of books for the weekend for Little District Books to sell on my behalf. They took 18% for their own business, but the payout was still pretty good!
And given that tables were FREE at this convention, I essentially made a 100% profit, save for the, like, $6ish dollars I spent to take the train there and back. And save for the cost of the books.
Here's one last thing:
I think it's very interesting to see what people buy or don't buy. Here's a list of my LEAST sellers to my HIGHEST sellers.
- Handmade notebooks. I thought a bookish community would go wild for stationery. For $3, a small lined-paper notebook with a fun patterned cover. No sales, but I got a few comments saying they looked cute! I'm glad I didn't bring my bigger handmade notebooks (priced around $15+, which for those is probably ridiculously underpriced for the labor required) because they would have just taken up space in my wagon.
- Anthologies. These got 0 sales but really that's because I didn't have enough space at my table to put them out, lol. Hard to sell something that's not advertised 😂 I imagine I would have sold maaaybe one, if I'd had room for them. They don't sell well even when I do put them on display. I had no control over the title or cover—and "BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM" with an image of plants as a cover makes it look like a biology textbook 😬
- Stickers. One person bought stickers. Even when they were priced at only $1 (other vendors were selling stickers for $3). Quite a few people picked them up and looked at them, or laughed at the "WOULD YOU STILL LOVE ME IF I WAS A BOOKWORM" sticker. But almost nobody bought!
- FLOODWATERS. My prequel novella made four sales at the convention. Floodwaters sold 0 books at consignment. People preferred book 1! (which is good, because I want people to prefer book 1, haha)
- BLOOD OF THE GODS sold 10 total, with 6 from me and 4 from consignment. This was really the main event, and will continue to be the highest seller even once I get the sequel out. Book 1 of a series always does the best!
All in all, I'm really enjoying doing conventions, and I can't wait for the next ones!
This was a longer newsletter than usual, so as a reward for making it to the end, here's a cute cat photo :)
Until next time,
Wren L. Rivers
@corvidarcana [Bluesky, Tumblr]
@corvid.arcana [Instagram, TikTok]
