What We Learned Exhibiting at MoCCA Fest 2026 (Tips for Comics Creators)

This past weekend was KCU’s first time exhibiting at a show since 2021! WE HAD A BLAST.

How We Prepared

Jade is acting as our project manager this year (in addition to being our creative director — she’s got a lot on her plate!). She is super organized and helped us come up with a comprehensive list of our goals for the show; what new promo materials we needed to create; and a checklist of everything we needed to remember to bring.

Thinking through what we wanted to accomplish in advance was critical. Though as you’ll see at the end of the article, we still forgot a few things and learned some lessons on how to do it even better next time!

Here’s what we created for the show:

• New business cards!
• A “What is KCU?” handout
• A “How to Pitch Your Graphic Novel” zine
• Stickers!
• Coloring pages
• A retractable banner
• A “Kasey” standee
• A tablecloth runner with our logo
• A newsletter signup sheet

What Went Well

Collecting emails

Our #1 goal for the show was to grow our newsletter list by collecting emails of creators passing by our booth. While we created a QR code for people to sign up digitally, what turned out to be most effective was the paper signup sheet.

This is my biggest piece of advice for any creator at any show: ALWAYS HAVE A NEWSLETTER SIGNUP SHEET.

Interacting with visitors at a big show like MoCCA is a bit of an art. People often want to peruse your table without being “sold to” right away. For me, what worked best was to let them look quietly for a bit, then break the ice by asking them, “are you an artist?” It was a very nice way to get a conversation started.

Then we were able to follow up by explaining, “KCU is an organization focused on career development for graphic novelists who make books for kids and teens. If that’s something you’re interested in, you can sign up for our mailing list here.”

Hanging out in person

Spending time with our “booth buddies” — the KCU volunteers who signed up to help us man the table and explain KCU to passers-by — was so much fun!!!! Thank you to Bert Tzeng, Marie Ventura, Jeff Larkin, Hollie Michaels, and David Quinn for being such wonderful company.

It was also heartwarming whenever KCU members stopped by the table to give us a hug! It was a hugfest all weekend long.

Another big shoutout to Johna Mandell, who organized a meetup for KCU members on Sunday afternoon. Eight people got together and went to a cafe before attending the panel I was on (“Kids Comics Today”) later that afternoon. I didn’t get to join them, alas, but I heard they had a great time together.

Having coloring pages

This was a last minute addition to our table giveaways. We decided to create some simple coloring pages using existing KCU character art, and to bring a box of crayons for the table.

Man, was that a good decision!!

It gave us another easy icebreaker question whenever people stopped by the table: “Would you like a coloring sheet? We have crayons if you want to color it right now.” Because our table was in front of a blank wall, we were able to hang people’s colored sheets behind us using painters tape. Instant gallery of art!

I colored some pages myself, and this made me realize why there has been such a craze for adult coloring books. Coloring is very relaxing. In the midst of the festival hubbub, sitting and coloring made the noise seem to melt away.

And of course, kids love to color! We were one of the few tables at MoCCA that had stuff specifically geared toward kids, so whenever parents came by our table, they seemed really happy that we had kid-oriented materials. Watching kids color is almost as relaxing as doing it yourself.

Selling the Let’s Go! anthology

We still have some leftover copies of KCU’s first-ever comics anthology, Let’s Go! We brought about 25 copies to MoCCA. Since books are more expensive than merch like stickers, and MoCCA is not a family-oriented show, I had low expectations for book sales. But we sold 18 copies, which was fantastic! Woohoo!

There were a few lessons I drew from our experience selling the anthology at MoCCA:

Having only a few items for sale helps with sales. There have been numerous famous psychological experiments showing that the more variety a seller offers, the harder it is for consumers to make decisions. I think the fact that we only had a handful of products to sell — a book, stickers, and a zine — actually helped us. It was easy for people to decide whether or not they wanted to buy something from us.

Enlisting the help of someone who’s a good salesperson (or being a good salesperson yourself) makes a big difference. Shout-out here goes to Marie Ventura, who personally sold 9 copies of Let’s Go! even though she was only at our booth for a couple hours. Whenever browsers would stop by our table, Marie was not shy at all about showing them Let’s Go! She would pick up the book, open it, and explain that it was an anthology aimed at kids, with comics by 31 different creators.

Marie’s enthusiasm definitely encouraged more people to buy the book than otherwise would have happened.

Being next to SAW!

