My body is currently in recovery mode from our three-day Komiket ~gig this past weekend. Mina, Ron, and myself were the #RomanceClass tinderas at Ayala Market! Market! from Friday to Sunday, and as always, the experience had been educational (and tiring, haha).
I find hand selling books fun. It gives you firsthand insight on what the person in front of you likes. They may not say it outright at first, but you can see the way their face lights up when, for example, you mention certain words to them—like “friends to lovers romance” or “queer love story.” Over the weekend, we’ve met people who quickly gravitated toward the Blush Books edition of Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. because its gorgeous cover clearly depicts a WLW romance. Some caught the Start Here anthology’s very loud rainbow cover and picked it up because it’s obviously something queer. Other times, I see people stopping to admire our beautiful clinch covers (thanks to our actor friends, as well as emotional photographer Chi Yu Rodriguez), and sometimes it’s the labels that make them stop and consider a book or two.
When I say educational, I mean this. Observing how people react to our display, how we arrange and label the books, how each cover catches someone’s eye. When we clearly see a pattern, we adjust our displays so that the books that catch the most attention get highlighted, and then we work on how to feature the books that need more attention. It’s a different audience each time, depending on the event organizer and venue, and it’s nice to have mental notes about this because we can anticipate our ~strategy for our next events.
This weekend, we tried something new. We printed out QR codes that led to a Dropbox folder where people can download two free ebooks, and we offered them to people who browsed our books but couldn’t seem to decide what to buy. They’re interested, but not sure if they want to shell out money (books are expensive, of course) on new-to-them authors, so we offer them a bit of the #RomanceClass reading experience. We plan to do this more regularly now, and hopefully we’ll be able to get new readers invested in what we do as a community.
I have a couple more ideas I wanna implement this year for our events, pero surprise na lang muna, haha. You’ll see them soon (ish). Just make sure you’re following our socials (X, Instagram) to keep yourself up to date about #RomanceClass’ upcoming events. Hope to see you at one of our events soon!
