CAPE report

This year's CAPE event was yesterday and I had an absolute blast. I was nervous for the first half-hour or so as I had very few people come by my table, where I was selling copies of Devil's Cape and giving away bookmarks, and it was very windy and chilly, but people eventually began to come by and I started to sell copies and the day just rolled along. If you're visiting here today because you stopped by to see me at the event and got the URL from the bookmark, then thanks and welcome!

• I went back and forth on how much to charge for the book. It retails at $14.95 and the copies cost me about $10 each. For a little while I was deciding to charge $12 for them, but after my first sale, I decided to drop it to $10, as that seemed like a good price point and I wasn't really looking to make a profit there, just to increase sales for the book (and in fact I got the guy who'd paid $12 to come back over and gave him the $2 difference back). After I'd been there a while I changed my "$10" sign to one reading "CAPE Special: $10 (usually $14.95)" and that worked well for me.
• Richard at Zeus had helped me order a case of the book (24 copies) for the show (for special events, you either need to pay up front or get the event runner to order them and be invoiced for them). And I brought another case of my own copies to help make the display look substantial. I'd hoped to sell maybe a dozen or 15 copies of the book. By the end of the day, I sold 26, so I was quite happy about that.

• Dina and the boys stopped by for quite a while, as did my friend Michael and his daughter. The kids got to play together and I think everyone had fun.

• Attendees were cool and supportive. The picture above was sent to me by Robert Hurst, who bought a copy of the book and had the photo taken for his Facebook page. He was kind enough to send me a copy. Hope you enjoy the book, Robert!
• I got autographs from Gail Simone and Mark Waid, both of whom have written comic book stories I've loved, and gave both copies of Devil's Cape. I hope they like them!
• I particularly enjoyed getting to know the people at nearby tables and quickly became a fan of their work. I'm looking forward to buying Mark Murphy's Tiki Joe Mysteries (which comes out soon); had a great time chatting with Rob Osborne (of The Nearly Infamous Zango; I snagged the first two issues) and his wife Sarah; and I enjoyed meeting Thom Zahler, whose Love and Capes had me chuckling out loud. It's a small world sometimes--Thom's local friend Jesse Jackson, who sat next to me at the event, works at the same small company where I used to work before coming to my current company--the same place buddy Michael works now. You can see Jesse in the photo up top next to me in the Hawaiian shirt. Another gracious, nice person.

Overall, it was a great, fun event. My thanks to all who stopped by to see me, especially those who bought the book, and my thanks to Richard Neal of Zeus Comics and the whole team behind CAPE. What an impressive, cool event.