Duckon Report

[billroper]

Things went well at Duckon. We had a couple of minor glitches getting ready for the SpaceTime Theater show on Friday night, but we had a great audience and got a lot of laughs. I was trying to get the show to fit in an hour -- we actually ran about 1:11 according to the tape. Pretty close. spiritdance was good enough to sit for Katie during the show, which made things much more possible.

I'd spent about five hours standing and running around by the time the show was over, so my legs were pretty shot when we got back from our late dinner. I headed off to the filk, sang one song (Beyond the Sky), sat around for a while, and realized that I just wasn't comfortable sitting there, so I headed off to bed a little bit early.

Our room was supposed to be a king non-smoking. It looked more like a queen non-smoking -- if that bed was a king, then I'm Czar Nicholas or something like that. So the bed was a bit crowded, but we managed ok. daisy_knotwise may disagree...

Also, for some reason, there were two halves of the rind of a kiwi fruit lying on the floor when I picked up the room. I picked up the kiwi fruit and tossed it, vaguely thankful it wasn't something worse, which had been my first thought, since the green part was facing down.

The bathtub was also an adventure. It looked like it might have once been a whirlpool, as there was a built-up wide ceramic ledge around the edge that made getting in and out with my bad knee more of an adventure than it should have been. Also, the shower head was at what I consider Munchkin height. *sigh* But I kvetch... :)

The con, on the other hand, was just fine. I had a good time talking to folks over the dealer table, Katie was suitably charming, and sales were good. Of course, we had a boatload of new CDs and there's nothing like new product to drive sales. Gretchen tells me that other dealers were saying sales were slow, which is possible, but attendance apparently was up by about a hundred members this year, which isn't too shabby.

janmagic came by and spent some time on Saturday afternoon working on my bad leg. It certainly helped loosen it up, which it badly needed by then.

We ended up with six auctioneers for the art auction on Saturday night: me, daddy_guido, rmjwell, Dr. Bob, Murray Porath, and Mike Cole, who was the Artist Guest of Honor. dek9 volunteered as a runner and did a fine job, along with the rest of the runner corps.

Unfortunately, the auction started about 20-25 minutes late. I think there was a small paperwork problem that they were sorting out. And we had a mountain of charity items, some of which were very nice, some of which probably should have been sold on bid sheets (unless they managed to attract three or more bids).

For example: book autographed by Author Guest of Honor is good. Obscure trade paperback autographed by no one, not so good.

It's bad, not because we're raising money for charity, but because we're not raising much money for charity with the less desirable items and we're sucking energy out of the art auction. It's painful when you're flogging a no-bid item to try to get somebody to bid something so that you can make it go away. This is something we've been over at WindyCon and Capricon as well, so I suspect we'll get it sorted out soon.

After the art auction, I went to the filk. I actually stuck my head into the smaller filk room and let them know that the auction room was now available and about 80% of the filk moved over there -- enough that, by the time I got back with my guitar (which Bonnie J. thoughtfully carried for me), I had trouble finding a place to sit. Kindly, exapno offered me a chair one row off the main circle, which I was happy to accept. I sang two songs before crashing out for the night, Crosstime Bus (which Gretchen had asked to hear earlier in the day) and Wings.

It was funny, though. Gretchen and I had speculated that Katie would find herself crawling on the carpet at the hotel (as opposed to the hardwood floors at home) and we were pretty much correct. She was getting around much better, enough so that Gretchen put her in pants for Sunday to save her knees from rug burn.

Gretchen had taken Katie to the room to decompress during the art auction and had been waiting on a couch downstairs as the auction ended. Katie was quite happy to see me, so I held her for a few minutes before going to get my guitar and set up in the circle. Later, I ducked out to grab a soda and pick up snacks for Gretchen. As I walked back into the filk room, Katie started making a beeline across the carpet, heading for Daddy as fast as she could creep/crawl.

It was awfully flattering. So I picked her up and held her for a bit before going back to my seat. :)

Sunday we got up early and cleared out of the room before heading back to the dealer table. Things were pretty calm. After we closed, first Dawn and later Guido came by to help us pack out, which we greatly appreciated. Then we decided that exhaustion was the better part of valor and headed home to collapse and watch the Cubs game.

Which also contained the word "collapse", I suppose, but that would be a completely different story and certainly less fun than Duckon was.

Comments

[old-fortissimo.livejournal.com]

T'was good to see you, and Gretchen, hear you filk, and meet Katie Der Wunderkind!

I still don't believe some of the auction items sold for the bidsheet prices.


