by Thomas Gondolfi
I want to start by thanking ALL of our fans for stopping by the booth (to buy or not to buy). Something not known is that booth time is slow time. While we do try to engage the throng that move past us, often times we end up doing nothing better than thumb twiddling. So when you come and visit, we get to talk to you about what’s happened new in your life and vice versa. So thank you. BTW… I don’t know how many of you know, but after the dealer room has closed on Sunday and we have packed up, we go to dinner with anyone who wants to come along, usually about 6 PM. Keep this in mind next year and come with us to talk about… well we talk about anything and just enjoy one another’s company.
We had an exceptional GenCon in 2019. With only one new book since GC’18 we missed a sales record by 3 books (well, 2 if you count the promised autographed book for one of our fans Aaron.) 3 lousy books, sigh. Next year… Next year.
I’d like to explain why we only had one new book since GC’18. In the last 21 years I have only had a single vacation of over the length of a long weekend. This was magnified when I started TANSTAAFL Press as I was doing two full time jobs, rather than one. So I decided to give my family a bit of attention. My wife and I managed our second vacation. As a result I didn’t get more than a single book into print. Mea Culpa. However, for those of you who don’t know, I officially retired from my day job July 8 of this year. In the 23 days I had before GenCon, I wrote the entirety of Window of Opportunity, a collection of short stories in the CorpGov Chronicles universe. That is a novel length rough draft in… call it 4 weeks. At this speed I believe I can have 3 new novel length products for GC’20 plus other interesting items I’ve got in the queue for our fans, old and new alike.
So I came in to say how great our GenCon is and I’ve spent the largest amount of time whining. Getting back to that — speaking of records, Thursday was the single best day of any convention we’ve done. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that a Thursday is a throw away day unless you have a hot limited edition game, a limited give-away, or some other draw. To me this spoke volumes. Remember my first statement where I thanked our fans? Many of those sales happened because our fans showed up day one. This means our folks find us as a priority, not just someone they happened to stop by when they get a chance. This makes me warm all over.
Again, thank you for another spectacular year in Indianapolis.