I may have an aneurysm by the end of the day.
In September, I’ll be tabling at a con for my own books. I might be a little excited about this.
Right now my wife and I are running numbers to see how many of our books we should have on hand at the con.
And that’s why I’m going to have an aneurysm.
See, it costs money to purchase the books ourselves. So how much should we budget for that? How many books are we bringing to the con? You want enough that you don’t sell out. At the same time, since we don’t have another con scheduled for about a year, we really don’t want many leftovers.
How many books should we plan on selling? Well, to get a good bead on that, we need to know how many people are going to come to the con. And after that, can we get a breakdown on demographics? We’ll be selling the Madelyn of the Sky books, which is middle grade fantasy adventure. Maybe I’m biased, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be a young teen to enjoy it, but that is who we’re marketing toward.

Of course, once you have those numbers (if you can get them), what percentage of people are likely to buy?
And if they’re buying, are they getting just book one? The first three books? The whole six-book series? What if we offer a discount on the whole set? What if we offer a deal to get the first three? How many people will get just book one—which means we need to order more of book one ourselves. How many more?
My wife has set up an excel sheet with all sorts of formulas so we can play with the numbers. How many hours is the con open? How many paying customers do we expect to see in any given hour? Well, Fridays typically people aren’t buying as much, and Sundays the last few years of the con have been pretty empty by the last two hours. What does that mean as we estimate sales?
Annnnnnnnnnnd… aneurysm!
So yeah. If you see writer’s brains leaking out of my ears, that’s why.