When we applied for a table at MoCCA, there was a question on the application form that asked, “Is there anyone you’d specifically like to be next to at the show?”

For that question, I answered “SAW” (the Sequential Artists Workshop), because SAW is like our sister organization; it’s similar to KCU, but focused on creators who are making comics for adults rather than kids. Tom Hart, the founder of SAW, is one of my very favorite people, and I figured that being next to SAW would be useful for both of us — when creators stopped by our booth but weren’t interested in doing comics for kids, we could direct them right over to our neighbor, and vice versa.

Having a table next to friends makes the whole show even better, that’s for sure.

Making new connections

Naturally, this is one of the biggest reasons to exhibit at a show. You want new people to find out about your work!

I already mentioned that growing our newsletter list was one of our biggest goals for the show, and we definitely succeeded with that goal. But beyond that, it was great being able to explain to people in person what KCU does.

As the show was winding down, Bailey had the brilliant idea to take a stack of our “What is KCU?” handouts, and to walk around to all the different art schools at the show and give some of them to faculty members representing those schools. She said they happily took our handout and said things like, “Your organization is great to know about!”

We probably should have done this at the beginning of the show instead of at the end, but that’s what happens whenever you try something new: you learn!

Speaking of things we learned….

What We Can Improve Next Time

Adding a tagline to all our stuff

When we created our banner, we just put “Kids Comics Unite” on it — we didn’t include a tagline that explains who we are/what we do. This was a big forehead-slap, because our mission is not necessarily intuitive to people who are new to us. A lot of people think that we teach comics to kids, or showcase comics created by kids, or something like that.

Going forward, we want to remember to include our tagline — “Kids Comics Unite is an online community offering career development for comics creators working in children’s publishing” — on all our promo materials.

Having a checklist/explainer doc for our booth volunteers

Since we had a number of different volunteers helping us at the booth at different times, we needed to explain certain things to each new volunteer. Such as:

• What we were giving away for free, and what was for sale
• What each of the sale items cost
• How people could pay us
• That our #1 goal was getting people to sign up for the mailing list
• Where the cash was
• Etc etc

But it’s easy to forget how hectic a festival can be. Not all our volunteers got as thorough an introduction as others. I realized belatedly that we should have created a “booth cheat sheet” with all those important details.

Tracking our sales

Jade created a “tic sheet” where we could note every time we sold something. But in the flurry of setup, and greeting people, and getting distracted by everything going on, we forgot to explain the tic sheet to our volunteers, and we even forgot to keep track of it ourselves.

So in the end, we didn’t have a record of what exactly got sold, and we had to figure it out by counting our leftover inventory and subtracting it from the total inventory we knew we had at the beginning.

Again, if we had had a “booth cheat sheet” that listed key tasks like this, I think everyone would have remembered better.

Figuring out our sticker sales strategy

Figuring out how to price products is tricky! You have to balance between making a profit, but also not charging so much that people won’t buy.

Initially, we set the price of our single stickers at $3 each, and the sticker sheet at $10. But after the first day, we had sold almost none of the sticker sheets, and we realized that it might have been priced too high. So we lowered the sticker sheet price to $5.

We also realized, though, that the size of the sticker sheet might have been a bit too small. The stickers were very cute, but because they were so small, they might not have been as eye-catching as they could be. So the next time we make a sticker sheet, we’ll print a bigger size.

Having a better follow-up process in place

It’s a week after MoCCA, and I’m only now writing this blog! It would have been nicer if we could have published a recap of the show within a day or two, when the excitement of the weekend was still high.

We also need to write a special welcome email to all the new people who signed up for our newsletter list, and it would have been good if we’d already had that prepped so it could have gone out right away.

And finally, I tend to have lots of amazing conversations with people, and then not have a process to keep track of all those new connections in an intentional way. This is something I’m working on improving now.

Final Thoughts

Writing a recap blog like this is a win-win. I get to share with you what happened at the show, but it also helps me clarify what we learned from our experience!

The only other thing I wanted to mention about MoCCA is something that might be fairly obvious from everything I’ve written above: being together in person with a bunch of kindred spirits is a HUGE positive energy boost.

The vibe at MoCCA was incredibly positive. Everyone was so excited to discover incredible art and stories, to meet new people, to share ideas…. It was a strong reminder that humans are social creatures, and we thrive from helping each other.

Over to You

If you attended MoCCA, I’d love to hear your takeaways from the show. Or if you’re just curious to hear more about something I mentioned in the article, leave a comment below and I’ll respond!