Saturday 6 August 2016

Manchester MCM ... our home turf.

We love the Manchester MCM.
It's a great event and also our closest, which means no lengthy trips down (or up) the motorway and no accommodation expenses.
This time around I'd hoped to have had our new WesterNoir Trade Paperback on sale, particularly as we were down to 10 copies of Issue 1, but sadly this turned out not to be the case.
An error at the 'finishing house' resulted in the books having the last 16 pages in the front of the book instead of at the back where they belonged.
Unfortunate but at least I spotted it when the books arrived rather than at the Event itself.
With two tables we have enough room for the comics and the adapted Lego figures, which are always popular. We also had a few display props and our new vertical display stands which certainly helped us get more notice too, with the lovely red Zombies cover at head height for all passers by to see.
And so the Event opened and we were really happy to see so many customers returning for the latest issues of WesterNoir and Stephenson's Robot.
Not as pleased however as when we saw our very first ever Cosplayer.
Yep.
Josiah Black himself.
The funny thing was that I'd been chatting to 'Josiah' and hadn't noticed that he was dressed as he was until he stepped back.
Gary and I had always said that we'd know we'd arrived when we had someone come along in Cosplay as an Accent UK character.
Well ... we've arrived.
We had two days of good sales, interesting customers and well, just enjoyed ourselves.
All books sold equally well really.
It was great to see interest in Strange Times 2, I'd worried that people would have forgotten Strange Times after all these years, seems not to be the case ... thankfully.
We did sell out of WesterNoir Issue 1 by around lunchtime on Saturday, which did hit sales as it made it difficult to sell the rest of the books, unless the customer already had number 1. Not much we could do about it on the day though, just one of those things.
All in all we had another great Con, sales were not as good as last year's but we did discuss a couple of new opportunities that if they come to fruition will be very interesting.
Looking forward to the next MCM event, which is in London and before that the Steampunk Asylum event in Lincoln.

It's all go.