This Indie Author talks about her experience as a vendor at CODCON 2023

As prolific as I am with this conventions, most of my knowledge is from the school of hard knocks. If you want a break-down of the arduous task of tabling at these conventions, take some time to listen to Alice the Author as she goes through her hour-to-hour break down of selling books at CODCon!

Most of this stuff I learned in the School of hard knocks myself, so Alice’s vid has fantastic insights on selling work at conventions.

A current new thing I’m doing with my setups for smaller conventions is to take a smaller amount of inventory with me. I don’t go more than a dozen of each of my large stickers, and I don’t bring every print or book I have with me on my trips. Library shows are a smaller one day showing, so even if I sell out, It’s not a big problem.

This system has also been a good way to not just manage my sale but analyze the rate my items sell. If demand is low for an item, I stop printing more and keep my table setups lean.

As I go around Artist Alley’s at conventions and hear about them, I write them down in a Spreadsheet on Google Docs. The majority of this list consist of events in my home state of Illinois. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start for any other artists seeking to do more conventions.

Convention Spreadsheet

I have a full year packed with cool conventions and events! Take a look through my Convention Schedule to see where I’ll be next!

Falling Forward

This month isn’t eventful for me. I had a life emergency that need my attention, so my art progress isn’t going crazy. I’ve been taking more hours at my day job to catch up on some heavy money issues. Nothing too debilitating, just need to save up money to prepare for next year’s conventions and my car problems.

 Snakk Character Commission

If you want to help me out, you can commission me for some cool art from me! I do digital art and mail traditional marker art!

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Let’s Make A Comic Part 1: Thumbnailing

This is my process on how I make preliminary thumbnail art for creating my comic story, Incident at the Game Store! If you’re up to having a signed physical book for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!

I was struggling to write a new comic after Shirley’s Day. So I decided to adapt an existing story to save writing time. I got the idea to create a collection of the dumb greentext stories from 4chan, Reddit, and Imgur. Many of these dumb internet posts are outlandish, so they’re a great source of visual ideas for me.

This is the original greentext story. Since it’s anonymous, I have no idea who originally wrote it. So, if someone messaged me claiming they’re the original poster, I’d have to take their word for it.

https://i.imgur.com/wkXCSN8.png
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Ideas for Shirley’s Day Sequel

I’ve been doing some job training for the past few months and it eats up my time, in my breaks though, I’m thinking of ideas about what I could do for a sequel to Shirley’s Day.

Ideas that I want to explore are: the consequences of Shirley stoning an entire school, if Shirley’s parents knew about her powers manifesting. How Shirley’s monster family lives in a normal society and anything else I can think of or what people suggest.

A while ago I made a rough concept idea of Shirley’s Father for a potential sequel for Shirley’s Day. I wanted to continue the snake theming and wacky “Pokemon logic” of that family, so I based Shirley’s father off of the Greek King Cecrops.

This is some old art of Shirley’s Mom that I don’t think made it into the print comic. I based her of my original sketchbook drawing of my Hipster Medusa art I draw a long while ago.

I’m still brainstorming some stuff, so nothings set in stone, but I do like the older look for Shirley. I’ll let you know when I have a rough story together.