Geek Syndicate
Day 1 – preview night
It’s a clear sign that I’m either too excited or not getting enough sleep when I nearly put pain relieving gel instead of toothpaste on my toothbrush. Today is Preview Night, and that means it’s our official first day at San Diego Comic-Con. And there’s tons to do. Promotion needs to be written across all our social media channels, calls to be made, stock to prepare, price listings to be completed and other important housekeeping. All from 7.30AM.
SDCC Exhibitor Tip
Have all of this admin stuff done before you get here. Sounds like common sense, true but you tend to find time slipping away from you weeks before you even get on a flight. Especially when you’re trying to get all you books ready for print. So when you arrive you can just focus on the stuff you can only do on-site. If you want to take card payments for your sales, you’ll need an American Social Security number, US bank account and internet capable phone. And don’t forget to add California sales tax to your prices – otherwise “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase will be waiting to hurt you with a Million Dollar Dream if you don’t have that in mind and file everything (or maybe it’s just the IRS threatening prison time. I get confused easily).
Once we’ve had breakfast (essential for any convention), run away from a giant green beetle threatening to eat our eyes, avoided being splashed by our neighbour’s leaking trailer, then avoided mild insanity via the loud music from our other neighbour’s trailer and packed everything into suitcases and bags, we set off to grab our SDCC exhibitor badges and prepare our table. Yeah, like it was going to be that simple. Instead, we drove around for an hour because I totally misread the map – turns out there’s two batches of several streets sporting the same names and same surrounding roads, all next to each other in two entirely different areas, even though they’re mere miles apart. Map reading made fun! When we finally get to the San Diego Convention Centre, the place is heaving with people, all queuing up for badges, passes and waiting for the show doors to open to the public (several hours before time). Preview Night is a funny one, especially for someone who is only used to UK conventions. It’s a bit like a soft launch – the show opens up from six to nine in the evening for a limited audience of professionals, exhibitors, and some guests pre-registered for all of the exhibition’s days. Of course, when the general audience is over 130,000, even a “imited audience” can mean floods of people. And that’s exactly what there was.
Even the Industry Registration is extremely busy
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