Convention Recap: Howler Art and Literary Festival 2024 - Part 2 - Running an Event

Ok, so by now you may have read my recap of what it was like to sell at the Howler Art and Literary Festival (The HALF). Now you can see a taste of what goes into putting on an event like this! Here we go!

The Event Genesis

Long story short I started a small non-profit group (The Hilltop Howlers) that is dedicated to supporting art, culture, and music in the Montgomery area, especially the Hilltop/Downtown areas. As part of that we occasionally throw events that showcase artist vendors. We started small with a few pop-up type art markets. Nothing crazy, just a dozen or so vendors on a lawn or the like.

Last year we threw the Hilltop Art Festival. It was a street fest with some music, 60ish vendors, some food trucks, the works. It was a big success, with about 1,000 folks coming out. The HALF is the same event, just with a new name and location. So is it even the same event? We should ask Theseus...

Changes

Why did we change locations?

Three reasons:

1. Moving to the Union Station Train Shed meant we could be rain or shine. The week leading up to the event last year almost killed me with stress as I fretted about the weather.

2. There is construction all over the Hilltop, which has taken away the bulk of parking that we had. Long term, that area is only going to get more built up, and having a street fest there is just going to become more complex, or entail we shift to be in a more residential area. Which leads me to:

3. Having an event in the street means you have to get permission from the folks who line the street. That is, frankly, a nightmare that I don't ever want to have to do again. You only need permission from 80% of folks, which is what we got. But some folks we were never able to contact, and those folks did their best to ruin my day (even though we made special care to ensure we wouldn't be blocking them in). If we had to shift into a residential street, that would only get exponentially worse.

Why did we change the name?

Two reasons:

1. We weren't going to be on the Hilltop, so we felt like we shouldn't call it the Hilltop Festival.

2. I really wanted to amp up the focus on authors. Montgomery used to be home to the Alabama Book Festival, so there is clearly demand for book events. So we wanted to bring a bit of that energy back, so we worked that into the name.

This made for an easy acronym as well, which I love: HALF.

Date - More Changes

You have to pick a date. As far out as possible. Last time we were on May 20th. We wanted to be in April, but there were too many competing events (including but not limited to my wedding anniversary). When we tried to plan for this year, there were still too many events. We couldn't get the weekend we wanted, and we didn't want to be earlier than April (potentially too cold) or later (summer in Alabama? no thanks). May 20th was already too hot, that was our number one complaint by far last year.

So this year we settled on the first weekend in October. Later in October we thought was a bad fit, due to Halloween, and anything after that competes with all the holiday markets (of which there are a ton). August is still summer, and early September I am devoured by Dragon Con. So that left a small window, and we picked as best we could.

For time, we picked 9-3. We opted for an hour earlier start this year, but kept the same end time. The fall has college football, and those games usually start kicking off around 2:30.

Costs and Permits

To have an event, we had to have a place. We had another spot in mind, but eventually settled on the Train Shed for ease. Plus, it's covered. As a non-profit we were able to rent if from the city for half price. So that was 750 bucks. The city required that we had to have an event permit and carry insurance. The permit was only 25 bucks, but the insurance was 208. We then purchased a blanket business license from the City of Montgomery, which was 514 dollars. All this came up to 1,500 bucks roughly. That, and a ton of running around from department to department in the city government.

Coordinating Vendors

Once we had the spot locked in, I went out there and took a bunch of measurements to see how many vendors we could safely and easily fit inside. We opted to not use the whole space for a few reasons (saving room for food trucks, having a dedicated load in space, giving room to grow, etc). But the space I designated I decided could hold 78 vendors easily enough. So that was how many spots we decided to open up. Taking the amount we had to pay, we split that up amongst the vendors, and decided to charge 25 bucks per 10x10 spot (which is cheap).

I then set up an application form on google forms, embedded it into our website, and then emailed it out to all of last years vendors. At that point it was just a matter of posting the form in various places, and looking over each application. Once they were approved, we sent them an acceptance email with details on how to pay. As it got closer, we sent out emails about how to load in, and with some shareable graphics they could use to announce they were taking part.

At that point it just became a game of have a couple folks sign up, have a person cancel, fill that spot, rinse/repeat. That, and poking folks repeatedly to respond to the fact that they had been accepted. I seriously had about a dozen folks apply, get accepted, then never respond to a single email I sent. Most of them got 3-4 reminders.

I also reached out to some food trucks about setting up. Funky Forte was on site again, which hell yeah they are my favorite local truck. We also had Fountain City Catering, which seemed very popular as well.

We also had a busker ask if he could set up and play. I of course approved that.

Marketing

We paid 100 bucks for Facebook ads (double what we spent last year). The day before I was supposed to be on WSFA, but when I showed up for my live interview, no shit, their computers were down. So they recorded an interview and said they would air it if they could. I don't think it happened though.

Last year I was also on WAKA, and I think we were in the Go Section of the Montgomery Advertiser. I dropped the ball there. I also put up some flyers. Essentially, last year the small facebook spend we did actually worked out very well, so I felt confident that doubling that would double the results. But it seems they were much less effective, and not having done the other stuff I did last time...

I'll own it, but in my defense, I am far more busy this year than last. And I didn't ask for help like I should have. Lesson learned.

The Day Of

There was an event the night before, so we could not show up and lay out our spots ahead of time. We showed up at 5:30 to find there was a stage that wasn't there when I took my initial measurements. A stage taking up roughly 12-16ish of my planned vendor spots. Womp.

