Something not visual novel related?… le gasp!

First, for the non-Dutchies; We regularly visit some conventions in the Netherlands to sell our stuff. Last week we were at Animecon, which also organizes the annual Dutch Manga Awards. These are basically awards which can be won by amateur manga artists who self-publish their stories.

As you can see from title of this post, we happened to win in the category original story with our book The Lost Angel Arianna. This resulted in us getting a cool, shiny, super professional(ly handmade) trophy and some moneyz!

Hell yeah.

Actually, we didn’t think we would win. It’s not that we’re not confident about our work, but more the fact that two of the three jury members had a great interest and history in western styled comics.

Yeah, that didn’t reassure us much; since people like that usually show a clear preference to a more western style, and our style is totally shoujo. What didn’t help either was that another person was nominated in this category with a story using a pure western comic style, and that one of the jury members said he didn’t like manga.

As you can imagine, we prepared ourselves to not be butt-hurt after that guy won, only… he didn’t. The importance of style did turn out to be an huge discussion point among the jury members, so at least our fears were justified. Also, now I can complain without looking bad~

Anyway, enough gossip about behind-the-scenes Dutch mangaka politics (man, what a sentence). As for the actual convention experience, it was a little different this time. Unlike conventions in America and such, Dutch conventions never had an Artist Alley (or as they say Avenue) before. Instead they just put the artists between the real dealers and shopkeepers.

However, this year they did separate the groups and thus we got our own Avenue. Yes I find it amusing writing this. As expected, sales went down and what didn’t help either was that it was placed after the dealerroom. You know, the place where people spend money? Still, it wasn’t that bad and if they make sure people realize we’re there, then I think it will work out more smoothly.

At the very least, we had lots of cool conversations with our neighbours into the wee hours of the night. Please, accompany us again next time, we still have to convince you to make more visual novels <3.

So, that was our con-report. We had a lot of fun there and will now resume pushing our trophy into people’s faces. I’m off! /o/

~Anna