With Writing Show host, Paula B.

In episodes 1, 2, and 3, we followed our intrepid pair, me and my husband Alan, as we decided to open an online bookstore, bought merchandise, rented an office, put together a Web site, and borrowed money against our house. Of course, the one thing we were missing in all this was customers. In this episode, I’ll explain how we sold our first books—in the most troublesome and least cost-effective manner you can imagine.

When we first started the store, we defined our target market very carefully. We would sell to creative people, including artists, writers, musicians, and game developers. The last—game developers—is a well-defined group that’s easy to reach because it revolves around a few conferences, associations, and publications. It’s also a group whose language we could speak because Alan is well-versed in its technical aspects, and I play video games. We had attended the Game Developer Conference in San Jose once or twice, and felt that that would be a great way to kick off the store. Welcome to our first selling experience: a trade show.

Now, trade shows are not easy to do, but we knew this. Alan had a lot of experience exhibiting at them, and I had a bit of knowledge from various conferences I had helped organize. Neither of us had actually sold merchandise on a show floor, but that didn’t turn out to be the main problem. No. The main problem was that it didn’t make economic sense to do trade shows at all.

You can’t look at what other people are doing and conclude that it’s working. This was a mistake we made over and over. We had seen a guy selling books at several shows we attended and figured he was making a living doing that. Well, okay, maybe he was, but I’m not quite sure how. Let me explain the economics of doing a show.

To start with, you need to rent booth or table space. Believe it or not, that isn’t the biggest expense, but it’s hefty enough. For the Game Developer Conference in 2004, we paid $2450 to rent the smallest booth they had, which was 9 by 10. When you rent a booth, you get a few basic things included in the price, like a couple of partitions, a basic sign, an entry in the directory, and a few free show passes. What you don’t get is most of what you need in your booth, including basic physical amenities, security, electricity, telephone, cleaning service, and so on. Let’s look at the minimum you need to do a show.

Continues....

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