Murray

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I didn't attend the auction (I was in the writer's track) but I run a charity auction for my Rotary club. If we get "junk" that's not getting bid on, we'll bundle two or three items into a grab bag. Get it cheap enough and some bargin hunter will grab it up.

[awfulhorrid.livejournal.com]

Definately good to see the both of you and your very cute new addition! I was trying to limit my spending as best I could this weekend and I almost stuck to my "One CD" limit for this convention ... mostly by promising myself that come the next convention I will actually have the money I'll be getting for my new job and I'll be able to go ... well, if not wild, at least moderately ferral.

(And I can certainly relate to the knee problems. Mine aren't quite that bad ... yet ... but I still was quite glad I'd remembered the ibuprofin.)

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Speaking as an artist, I resent the flood of charity items taking time, attention, and even money away from art. I want to exhibit in a show where artists do well, so they come back and attract their peers and more serious art buyers, not a show where half the potential buyers are already burned out (if they haven't left the room) halfway through from having to sit through charity pieces.

Speaking as an art buyer, sometimes at least, I resent everything that stretches what deserves to be a businesslike half hour affair into a three hour marathon where I'm afraid to go pee because the one piece I want has been sitting on a chair since the start and it might get sold while I duck out. I don't like the auctioneer milking the piece, bidders who keep calling the runner back, or bidders who wait until the slowly delivered "third and final time". And I especially resent taking time to flog some not-special mass-produced thing whose only relevance to the con is that it's silly and the feeling that I'm not even allowed to complain because "it's for a good cause".

Speaking as a convention attendee interested in things other than the art auction, I resent anything that makes the art auction drag on. Schedules are important when there are multiple activities. When the auction runs long, it disrupts the rest of the evening. Leaving aside the con just past, think about how many cons have had the filk either delayed until many participants gave up because it couldn't start until after the art auction, or had a guerilla filk start earlier in a space that was too small, followed by complaints that the space was too small, or the energy being lost when it moved into its assigned space? I suspect that other Saturday night activities are similarly messed up when the art auction is nominally 8 to 10 but the last piece is declared sold at 11 and the room and the people aren't available until midnight. Charity pieces aren't the only reason art auctions run too long, but at some cons I've been at lately, they've been a major factor.

I think a good policy would be to decide on an amount of time for charity pieces before the auction begins. I think 15 minutes would be reasonable. That time could be interspersed with the art. It could be 3 pieces introduced with lots of schtick and milked for every penny, or it could be 15 or more pieces run through in a no-nonsense fashion, as long as it only takes 15 minutes total. If it takes more than 15 minutes, I think it should be blocked as a separate time on the program grid, such as 7:30-8:00 charity auction, 8:00-10:00 art (and only art) auction. And it should be strictly limited to that time, not allowed to bleed over.

[billroper]

Ok, but as an artist, don't you want the auctioneer to milk your pieces (within reason)? Personally, I was trying to move things through reasonable quickly, especially for the less-desirable charity items and I think most of the auctioneers were doing the same. But there were a lot of charity items.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I realize that my different roles want sometimes conflicting things, which is why I had separate paragraphs. For my own self-interest as an artist, I'm not really worried my individual piece being flogged -- I don't think any of my pieces have ever made it to voice auction anyway. But I do want the kind of show that brings in lots of buyers, which means lots of good art from lots of artists, which means a healthy number of pieces going for good prices. When the length of the auction chases people away, it's bad for artists. I don't want my pieces to be flogged more than others', and I'd rather sell each piece faster, allowing time for more pieces to come to voice auction, so that I'm more likely to have mine make it. (I think one of my pieces that sold had two bids on the bid sheet, so if it had been two bids to auction rather than three, I would have had a piece go to auction this weekend.)

My own feeling is that a good introduction of the piece when it's brought up is helpful, but that the emphasis on the game of stretching out the sale of each piece isn't. When a person waits 30 seconds to bid, how often are they really taking that long to change their mind and bid when they weren't planning to, and how often are they just enjoying the attention of being stared at by the room? And what is the ratio of people who enjoy watching the so-called drama of taking 5 minutes to sell a piece as the two bidders each pretend to agonize over each bid to people who hate wasting their precious con time on it?

My only comment about how this specific auction was handled, by the way, was that it was too long, and that seemed to be largely because there were way too many charity pieces. I didn't see more than 10 minutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that if you'd only spent my suggested 15 minutes on charity pieces you'd have finished on time.

[billroper]

As far as the last comment, I don't know, because I really don't have a good count of how many pieces were in the auction.

My experience with art auctions (which is fairly long on both sides of the hypothetical gavel) is that there are buyers who take that long to make up their minds and who do agonize over their bids. Some days, I'm one of them. :) Also, there are many people who first notice a piece when it's at the auction, so you get a runner call (or three or four) so they can get a better look at it. You might say that these folks aren't serious, but I find that they frequently are.

