Atlanta Comic Convention 2025
The deets
Where: Atlanta, GA
When: Mid July
Table Cost: $300 (we were given a 50% discount due to running panels)
Attendance: estimated 20,000
The space
This time the con was hosted in hall A of the World Congress Center. The layout was a bit better than the previous year. This year artist alley wasn’t surrounded by vendor booths, and instead only had vendor booths on 3/4 sides of the rows. Traffic did have to go past artist alley in order to get from the entrance to the signing booths, or to the food vendors.
The market
ACC does have a dedicated artist alley that separates it from the vendor booths. That said, the destinction is still not handled in an ideal way. Artist alley rows do not have any identification so that attendees can easily tell who is an artist and who isn’t. This isn’t helped by the conventions very lax standards on who counts as an artist and who counts as a vendor. An example of this was a booth of resellers who spray paint model toys they bought rather than 3D modelled or printed out themselves.
Artist alley had far more tables than expected with over 400 artist alley tables and booths combined. We ran some numbers and found that Momocon, a convention that has 3x the attendance, had a similar number of tables. There were also many empty tables and staff never put out a statement or set a precedent for what is to happen to vacant tables after a certain amount of time has passed. We ended up sharing an empty table next to us with the next booth over after the artist was a no-show on Saturday. Several other vendors did the same to vacant booths in their alleys as well.
It was explicitly expressed to us by an attendee that they will skip whole rows of artist alley if they see empty tables. Conventions need to be mindful of the bad optics empty tables has on attendees and how it has the potential to negatively impact sales of the vendors and artists who do show up for the event.
The audience
This is a signing con, which means that many attendees come to get autographs from guests which are very expensive. We had attendees tells us that the only reason they were checking out artist alley at all was because the guest they came to get an autograph from left early or cancelled.
The sales
We made just under 3x table cost for this 3 day con. We must point out that our table cost for this con was halved. So had it not been discounted, we would have only made 1.5x table cost. This is shockingly low for a multiday pop-culture con of it’s size, especially when we compare it to much smaller 1-day cons. Even with our discounted table cost, we didn’t make back the cost of the table until day 2 of the event. When talking to other artists in artist alley - including artists that paid for end tables which were priced at $400 instead of $300, and vendors in the larger and more expensive booths - this seemed to be a consistent issue.
Our time sink for this event amounted to 23 hours of active vending, 1.5 hours of combined set-up and break-down time (total of 24.5 hours across 3 days).
Items that sold the best were stickers, prints, and totes.
The rest
Other issues we ran into with this con came from lack of communication or miscommunication. We were not notified that our panel on Friday had been moved to Saturday, and we only learned of that change when we double checked the schedule on Friday.
We were told, via email, that parking for vendors would be $11 in the parking decks for the whole weekend. None of the parking decks had that rate available, some of the parking decks were inaccessible across the weekend, and the website to pre-pay for parking (which is the only way to pay for parking) was inoperable during part of the weekend.
Staff at the event informed us that we were on the list to have a member of staff watch our table while we were in our panel. When it came time for us to go to our panels, this did not happen due to a lack of available staff/volunteers. Court ended up doing both our panels by herself instead of us both being present for it, despite another table having a staff member watching over it while the vendors were at lunch.
During both our panels, the projectors would not work and there was no technical support available. We luckily had our PowerPoint loaded onto our linktree so the audience could follow along on their phones.
We were not present for early load-in on Thursday because we decided to set-up early Friday instead, but we heard from folks who did load-in on Thursday that it was a complete disaster. There were vendors who waited upwards of 3 hours to load-in while stuck in the sun and heat.
Pros
It’s rare that I can’t find much to say to encourage someone to give an event a shot. But after giving this convention three chances to improve, we will not be recommending this convention unless there are some major changes in the future. I would say that the fact that we got our table at a 50% discount for running panels would be a pro to the event, but we suspect this offer was only made to make more incentivize panelists to buy booth space and there’s no guarantee this will be a consistent offer in the future.
Cons
Lack of quality control in who ends up in artist alley
Too many vendors for the attendance rate of the con
Paid parking, not at the rate promised, and had to be pre-purchased through a broken website
This is first and foremost a signing con, most attendees are spending money on autographs
Communication break downs between staff and vendors
Lack of staff or technical support for panelists
Lack of efficiency in early load-in