A few updates before I get into today’s missive!
The name of this newsletter is changing from Body of Work to Uncommon Practice! It’ll still be me writing about making art and being a person in the world, just with a name that aligns with the other work I’m doing.
I have a new online store where you can buy my book and my zines and more (like zine earrings). The Uncommon Practice Shop!
It is a work in progress, but I’m very happy it exists and would love for you to check it out.
I’m collecting addresses for a snail mail newsletter. If you would like to get the occasional postcard or other paper goodie, you can sign up by clicking here.
I was in Vegas this weekend for a zine fest! This my first time at CoZi LV, and my first time with my own full table!1
My friend Mercedes asked how someone decides whether an event is worth it to vend at. There’s a business savvy answer that I’ll drop as a footnote for folks who want to know2, but in this case I decided I wanted to do this event 100% based on the fact that I grew up in Vegas and was so desperate for things like this to exist back then. I’ve been waiting since last fall, when I learned about the event, for the chance to apply. It also helped that the table fees were very low—$10-30 on a sliding scale—so it wasn’t a huge investment. I felt pretty confident that even if it was slow I would, at the very least, make back what I spent on gas to get there (and get to see friends and family while I was in town).
My table was right by the entrance (the tables were laid out as an outer square and an inner square), which is a weird spot to be in. On the one hand, it’s a prominent table where almost everyone is guaranteed to see it. But as the first table, a lot of people don’t want to buy anything until they’ve looked around more (I heard a lot of, “I’m going to walk around, but I’ll be back!”), and if you’re the last table people see they may have already done their spending or be in the throes of event fatigue.
The organizers couldn’t have known this (except from general vibes), but from an organizing standpoint I am a good person to stick in this spot for the same reasons my retail jobs always made me work the front of store—I have a big smile and a loud voice (I also have a colorful table). I talked to everyone that came by and said things like “welcome!” if they had ‘I just got here’ face. Hard to say what the sales impact was without any other data, but I would be really curious how a comparable table at another spot in the room did!
I make zines about a lot of things, and I have a hard time narrowing down my own stuff which can definitely work against me. In this case, I had basically the perfect table space/layout to fit all of my zines, so I didn’t have to cull anything for reasons of space. But there are a few things I didn’t sell any copies of, and you could definitely argue that a simpler, more curated setup might have made for more sales (less decision fatigue, easier to see everything).
For Los Angeles Zine Fair (LAZF), I made WAYYYY too many copies of my zines (I still have dozens of my Harry Styles zine) because I was nervous about what to bring and missing sales. I really made an effort to dial it back for this event and not overproduce.3 I made 5-7 copies for anything new, and ended up selling out of 2 zines and having 1 copy left of a third. One of the things that sold out was a zine I made for the event—Things I Took for Granted Living in Vegas—and it sold out with a third of the event still to go. On the one hand, I’m glad not to have a bunch of copies of a regional zine left over, but I probably could have sold 3-4 more copies if I’d had them. The perpetual tight rope!
My best selling zines were my Zine Prompts and Creativity is Political. It’s interesting to see what does well when/where; at LAZF, my bestsellers were my Carly Rae Jepsen zine and my Tiny Bi Zine set, which each only sold a few copies at CoZi.
I thought for sure that my Visit the Darkest Timeline brochure would grab people’s attention (whether or not they bought it) but most people seemed to look right over it unless I mentioned it. That zine is professionally printed, which adds to the vibe, but a friend pointed out that if you’re not really looking at it it looks maybe too legit—like it’s a pamphlet I’m distributing rather than a dark humor art piece. Not sure how I’ll account for that in the future—putting it in a shared shelf rather than standing on its own might help.
I debuted a bunch of zines that I’ve made over the last few months, including 5(!)4 that I made or updated in the 2 weeks leading up to the event! Seeing people interact in-person with the new stuff was really fun. I also made zine earrings!5 Originally I was just planning to make a pair for myself, but I made a few to bring to the fair and see if there was interest. For the first couple hours they didn’t move, and then I sold all three small pairs in close succession. (They’re up for pre-order in my shop now, if you want a pair of your own!)
I could write a lot more about this, but I’m going to stop myself and leave you with a picture of the many buttons I made for the event, and an invitation to ask me any questions if you’ve got ‘em! Happy to talk numbers or anything else zine fest/tabling related.
At zine fests, and similar events, tables are typically 6’ long, and to fit more folks in they’re often shared - so each person gets 3’ of space. And friends might split that half space to bring down table fees and have support; at LA Zine Fest, Ra and I shared a half table.
Whether an event is worth it is a math equation, except you don’t always know all the variables. If you know how many people attend an event, you can (generally) work out how many of them are likely to buy from you. 2% is a normal conversion rate in the world and on the internet, but I think zine events have a higher conversion rate because zine people are what a marketer would call a “warm lead” or “highly engaged” (they want to buy things!). But let’s use 2% for general utility—if 400 people are at the event, 8 of them are likely to buy from you. If your average order value is $10, you can estimate you’ll make $80. But lots of events don’t publicize the number of attendees, or if they’re big/long running events they might use numbers from past events that may not reflect current attendance. And AOV is hard to know if you’ve never tabled before (though hopefully you have friends you can ask!).
After that, you might have different goals at different events or based on how dependent you are on money from tabling. “Making table” is the first threshold (at the very least, you want to make back what it cost you to be there), and then you might think about your hourly rate for time at the table (if you make $80, the table cost you $30, and you’re there for 5 hours, you’ve made $10/hr). There are also some non-monetary factors to consider—doing an event in Vegas connected me with people that I would not have been in front of otherwise. I have a zine business card, which promotes my other projects like this newsletter and The Bi Pod.
I didn’t bring enough business cards (I also forgot to count them ahead of time, so I don’t know how many I gave out. 30-40?). I ran out in the last hour of the event, and had a handful of people who asked. I had a little sign with my newsletter sign up and my IG handle to point people to, but the business cards is nicer/easier.
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