I just finished selling and signing my books at my first convention.  It was quite an experience, on many levels.  My little table was squeezed in between an artist who was doing some sort of custom drawings of anime characters, and a graphics design professor doing a brisk business selling stickers for cellphones and laptops, again with characters I was not familiar with.  A constant stream of Cosplay fans dressed as pixies, fairies, and goldilocks girls wandered by along with an intimidating Darth Vader and a really spooky Voodoo guy.  Were the blue girls Smurfs, or something completely different?  I have no idea.
These strange, young creatures never stopped at my table.  They just floated on past.  Thick books full of physics, philosophy, and the nature of reality did not draw them in.  My customers seemed to be the “older” crowd, those guys with t-shirts that mentioned “quantum mechanics”, “Schroedinger’s Cat”, and “Heisenberg”.
Nevertheless, I talked to some of the other authors in the dealers room, and learned some very interesting facts about the publishing business.  Audio books seem to be a growth product, as the “older” crowd again, finds reading some small print difficult these days.  I was also positioned across the room from a publisher who had a constant video trailer display for their books running on a flat screen tv.  Very nice graphics, unfortunately I still can only draw stick-figures, and I doubt I have time to learn anything more artistic.  Writing is hard enough!  I spoke with one couple, who I thought at first were struggling self-published writers like myself.  Ooops … they are very well known members of Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization I can’t join until my sales are much, much bigger than they are now.  Another author, with a very nice table display and a costume to match, writes about Cupid as a hit-man!
A special thanks goes to my wife for sitting next to me during this entire adventure, without a single complaint.  Whether she will do it again or not, I can’t say, but I appreciate the support this time.
Now, back to writing Perturbations Of The Reality Field where I can control the strange characters that pass on by.