All that said, I find that starting a countdown to "Sold!" is frequently a useful tactic for getting someone to make up their mind. And you'll notice that I do just that once I've made sure that everyone has had a look at the piece and the bidding has slowed down. I also try to make eye contact with bidders to see if they're still in the game or not.

The Interfilk wench gang tackle is a different thing, but that wasn't a problem for this auction. Except maybe when dek9 and I were sitting on daddy_guido's lap, but that was a one-shot (so to speak) and didn't take a lot of time. It did produce a good bit of amusement though and my opinion (yours may vary) is that an amusing auction tends to attract a number of marginal bidders who drive up prices for the artists.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Interfilk auctions are a different ball of wax. Even though I don't like it, I think a higher level of shtick and milking are appropriate there, because people aren't supposed to be making rational decisions about how much they want the items, they're being begged to donate money.

At an art auction, keeping the audience amused is good, but spending a lot of time on the amusing stuff has the opposite effect on the person who's just waiting for the piece he's there to bid on to come up.

The bidder who didn't see the piece in the show but is genuinely interested in it at the auction is a conundrum. Once the piece is actually being auctioned, it's not practical to give him the time the piece deserves, and even making a pretense of letting him really evaulate it, rather than just giving him enough of a look that he remembers seeing it in the show, is going to be a big delay. I wonder if there's a way to change the format so that people could actually look at the pieces that are waiting to come up without it becoming a mob. Consider this as a thought experiment: Rather than arranging as many pieces as will fit on chairs at the front of the room (where the bidders can't really see them anyway), break all the pieces to be sold into groups of roughly five pieces (with one or two pieces per auctioneer per group when there's a team of auctioneers). The current group is handed to runners, but the next group is placed on a table at one side of the room, and people are allowed to leave their chairs and look. Between groups is a good time for a charity piece or an announcement or a joke, and the new "on deck" group is announced and placed in the side viewing area before the new "being auctioned" group gets started. A little attention to the traffic pattern (for instance, the rows of chairs should be wider spaced than normal so it's less difficult for people to get up and walk by the side table when they see a piece they'd want another look at). If this works, it would cut way down on the number of runner calls and let people really see pieces they missed in the show. And when people know the next 5 pieces to be sold do not include the one they're there for, they can safely go to the bathroom. On the other hand, if it fails, all the bidders are jostling each other at the side table checking out the next group rather than in their seats bidding on the current group.

[billroper]

My first thought is that you're more likely to see the latter result, but I admit that I've not seen this tried.

Anything that requires more work to get the room reset to specification for the art auction is probably a bad thing overall. I decided to pull a column of chairs out of the center aisle before the auction started, because it was just too narrow for the runners to navigate quickly. That was enough work. :)

As far as keeping the audience amused, it's quite possible to do that while still being quick about it. But that's the trick...

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Anything that requires more work to get the room reset to specification for the art auction is probably a bad thing overall.

While I certainly haven't worked as many art shows as you, I've worked enough that I have some appreciation of how much work is involved. I wouldn't want to make the job harder unless it had real benefits. But if my idea worked, it would certainly mean more work in terms of more people coming to the auction, more pieces sold, more art coming to the con, etc., and I don't think that's a bad thing. If a different room layout and a slightly different auction format made things run more smoothly, I think it would be worth it. Unfortunately, I suspect the improvement would only come after bidders had a chance to get used to the new world order, while the complaints would be immediate because someone will always complain when something changes.

Laying the chairs out differently to accommodate a new traffic flow can probably wait until the new traffic flow develops, though. Other than that, the main effort is convincing the auctioneers that there's something to gain from picking the groups ahead of time.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I'm *ALWAY* missing SpaceTime because I've usually JUST shown up at the hotel about then, maybe picked up my program, and I usually don't look at it until 9 or 10 at night. Then I'm bummed I missed it. I think I've only ever made it one time, when I showed up on Thursday at some con or another.

This year at Duckon, I got to the hotel, dumped my bags in the room, picked up my reg pack, walked into the blinkie room and helped there for about 2 hours before even looking at the program.

Sorry I missed it. Maybe I'll leave myself a note for next year.

[dek9.livejournal.com]

It's ok - we'll be at Conclave (and I think that's usually a Saturday night show). One of these days I'll get the website up and we'll have the schedule on there of upcoming shows, so that that people can know when we'll be on as soon as we do.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I only do Duckon anymore.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

It's particularly nice when Small Child decides that She Wants To Be With Daddy.