Tag: books

post-First First Friday wrapup

Okay, so, two days later I think I’ve sufficiently decompressed.  First Friday was … hard.

Getting everything together was psychologically taxing.  Which paintings to take along to display, how to display them without spending too much, testing the generator/lights setup, thinking endlessly about signage, how much change should we have in the money box, how to fit everything into the car…  And when I checked the official website for Roosevelt Row on Friday morning, they’d moved the setup time from 4PM to 5PM up to 5PM to 6PM, so I was aiming to leave the house by 4:30.  Everything took a little longer than expected (especially fitting everything into the car), and there was unexpected “baseball traffic” and it was a little after 5:30 when I showed up.  Bleh. Continue reading post-First First Friday wrapup

Phoenix First Fridays; tonight, May 2nd

wretched creature & Modern Evil Press
will be showing at:
Phoenix First Fridays / Roosevelt Row
Garfield St., between 3rd and 4th St.
Friday, May 2nd, 2008, 6PM to 10PM

Is it too late to make a blog post about something happening tonight?  Will anyone see it before-the-fact?  We’ll see.  Gotta get that mailing list thing figured out, so I can email everyone and let them know when things are happening.

Like tonight: I’m going to be displaying at First Friday in downtown Phoenix.  I’ve mentioned it before, but now that it’s mere hours away, I’m getting restless with excitement.  Trying to get everything together & figured out so it goes of “without a hitch,” as they say.  I’m not showing in a gallery (yet), and as I’ve been avoiding doing for years now, I’m not illegally showing on the sidewalk or in an empty lot, either.  Instead, I’ve rented a space from Roosevelt Row, an organization which is legally getting a section of Garfield (one block south of Roosevelt) blocked off under “Block Party” rules and dividing it up for licensed vendors on First Fridays.  A lot of the people who have been setting up illegally already had tents &c., which is something I lack, but I’ve got tables, lights, a generator, and more art than I could possibly show in a 10×10 space (without a tent/walls to hang it all on).  Plus my books and Heath’s jewelry (chainmail) and … maybe we’ll make some money, eh?

I’m trying to decide which art to show (show first, that is – I’ll take most of it anyway, in case anything sells, I can replace it), since there’s only so much that can be seen in a setup like this.  Thinking about price tags, signage, labels, all that. Only hours to go.  But the basics are covered. I’ve even got stands for my books and some of my art, which is better than having it just laying there.  I’ve spent enough, between renting the space and getting extras, that if I don’t sell at least one painting (or a lot of books) it’ll come out at a loss — And I didn’t spend much.

Anyway, that’s it, I guess.  If you see this in time, please come show your support (maybe buy a book – they’re cheap!)

wretched creature & Modern Evil Press
will be showing at:
Phoenix First Fridays / Roosevelt Row
Garfield St., between 3rd and 4th St.
Friday, May 2nd, 2008, 6PM to 10PM

Hand-advertising; posting flyers

So, as I mentioned the other day, I designed a flyer to advertise modernevil.com – This weekend, Mandy and I selected a paper color (goldenrod, not too yellow, not too bright, eye-catching but also differentiated from the fluorescent yellow and orange flyers everyone else is posting), found some cheap copies (2c/copy at the UPS store at Dunlap & Central in Phoenix, if you pre-pay for 1k), and spent several hours cutting the little tear-off strips at the bottom of 250 pages.  In the unlikely event that every strip gets torn off every flyer and all those strips convert to new readers, that’s 3,000 new readers.  If some of them actually buy books – hooray!

Of course, that’s all dependent upon finding 250 places to post the flyers.  (I’ll ignore for a moment the hundreds or thousands of people who will walk by each posted flyer without even seeing it, the dozens who will see it but not be interested, and the few who will be interested but lose the tiny strip of goldenrod paper they shoved in their pocket.  First it has to be somewhere, and only then can it become ineffective!)

Yesterday, after stopping by the bank and Discount Tire (to pay for the tires I ordered – I get to go back Thursday afternoon and wait for them to actually get put on (ooh – I won’t really have internet access there to distract me, maybe if I take my laptop (or a pad of paper) I can get some work done!)), I started driving around a few places to see if they’d let me post the flyers.  And to stop in to any independent book stores I saw, to see if they’d carry my books. Continue reading Hand-advertising; posting flyers