So we had to adjust on the fly. Original plans called for us filling from roughly the middle outwards, in four rows in both directions. But with this wrench, we decided to fill from one end to the other. Which meant the first folks who showed up had a longer walk to reach their spots from the loading area. If you look in the picture up top, folks were able to unload from behind the little terra cotta building towards the back left. So it was a bit of a walk, but nothing egregious.

That is unless you have mobility issues, or excessively heavy setups. Which I didn't think about when we made the call on how to fill in. So on the fly I had to start letting some folks start to fill in from the side opposite of everyone else. The much closer side. Which made a surprising number of folks pretty upset with me. Which, well, sucked.

It also meant that because we had four vendors no call/no show we ended up with a gap in the middle of my rows that I hadn't planned on. No one else seemed to really care all that much, but it bugged the ever loving hell out of me.

Spoiler: Cancel last minute with no explanation, or no call no show? Yeah, you get added to the list of vendors I don't allow back.

Anyway, all but one or two vendors were set up by 845 as we asked. And the two who weren't were good to go by just after 9. Load out went even more smoothly, with everyone pretty well gone within 45 minutes.

Besides the LadyWife and I, we had two amazing volunteers, Anthony and Elizabeth, who seriously saved my bacon. Without them there was no way the LadyWife and I could have gotten this done.

We ended up with 43 artist booths, 27 author booths, 3 food vendors, 1 non-profit (the mgm library system), and 3 food trucks. Which totaled 74 booth spots of the 78 we allotted.

How It Went

How did the event actually do? It went ok. Weather was perfect, but the crowd was smaller.

Our first year we had about 1,000 people come out. This year I am estimating we had roughly half that number. Any event where you lose half your attendance is not going to make you feel good, no way around it. Why did it drop so much? Here are some theories:

• Saturday was also the opening day of the Alabama State Fair. No theory here, that absolutely hurt us. Luckily it's the same weekend each year, so we can plan accordingly for 2025.

• Parking downtown isn't always the easiest. A number of vendors expressed to me they think that was the main issue, and they may be right. I do know though that if we had been back were we were last year, it would have been far worse, as again: the main parking spot on the hilltop is being turned into a building and is a construction zone. And a couple of the streets are closed, which got rid of a chunk of street parking.

• Fall versus Spring. Maybe less folks want to go out in the fall for a market? I honestly don't know.

• Not being on the news, and not doing all the marketing we did for year one probably hurt a little bit. Not 'cut the crowd in half' hurt us, but it didn't help I'm sure.

• Read Herring (downtown bookstore) had their annual sidewalk sale. That may have stolen author traffic? Who knows?

The weather was pretty much perfect. The only quibble there was there was a strong breeze, which kept blowing banners over. Which isn't ideal, but I would rather deal with that than be sweating up a storm wishing for a breeze.

I really liked the Train Shed as a venue, but there were some complaints about the passing trains. It wasn't bad on the end I was, but I am told at the other end of the rows it was worse (the acoustics are different due to the surroundings I think). None of the trains were very long, usually being gone in a couple of minutes, but it did happen I would guess about a dozen times from the time I showed up at 5:30.

So not ideal, but not a deal breaker for us.

All the vendors I talked to at least made their table fee back, except one. I'd say three/fifths of the vendors I spoke to were happy with sales. Most of the those who weren't were nice about it to me. Everyone who was a returning vendor I think said they sold less than last year. The authors did worse on average than the artists I think. Horror/Fantasy did pretty good, but all the other authors sold notably less.

Long story short: I'm not happy with how this turned out. If we had 1,000 folks come out, then all the other little things I mentioned could be forgiven. But all those things, coupled with half the crowd? Yeah, I'm upset. When you host vendors it's a two way street: they promise to show up, and you promise to bring the crowd. And we didn't bring as big of a crowd as we did before.

Was it all my fault? Hopefully not. But there is no way around it: I didn't do as good a job with promo even though in the moment I thought I was, and I made a bunch of changes year over year. The buck stops with me. I won't blame any vendors who don't want to come back, not in the least.

Saturday morning I actually told a few folks I wouldn't be throwing this again. It's so much stress, and it's a non-profit event. The only money I make for all my months of work is selling my own books. But my LadyWife and a few other folks talked me off the ledge, and we have a plan in place so that I won't be working on this alone. So next year we will be back, with a full team working on this to make it bigger and better than ever.

Quick aside: I hit 10,000 steps on my fitbit before the event had even started. I'm too fat for all this.

What To Change For Next Year

Everything is iterative.

So what are we going to change for next year? Here are some thoughts:

• We will go back to a 10 o'clock start. There was not enough foot traffic between 9 and 10 to justify it. I don't see us doing anything past 3, due to football so that probably won't change.

• We are going to better handle load in to make the distance traveled more equitable for vendors.

• Moving the weekend. We didn't realize that the State Fair opened this weekend, and that hurt us. So we are thinking maybe the last weekend in September instead of the first weekend in October. But that is far from locked in.

• More promo: being on both tv news stations, getting in the paper, and putting up flyers. More targeted ad spend on Facebook. I also want to figure out how we can promote this event on Maxwell and Gunter (the local air force bases). If you know how we could do that, please reach out.

• Adding a couple more musical buskers, for more continuous music. Possibly having one on each end.

• Having some tables and chairs for the food truck area for folks to eat at. This was actually planned for this year, but we had to pivot last minute.

• We are looking at doing some things to highlight the books more, like maybe having some readings, and partnering with local book stores in some way. Maybe partnering with the AWF somehow.

• Next year we may make more of an effort to focus on horror and fantasy authors, as they almost all sold pretty well. I absolutely won't turn down romance/Christian authors, but I will make it clear to them to moderate their expectations if they apply.

• What won't change is the number of vendors. I won't add any more vendors until we show a couple of years of solid growth crowd-wise.