By Else
Two weeks after Made in Asia we traveled to another convention to set up our pop-up bookstore, this time in the lovely Ghent at FACTS, Belgium’s largest Comic Con. This means a group of four very nerdy booksellers (Tiemen, Sywert, Jonna and me) made a road trip from Amsterdam to Ghent to eat amazing food, sample the Belgian beers, and uh… oh right, sell books at a convention.
The weekend for us started on the Thursday, with our journey to Ghent. Things always get exciting around Antwerp, where there is an eternal traffic jam, but all in all our ride was smooth and uneventful. Aside from the beauty that is the Loop around the Ghent EXPO. This is a marvel; just a road around the EXPO hall, IKEA and other concerns around there, but made with European funding and very confusing if you want to get to the Holiday Inn in the middle.
Because Thursday was a travel day, all we did in the afternoon was set up the bookcases at our stall, so we’d have a little bit less work to do on the Friday. The cardboard bookcases have come to the end of their life span, so this was their last convention and at Dutch Comic Con in June we will have new ones! After setting up the bookcases, it was time to sample the local cuisine and beer. Klokke Roeland is a local beer in Ghent, served in one cafe that brews it themselves. And it is so good, and also very very dangerous. 10/10 would recommend.
Unfortunately for us, something called ‘work’ had to interfere with our busy schedule of going out for dinner and drinking beer, so on Friday we set up the entire store, books and all. We had a total of 6 pallets worth of books that we had to split into different sections and then put up on the shelves to make it appear pretty. Jonna made a very fun time lapse for our socials which shows the process of setting up a pop-up store really well. Our pop-up stores usually follow a similar layout at all our conventions. We have a Fiction section in which we have a selection of Young Adult, Romance, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror, and Literary Fiction. We also have a Manga section, a table for all the Table Top RPG, Game-related, Warhammer stuff, a table that has all our Mythology books, Disney books, cook books etc. on it, and a place for all the graphic novels and other miscellaneous stuff we’ve brought. During the set-up, we are all responsible for a different section to make it look as nice as possible and have some sort of cohesion and it is so satisfying to see you go from empty, to chaos, to coming together, to being done and looking good!
After our full day work-out of building up the pop-up bookstore, we went out for dinner to an amazing Afghan place to celebrate and to look forward to actually selling the books and making sure we had less to pack back up on Sunday.
On Saturday, the convention started in earnest. We divided our days up into different ‘shifts’ to also get some rest in between selling books. Tiemen and Sywert took the morning shift, while me and Jonna could sleep in for a bit. Working at the convention is actually not that different from working in the bookstore: you answer questions about your stock (most repeated phrase was “if it is not in the bookcase, we didn’t bring it or it is sold out, but you can check out our website or one of our stores in Amsterdam, The Hague, or Leidschendam!” because unfortunately we only have limited space at a pop-up bookstore and we had to make choices in what to bring), you ring up customers, and you dance to the music playing in your head.
We also got to stroll around the convention areas and visit other stores, because that’s what conventions are for. And FACTS has a great selection of stores and activities and a lot of space to walk around in. During the weekend, I bought a couple of buttons, some postcards, a bookmark, and a very cute book sleeve with reading capybaras on it. It was a great success! And after dinner, in the hotel this time, we only had to walk upstairs to fall into our beds to get some rest and do it all again the next day.
Sunday at FACTS is shorter than the Saturday because the convention ends at 17:00, so we have enough time to pack everything back up again afterwards. Usually the Sundays are a bit less busy than the Saturdays, but this year the Sunday was actually busier than usual. And every time we returned to our store, it was difficult to make out the store because of all the people gathered in it, browsing books. There is a saying in Dutch ‘Door de bomen het bos niet meer zien’ which means you cannot see the forest for the trees any more, but in our case it was that we could not see the store for the customers any more.
During the great repacking after the Sunday selling, we found out how much books we sold, because we had to repack them all. Again, I did not need to go to the gym after this weekend (not that I ever go), because you haul around loads of books and boxes full of books. After everything was said and done, we repacked about four and a half pallets full of books, which means we managed our goal of having way less books to pack than we came with. After the great repacking, we went back to the hotel, ordered pizza, and did the bare minimum of socializing during the pizza eating because we were all ready go back to our hotel rooms and crash once again and look forward to our own beds again the next day.
Monday was our last FACTS day, but just like the Thursday, it was just a travel day. On our return journey, the traffic around Antwerp was worse than on the Thursday, but we managed to get through it due to Tiemen’s great driving skills. And we all got home safe and sound and crashed into our respective beds and didn’t come out again until a few days later when some of us had to work again. Unfortunately this was the last FACTS we will be attending for now due to scheduling issues, but we hope to be able to pick it back up in the foreseeable future, so watch this space!
Exhausted! But we’d do it all over again in a heartbeat
