Practice What You Teach aka Origins Hand-selling Report (Patreon)

At the start of the month, I taught a two-hour class on hand-selling at conventions for Cat Rambo's The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers.

Two weeks later, I attended the Origins Game Fair and spent the weekend hand-selling my own books as part of The Origins Authors Library. Selling at that con so soon after teaching was great, because I was more actively aware of my strategy while hand-selling. And by the end of the weekend, I was already reflecting on how my time at Origins stacked up with what I’d taught at the class.

First, here's a view of my setup. Then I'll explain the choices that went into it. 

Easy On-Boarding

Since I was selling outside a SF/F fiction-specific event, I wanted to create as many points of access as possible, since I was dealing with a “here’s a room with authors at a table waiting for you to come by” situation.

I decided to only bring two titles to the con (Genrenauts Season One and Shield & Crocus), partially due to baggage constraints and partially because I haven’t gotten a ton of utility out of selling the individual Genrenauts episodes alongside the omnibus (aside from the individual paperbacks making the collection look like a better value - which it is). This meant that my table was going to be pretty empty unless I found ways to fill it up and/or to artfully use white space.

Because of my baggage allowance and available titles, I brought my stand-up banner, which hadn't seen use since Jay Swanson and I teamed up for NerdCon: Stories. The banner has my name at the top (rather than the bottom as the Genrenauts paperbacks show) and features the bright colors of that book's cover.

In terms of other signage wanted to start a bit more general with my pitches and comparisons. I was very happy with these small pitch sheets I printed up for each book.

They look like this (file attached as well if you'd rather):

(for Genrenauts)

World-Hopping Science Fiction

For fans of

Sliders

The Strange

Leverage

(for Shield and Crocus)

Fantasy Superhero Action

For fans of

Blades in the Dark

China Mieville

Marvel’s Avengers

Each of these was printed in 36-point font on a piece of paper with a good bit of white space on every side. I placed these pitch sheets in front of each book, which was displayed about 50-60 up from flat, using wire-frame book holders.

As you can see, I focused on film, tv, and game comparisons for each, with only one prose fiction comparison (the works of China Mieville). In my experience, there’s a big overlap between the attendees of Origins and those of GenCon. Since I've attended GenCon more recently, including two years selling for Angry Robot, I based my approach on that con. I found that most GenCon attendees were more likely to recognize a media (Sliders, Leverage, Marvel’s Avengers) or rpg (The Strange, Blades in the Dark) comparison. Comps don’t do much to help you unless your would-be customer recognizes them. 

In practice, after a couple of readers at Origins to my Genrenauts pitch with “oh, kind of like Quantum Leap”, I folded that comp in pretty often, even though it wasn’t on my sheet. Many of the people coming to my table appeared to be my age or older, so they were in the right age bracket to have seen that show on the air. I’m likely to swap in Quantum Leap for one of the other comps next year and hope that the sign will do even a bit more of the heavy lifting for me.

Distilling the Pitch

I’ve always had a hard time boiling Genrenauts down to one sentence that isn’t just an X meets Y. I can do “Quantum Leap meets Leverage and Redshirts,” but I’ve come to side with literary agent DongWon Song in his assertion that it’s smart to go beyond just the X and the Y so you’re conveying what’s special and new about your project rather than just trying to occupy the space comprised by the overlap space of the two/three comps.

The elevator pitch I tend to use for Genrenauts is a bit wordy, but has been pretty effective:

“The Genrenauts are a group of narrative experts that travel across dimensions – each the home of a story genre like Romance or Sci-Fi – to find and fix broken stories in order to protect the multiverse.”

It’s a little unwieldy, and there’s a lot to convey in order to get across the big idea of the series. If the person I’m talking to is receptive, I tend to use a slightly longer pitch or add on info like:

“These worlds are constantly playing out stories in their genre, meet-cutes and breakups and reconciliations in Romance World, etc. But when stories go off-track, the entropy ripples across the dimensions to disastrous results.”

That makes the stakes much clearer, as well as conveying more about how the multiverse works.

At Origins, I tried coming back to the “World-hopping Science Fiction” or “Dimension-Hopping Science Fiction” as an initial pitch more often, so as to have a very brief pitch rather than just trying to smoothly talk through the longer, slightly awkward pitch. 

Shield & Crocus is much easier to encapsulate, for me. It’s “A Superhero Action Fantasy,” or “A Superhero Action Fantasy about a group of rebels trying to free a city built among the bones of a titan.” I'd use these genre-specific short pitches when people would ask "what do you write" or "what are these?" in order to get through both quickly and leave room for the reader to express their interest.

