Ichibancon 2014 – page 3
Helpful tip to anyone organizing a convention: putting Artist Alley in a high traffic area might SEEM like a good idea, but it’s really not. Being completely hidden behind a slow-moving wall of people who weren’t looking to buy anything in the first place is not good for business.
So, yeah. Ichi had most of their Artist Alley tables set up right next to where the main events rooms were, which meant we were totally swallowed up by crowds most of the day. Business was… well, more on that in a second.
On a side note, though, I actually thought the halls were WORSE than at a bigger convention. Yeah, Otakon wedges a hundred times more people through its halls, but at least THERE the crowd is the only thing you have to worry about. It’s not like half of said hall has tables full of stuff to knock over.
(Historical Notes: It’s worth nothing that, come 2020’s Ichibancon, most of the open hall space was given over to guest autographs. That is SUCH a smarter use of a potentially crowded location, because the guests don’t need to worry about grabbing anybody’s attention. Anybody who want to see them already knows it, and will deliberately seek them out. So, yeah, good job learning from the past.)
Artist Alley in a hallway makes sense in theory and only in theory. I remember for a while with our own table I’d use that last panel on the majority of advertising for our where we’d be located at. It added something over just having text and a cropped photo of the room map I thought.
Yeah, there’s the two separate problems of (1.)people not being able to see the tables at all due to crowds, and (2.)most of the people passing by not already having a motivation to stop and check that one particular table out.