Here’s the report of the fest… I wonder why I do these after each festivals? Is it even necessary? No point questioning it now. Here goes my story of this past Saturday. Woke up bright and early at 5:00 am and rode the subway to get to Penn Station. This was my first time riding with Amtrak and it was nicer than I thought it would be. After one and a half hour I was in Philadelphia, a bit lost the first ten minutes, but logic prevailed (“the sun rises in the east, therefore I’m going the wrong way” type of logic), and I successfully navigated myself to the festival. I’m very proud of myself for not getting lost. It means I’m one step closer to becoming a seasoned survivalist
As for the festival itself, I have to be honest, it was a big disappointment. An intelligent person would focus on the positive and not say bad things. I am not one of those. I guess I’m the type of person who likes to burn things…like bridges. I must really like doing that because I keep on doing it over and over again. So let’s talk about what disappointed me. First and foremost: the crowd and how extremely small it was. I don’t know whether it was because there isn’t much of a comics crowd in Philly, or there wasn’t enough promotion of the festival, or maybe because I was in the back room which filtered out a lot of people, the point is I spent most of the day gazing off into space. The festival started at 10:00 am, and I only saw a noticeable increase in people at 3:00 pm. Then they were gone by 3:30 p.m.
The other issue was that I barely made back my trip expenses. I’m grateful to the eight people who donated to the “don’t let Estrella sink further into debt” fund. However I had the distinct feeling that this wasn’t a crowd into spending money. I totally get what it’s like to have to watch your finances. It’s the second reason I do festivals: to earn some extra money when I don’t have enough freelance work. It just sucks when you’re on the other side of the table. But I digress.
My impression of the festival was that it was the book launch party of that “Little Nemo” book. Many people carrying the book seemed more interested in getting signatures than actually looking at exhibitors work, let alone buy anything.
The good thing though is that I met some very nice people sitting at the table next to me, from the company day job etc. I also caught up with the super nice Maria Hoey of Coin-Ops and Drew Brockington. And I stole an Amtrak magazine on my way back… Actually I like to think it was complimentary. So that was my trip to Locust Moon Fest. Needless to say, I won’t be going back, which is just as well because after what I just wrote, they probably won’t want me back. Burn baby burn!
hi estrella, we appreciate your feedback here and certainly WOULD want you back. we are learning as we go and do recognize that we need to get a lot more traffic into the backroom especially and the festival itself overall. we’re already working on ways to improve that situation in particular, as well as the overall event in general. thanks for the honest feedback, we do apologize that your experience wasn’t great. we want everyone to have a wonderful time and make some money and we will work as hard as we can on making sure that happens next year.