Last weekend I was part of the CXC presence at the Columbus Book Festival, at the Main Library and Topiary Park in downtown Columbus. This was a celebration of the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s 150th anniversary, where thousands of people gathered to celebrate their love of reading! There were many exhibitors, including authors and writers, publishers, entertainment, exhibitors, and many more. This included special featured authors who gave special talks, as well as a large tent filled with nearly a 100 independent authors. The festival ran from the 15th to the 16th, and I was present both days where I helped man the CXC tent.

Over the course of the weekend we essentially acted as on the ground outreach for CXC, working to advertise our free festival to people who were unfamiliar with us. Because of how the festival was organized, we essentially had a “comics corner” where we were grouped with other comics related exhibitors, such as The Laughing Ogre, a local comic shop and one of our partners. In our tent we had a display set up of some examples of the work done by this year’s special guests, some merchandise which we were selling for donations, and plenty of postcards and other informative posters. While it may have been hot, humid, and rainy, we got lots of traffic and were able to engage with many of the festival-goers.

The rest of this week I have been going through information we gathered during the Columbus Book Festival. We had several sign up sheets for our mailing list and for volunteering with CXC. I had to go through all of these and turn the written out names, email addresses, and phone numbers into a workable spreadsheet. I also searched for information on the other exhibitors which participated at the Columbus Book Festival, creating a datasheet of public contact information for potential networking and partnership opportunities for CXC. Finally, I’ve been continuing to help coordinate and organize flights for special guests, which will hopefully be complete soon.