Given past conventions, I was expecting to sell about two copies of Genrenauts for every copy of Shield & Crocus. But while I did sell more Genrenauts, it was more like 3:2 than the 2:1 I was expecting, I sold out of Shield & Crocus early on Saturday and could have probably sold 2-4 more if I had the stock.

Special Offers

I sold Genrenauts Season One for $20, Shield & Crocus for $15, which is the standard pricing. But I offered the pair for just $30 total. That’s a $5 savings, which created a bit of extra value for a reader willing to take the plunge on both books.

Other Factors

1) I spent most of the con at my table, but I was more conscientious about resting my knee and not standing for too long at a time than I have been at previous cons. My table was fairly far back from the main walkway, so I wasn’t really in a position to try to pull people’s attention all the way from the hall. Instead I focused on being welcoming and friendly, instead engaging people closer to natural talking distance.

2) Unfortunately, the Origins Library panels were not very well-attended overall. We were in a different part of the convention center, and the signage for the panels was fairly minimal. The Library-specific and general Origins organizers both acknowledged the problem, and are hoping to do better for next year. Having smaller crowds at the panels meant that we didn’t have as many people coming in for specific panels and then wandering over to check out books by those panelists. Ideally, you have a great feedback loop between a dealer room and the panels, where readers learn about panels to attend from the dealer room (usually via the authors) and then readers specifically interested in the panel topics see the authors being smart/helpful and then want to check out their books.

3) Since I had a small list at my table, and I used “what do you like to read?” pretty often as my opening question, I ended up pitching a lot of books that weren’t my own. I pitched Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera, my neighbor RL King’s Urban Fantasy series, and more. I still view that as a net win, since if a reader finds new books and loves them, they’re likely to maintain or increase the amount that they read. “I loved X, what can I find that I’ll enjoy as much? Let’s try Y and Z.”

4) Greg Wilson and I interviewed several designers for a special episode of Speculate, which was very fun. It also served as an excuse to get out from behind our tables and experience a bit more of the con. This let me get a better sense of what games and companies are prominent at Origins, which will help me know the con better in the future.

Results

My sales for the weekend were the second-highest I'd ever had at cons just selling my own books (behind the amazing time at NerdCon: Stories). Even without a ton of traffic, the pitches connected with readers and I gave away a lot of postcards for my other series. I'm totally happy with the results. Which leads us to:

Looking Forward

Before the end of the con, I was already thinking about what I’d do differently in 2020 if I got to attend Origins again as an author.

The biggest difference for me in 2020 is that I can bring another title next year, thanks to my upcoming book [REDACTED – MORE INFORMATION SOON]. There’s also a chance I might have more Genrenauts published by then and could publish a print edition of 2-3 episodes together. That’d be very handy to have to sell to readers that bought Season One this year, those readers that liked it enough to want more of the same even if they hadn’t found it on their own. [REDACTED] is my top priority right now, and while I am making progress on other books, it’s been a bit slow.

Another limiting factor for me was books without physical editions. If such books existed, I would have brought paperbacks of the Ree Reyes series or Born to the Blade. I had promotional material for each at the con, and handed out a fair number of each of those postcards. If I had physical editions for all of my books, I would have had six more books to sell (and that’s not counting individual Genrenauts episodes) across three different properties. Instead of two series, I could be pitching five. That’d make it harder to focus on any one book, and I’d need to really boil down my short pitches to not overload people. There’s also the question of bag allowance. I flew Southwest, which gives me two checked bags for free. I could re-arrange my loadout to fit *some* more books, but I’d run into a pretty hard ceiling in terms of weight and space. Beyond that, I'd need to drive to the con with a friend or have books shipped to the con (from a publisher or distributor), which would add more costs.

I am also strongly considering creating a print edition of the Genrenauts Episode Zero novelette for next year, either to sell at a low price point (probably $5) or to use as an add-on gift for larger purchases. My cheapest book was $15, and if I had a $5 or $10 offering, I probably could have met a few more readers where they were in terms of budget and interest.

Seeing what other authors were doing, I’d probably also bring a solid color tablecloth to cover my part of the table, as well as creating a bit higher-quality signage (the If You Like pages and/or other bits of signage like pricing) as well as making room to display a newsletter signup, probably with a freebie offer ala “Get a free Genrenauts story if you sign up…”

See You Next Year!

Overall, Origins was an excellent time and I'm very satisfied with how well it went, both in terms of selling and the whole "was it a fun time?" part. Games have been such an important part of my life as a creator and fan, so it's really cool to get to attend as a working professional and sneak in some gaming fun along the way.