** Note: I write up my experiences of various group sales and events as a record for myself, and in a spirit of transparency and potentially useful information sharing. Results will vary from book to book and author to author. No guarantees are implied. I am, as always, thankful to the organizers (Parsec); the participating authors, vendors, and artists; and anyone who came to the con or stopped at our table.
Context: I’ve been self-publishing for 11 years and change, but it took till now for me to drum up the confidence to try a full-scale in-person sale. In that time, I’ve completed seven novels / novella collections. My husband also self-published his first novel in 2025. We both had some transferrable experience from Artists’ Alley tables at anime cons in the mid-00s, which I used to run with my sister; we specialized in themed teddy bears and other fiber crafts. I’d sold a few copies of my first book at some of our last cons about ten years ago, but had never done a book-focused event before.
We’d enjoyed attending Confluence in the prior couple of years, and as a SFFH book-focused convention, it seemed like a reasonable fit. Confluence’s Vendor Room includes a combination of indie authors, small presses, vintage and new booksellers, and sellers of related goods (T-shirts, jewelry, etc.)
Sale dates: July 24-26, 2026.
Our table (photo from day 1):
What I ran:
- We brought paperback copies of all of our books (not counting my individual novellas), or 8 titles overall.
- The sale prices were set to split the difference between the printing costs and the usual online prices for the paperbacks, so that buyers at the con would get a better deal. This ended up being $13-15 depending on the title’s print costs.
- I decided to sell the books 2-3 of my two trilogies only in bundles, and brought just a few copies of each. These were set to $30 for my Healers trilogy bundle and $40 for my Therapist trilogy bundle, due to its higher printing costs.
- I also had some first-edition copies of my first book for $5, since that cover is out of print. (I still like that cover to this day! But it was a one-off premade cover, so I couldn’t match the other books in the series to it.)
- Finally, we found some handmade brocade dice bags from our craft table days in storage, so we put those out for $5 to fill some space once the first editions were gone.
Other display notes:
- We printed up a poster with QR codes and short summaries of each of our books, to provide an ebook option. We had set up coupon codes for the ebooks at some retailers that offered them, but otherwise those were at their usual prices of $2.99-$4.99.
- I wanted some vertical dimension to the table, so we had a few book stands and a tiered/stairstep-style display.
- We had bookmarks printed as business cards, with our URLs and branding on either side.
- My husband wrote a flyer/sign explaining the subgenre of some of our books, in case of questions.
- We offered free candy, because why not (Hershey miniatures and sugar-free Werthers), as well as some 1″ pins with my logo dragon and Rose the kitten from my husband’s book cover. The pins are another perk from our past lives with an Artists’ Alley table; my sister still has the now-vintage Tecre pin maker we relied on.
- As it happened, we ended up writing up a few more labels/tags/signs on the fly, especially to add clearer pricing.
Results: We sold 21 books total: the 3 discounted first editions, 4 bundles (12 books total), and 6 individual books. Plus a dice bag. Admittedly, some were sold to supportive folks we knew. That’s the double-edged sword of the indie, isn’t it. However, most of them were sold to readers new to us. All in all, the proceeds covered our table and badge costs, which I’m happy about. We’re local to this con, too, so it helped that we didn’t have any lodging costs. It did not recoup our printing costs, which would have necessitated selling about half our stock. That would have been an ambitious goal for our first outing. However, we still have the additional copies and hope to try another event sometime.
Takeaways:
- Credit card payment lessons: I had Paypal and Venmo QR codes ready, but they didn’t work as expected, and most customers paid cash. On the last day, I set up Square to have another option available. Probably should have had that going in!
- Sign lessons: The big sign had printing issues of a very particular, Adobe-implicating sort (e.g. chaotic kerning). But overall it didn’t seem like most folks were buying ebooks anyway. Next time around, I will either skip this element or downsize it significantly. Two of our other printed signs proved to be unhelpful as well: the payment QR code sign as noted above, and one with discount codes that didn’t seem to be used much. We’ve taken note of this and plan to make readable, home-printed, cardstock signs instead of ordering professionally printed signs. Less expense, serves the purpose. That said, going into this event without any idea of the interest level in ebooks led us to take some chances. We have more info now.
- Positive note, and not too surprising: As an unknown quantity, a deep discount (as we had on the OOP covers) helps to convince folks to take a chance on your work. On the other hand, I don’t like undercutting ourselves, so I hesitated to discount our new copies any further than we did. Having some old copies to clear out was a good opportunity.
- As I’ve mentioned in passing above, we had no idea whether there would be more interest in ebooks or paperbacks, but paperbacks carried the day. We also got a question about audiobooks, which we don’t have yet, but would love to have someday. (They’re a significant expense, especially as indies who insist on human talent.) I do like having an option for readers to get ebooks if they want to, but I think, or at least hope, that our business cards cover that base.
All in all, we had a good experience. We had interesting and positive conversations with attendees, and made some sales even as complete newcomers and unknown quantities. Staff, volunteers, and other vendors we talked to were supportive; we deeply appreciate the goodwill extended to a couple of newcomers. Even as a fairly extreme introvert with social anxiety issues, it makes me happy to see a community of people enjoying what they love.
And although she’s not reading this, I want to thank my sister for covering for us on Friday. We had to bow out for a family wedding on my husband’s side, and completely missed the first day of the con apart from setup. Next year, hopefully we’ll be there for the duration.
Thanks again to everyone who organized and attended!