Because when there’s over 100,000 frigging people at a convention, it gets more than one post! And yes, there will be photos. And yes, most of them will be of hot chicks in skimpy outfits.

Let’s start with a quick overview. If you’ve been to many fandom-based conventions, like MidSouth Con, ConCarolinas, even Dragon*Con, you ain’t seen nothing like Comic Con. It’s way more of a trade show than a con. What I mean by that is that people mostly buy their Comic Con tickets for the exhibit hall and the autographs, and the panels are kind of an afterthought. There were exhibits from Xbox, Marvel, DC, Legendary Pictures, Dark Horse, Chevrolet, Craftsman Tools.

Yeah, I said Chevy and Craftsman had booths at Comic Con. Now do you get what I mean by this was a trade show and not a normal con? Craftsman paid someone to write and draw and custom comic book with their superhero in it to promote their Bolt-On series of tools.

Take a minute and go there. The first time I saw “Bolt-On Tool” I went there. Couldn’t help it.

So it was a very different environment for me than most cons. I kinda knew what to expect, having done the Heroes Con for a couple of years. But this was way, WAY bigger. Like 4X bigger. And that meant that it was easy to miss stuff, like a small book booth. Or like Artists’ Alley, which I never set foot in all weekend. Or the panel rooms, which I never saw.

And missed out on a chance to meet Kim Harrison, which was a bummer. But there will be other cons, and hopefully she will attend some of them. But I did see Richard Kadrey and had a nice chat with him on Sunday, so that was nice.

But I sold almost everything I took with me. I had about a dozen books left when the show was over, so that was good. I was mostly pushing the Black Knight Omnibus, because it’s new and shiny. And looks amazing!

I took 50 copies of the omnibus with me, and sold 40 of them. I sold out of Genesis and The Chosen, and had 2 copies of Bump in the Night left at the end of the weekend. So it was a good weekend for sales. I even sold a couple of Read Recklessly t-shirts!

But I won’t be doing NY Comic Con again any time soon.

It’s a really expensive show, because everything in New York is expensive. And it’s not a wonderfully organized show, and there aren’t really very many opportunities for me to really connect with fans, other than pitching them a book. And while that’s fun, it’s not as much fun as sitting on a bunch of panels and talking about the craft.

And I’m trying to cut back (a little bit) on the number of shows I do. I’m already committed to nine cons next year, with a couple of other maybes, and that’s a bunch. It gets expensive, and while some of the cons I can split rooms with folks and ride share for gas, I can’t always count on that. The only way I was able to afford NYCC was because my awesome friend Tamsin let me sleep in her spare room for the weekend and shepherded me around the subway. Otherwise it would have cost half again as much as Dragon*Con!

But I had a good time. I met some awesome folks, a couple of whom have already dropped me a line on Facebook or email, so I hope I can get scheduled into some smaller con in the Northeast soon. Just not a con with 100,000 people. That’s way too big for this old country boy!

But check out some of the costumes! 

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