kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ye Aulde Soape Opera, or, How Not To Stage A Ren Faire. Ye Aulde Soape Opera, or, How Not To Stage A Ren Faire. Please understand, dear NSR’s, that I’m actually rather new to the world of Renaissance commerce and jewelry-making. It was in 1996 that I made my first pair of earrings, and I wasn’t even selling until nearly two years after that. I’d been doing sci-fi cons and craft fairs for a while, and it was only this past year that I burst into the wild wacky world of Rennie merchanting more or less exclusively. The point I’m attempting to get a bearing on here, even if I never quite actually make it, is that I’m pretty new to this. Thanks to the fiscal frighteningness of last year (Thank you for that economy, Dubya, you may now expect a flaming bag o’ poo on your doorstep from me—if I can work up the postage) I’ve been really only booking faires that I can negotiate with a bit—I’ll tell stories and perform, if you give me a break on my merchant space. Some of the larger fairs and rather a lot of the smaller ones are actually going for it… so when I saw a note on a Rennie message board about a new faire starting up about an hour and a half from home, I figured what the heck and wrote a bouncy little "Hi, this is me, I make jewelry and would love to come to your faire to sell it and would you cut me a break on the space if I told stories?" Now, one thing I am entirely sure of the value of is my storytelling. I’ve been telling stories for 16 years now, and I do it pretty darn well, and have been paid for it pretty darn well, also. I have no doubts whatsoever that I’m offering value for whatever money they don’t charge me for my vending space. I can put on a helluva show. The person I first contacted (apparently the only real Rennie in the bunch,) seemed enthusiastic and forwarded my email to the merchant coordinator, and that’s where the fun started. So when I got back a poorly spelled missive (If you’re putting on a Medieval faire, don’t you think you should learn to spell "medieval"?) informing me that the price for the weekend of vending was $250 but if I were willing to perform all day, every day, they might see their way clear to knocking $50 off the price. This is the point where my jaw hit the floor. To give you some perspective, dear NSR, some of the longest-running, best-established faires in this region—the ones that are considered incredibly expensive—are at most $60 per vending day. No vendor I know would even consider faires that cost that much to do. A lot of us don’t even have brick and mortar shops—we sell only at faire, and therefore really need to make money to make it through the rest of the week. And we need the time to advertise our presence—I saw the first announcement for this faire in March, and it’s happening in June, and I thought the time frame was rather short, but what the hell until I got their reply. For a first-year faire that wasn’t even together yet, they surely had brass balls the size of Mount Olympus. I wrote back and politely but firmly explained that a) that was far too expensive (what the hell were they smoking???) and b) that in the days of yore, I got something like eighty dollars an hour to perform and their offer was a twee bit insulting to say the least. No response. I’m assuming Ms. Spelling Impaired had her fuses blown by the idea that I was not jumping immediately on the Fairewagon. So, because I am the kind of person to poke things with a stick, even though my mother told me not to, I forwarded on my response to the original, enthusiastic dude and politely said "I wish you folks all the best, all of us want more faires in our region, but you’re simply way too expensive." The response was gratifyingly fast. Enthusiastic Guy (EG, from here on in) wrote back that he couldn’t imagine what the hell they were smoking, he would clear things up and it would be fine. We had a few friendly exchanges of email, and he said he would present the case to the committee at his next meeting. He wrote back after the meeting, said things were mostly settled, here was the person to contact and she had my name anyway (Not the same person as Ms. Spelling Impaired) and they would be in touch. A few days go by. I wrote back to EG and said I hadn’t heard from her, what should I do at this point? He wrote back and said not to worry, but he would pass on my information again. So a day or so later, I get an email from a person who is, apparently, Ms. Hoo-Ha High Head of Committee, saying we’re interested in having you come to faire, could you recommend some vendors to us because (surprise, surprise!) they’re having trouble tracking some of them down. By the way, we’ve come up with some fees and here’s our new web page. And anything you can suggest we’ll take really seriously and please advise us. I wrote back and say hi, thank you, give me the fee structure and I will happily send it on to my friends. By now, I’m starting to feel rather like I did when I was giving the Sex Talk to someone when I was 28; I’m too young to be a mother at my age. Hadn’t anyone in this group even run so much as a church craft fair before? The email I got back was an absolute masterpiece of obscurity, mentioning differing fee levels and this fee and that fee (all of them substantially lower than the $250 first quoted to me, but oh well) and oh, by the way, your tent qualifies as a "large space"….(again, for reference, dear NSR, my ten by ten EZ-Up is considered the bare minimum and smallest available as far as Renaissance faires go.) Huh? Just to keep other folks in on the fun, by now I had started copying some of my Rennie vendor friends, and also EG just for the hell of it. And so far I had written these people a good half a novel on How to Run A Ren Faire and still had not gotten a straight answer to the Burning Question Of The Day: HOW MUCH DOES THIS DAMN THING COST! So this afternoon I called. And was told to look back at the email which "explained everything". Guess what faire I'm very unlikely to do? 5:36 p.m. - 2003-04-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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