Ikkicon report - rage against the bootleg
Well, I’ve been delaying writing this for a while. On Sunday and Monday I was just happy to be back home. Tuesday and Wednesday I had a pretty nasty case of the stomach flu, and up until now I’ve just been deciding if I should write about this. Well, I have.
Unfortunately we most likely will not be going back to Ikkicon. It’s not anything about the people there (they ranked among the friendliest con heads I’ve dealt with) or about the overflow hotel (much cheaper than the ones we normally stay in, just as good, and I liked actually getting a free breakfast (donuts rule!)). We just didn’t make enough money.
You see, Saturday is usually the huge day for selling things at an anime convention. This time, we sold roughly the same gross on each day. Now, this is probably due to two factors (or at least these are the two we’ve seen): First off, the venue is too small. We noticed it as soon as we walked in (a bit after one AM, because we never manage to leave for a con on time) on Thursday. They had to restrict how many people could enter at once, and hurried people past our booth right by the front.
Second, we do a lot of wallscroll sales, and there were several sellers of cheap imported wallscrolls that are, to our knowledge, not even supposed to be sold in the United States anyway. They’re classic bootlegs: No copyright info, no UPC on the paper slip in the package, and poor print quality. And yet they are crowding us out by the virtue of being a cheap substitute good (for you economists out there).
So yeah, no Ikkicon for us again unless they get a bigger venue and crack down on those bootlegged wallscrolls that are killing us. Seriously, I wish the bootlegged wallscrolls were the first and only thing that’s killed us by being illegally imported, but we’ve had problems with the Naruto headbands in the past (wonder why we don’t sell those anymore?).