u/Cultural-Bobcat6702

I got caught out this year and I want to fix it for next year.

I spent the spring looking at whatever was open to apply for, applied to those, and did alright. Then around June I went to look at the bigger cons I actually wanted and most of them had closed applications months before. So my whole year ended up decided by which forms happened to be open when I looked, which is a dumb way to pick.

What I am trying to work out is how far out you all actually work. Do you sit down once and map the whole next year, or do you keep a running list and check things off as forms open? And how do you keep track of the deadlines, because that is the part I keep losing. I had them in my notes app, then in a spreadsheet, and I still missed two.

Also curious how many of you apply to more than you could actually do, assuming you get turned down from some of them. I have been applying to about what I can handle and then ending up with gaps when I do not get in.

There's a lot of advice around about picking new events and almost none about quitting one you already do.

The tricky part seems to be that a show usually doesn't go bad in one jump. The fee creeps up, the crowd thins a little, and because you already know the load in and where your booth goes it stays the easy option. Familiarity ends up doing a lot of the deciding.

So for people who have been at this a while, what actually makes you cut a show? Is it a number you track, like sales against the total cost with travel and fees in, or is it more of a judgement call after a couple of bad years?

Also curious whether anyone has dropped one and regretted it because it picked back up the year after.

I asked this in another craft fair group a couple of days ago, because I keep paying booth fees on not much more than a nice looking flyer. The answers were better than what I had been doing, so I am putting them here.

The thing that came up most was not attendance. It was how long the market has been running, how long it has been in that same spot, and how many vendors come back every year. The returning vendor rate is the number that is hard to fake. An organizer can tell you a huge attendance figure and there is no way to check it, but if most of the vendors are new every year, that tells you what last year's vendors decided afterwards.

Second one I had not thought to ask: whether they cap how many of each type of vendor they take. If you are in a saturated category that is the difference between being one of two and being one of nine. Worth asking even when the answer is no, because how they answer tells you whether they think about the mix at all.

Third, go and look at it. A few people said attend it as a customer first, even if that means waiting a year. The cheaper version is finding vendors who did it in past years, usually through tagged photos, and asking them straight out. People answer that more honestly than I expected.

What changed how I read all of this is that a vague answer is itself an answer. Someone who has run the same market for eight years knows their returning vendor number. Someone who deflects to a big attendance figure usually has nothing else to give you.

I have paid for two events now that turned out to be a lot smaller than they sounded, so I am trying to get better at asking things up front instead of finding out on the day.

At the moment I ask how many vendors they are taking, what the turnout was last year, and how they are advertising it. The turnout answer is the one I trust least, because it comes from the person selling me the booth and there is usually nothing to check it against.

So what else do you ask before you hand over the money? And has anyone found a decent way to work out whether an attendance number is real, or do you just go once and find out?

US based, dollars, for the location rule.

Something I keep seeing come up here and in the craft fair subs is people applying to the same events every year mostly out of habit, and then wondering later why the year felt flat.

What seems to trip people up is that a market gets judged on how the day felt rather than on what it actually left once the booth fee and the fuel are out of it. And a decent market that got rained on ends up looking identical in a notebook six months later to one that was just dead.

So what do you actually track? Do you write anything down at the event itself, rough turnout, weather, whether the crowd was there to buy or just walking around, or do you go on memory when applications open again? And does one bad run drop an event for you, or do you give it a second go before writing it off?