Salt Lake Comic Con-How the Other Half Lives

This past weekend tens of thousands of geeks, in all of their bizarre glory, descended upon Salt Lake City. They put on their geeky t-shirts or donned their Cosplay outfits and headed toward the Salt Palace in droves that probably frightened the not so into Comic Con people of the city.

I’m allowed to say this, because I’m one of them.

Well, I didn’t dress up, but I did pull out some of my more favored t-shirts. Mostly because I needed to look somewhat professional. Which isn’t all that hard at a geek fest.

I’ve been to the last two installments of Comic Con in Salt Lake, but for both I came as a guest. This time around I was sitting behind a table, selling books.

My books, which first off how awesome is that? I never thought I’d be a vendor.

The Con takes on a whole different dimension from behind the safety of a six foot by two foot table. While I did point, laugh, squeal in delight and in general adored the crowds as they meandered by, my perception of them changed. Instead of all geeks, now they were geeks who read books and those who don’t.

Now don’t get all feisty, there were quite a few people that came by that said they didn’t read. Some didn’t have time, others only read comic books, others only played video games and others only listened to audio books. (One woman said “books on tape” and corrected herself. I still call them books on tape. But I’m blonde, so I’m allowed.)

It was very interesting to try to judge (yes, going to a bad place after I die) people as they approached. Did they read? Would they like my books? The process reminded me of putting together a jigsaw puzzle. That point when you’ve finished the easy parts, and have a choice between the trees and the sky. You go with the sky and have to identify the pieces through slight changes in color. Changes you didn’t even notice before you needed the next shade of blue.

I’m not going to lie, I’m terrible at this. I’m a failure as a sales person and if not for the other authors at the table I may not have done as well as I did with book sales. An area to improve on, I suppose. Add it to the list.

Still, we had a great time. I learned a lot. I’m still exhausted.

My favorite part about Comic Con is that looking at all of the geeks that go through the place, it makes me feel positively normal.

I’m not normal, I know this, but hanging at Comic Con is like finding my people. And let’s just say that to compete with the best of the best, I have a long way to go!