This weekend I conducted a little experiment.

One of the first things I did when I got down here was print 50 copies of a mini-comics edition of Benny Bunny On Wheels to take around to the stores and give to people I meet.

When I went down to Venice Beach for the first time and saw the chaos of a scene down there with all of the shops and vendors, I got it in my head that I had to go down there and see if I could sell comic books to people.

I decided I would go but procrastinated doing it for the first week I was here. I really did have work to do, but once I was honest with myself I could admit that I was putting off going down there because I was too nervous.

I felt silly for being scared about it. I used to do exactly this every day. But that was a couple of years ago and I’d gone soft. A bunch of reasons why it would wouldn’t work filled my head: I have no kiosk or booth set-up, the book is small, Venice Beach is too competitive, on and on. But through it all I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was something I had to do, and I decided that the fact that I was so nervous about it was exactly the reason to do it.

On Friday and Saturday I hit up Venice Beach and the 3rd Street Promenade for an hour in each spot. Well, Saturday anyway. Friday I was too chicken to approach anyone.

I worked up the nerve to approach some strangers and in an hour, I managed to sell three. I was doing it to do it instead of for money so I was telling people that the price was ‘pay what you can’ just to see what people think it’s worth. That’s probably good market research. In total, I got ten bucks for those three books

I sold three more before deciding that I’d had my fun and that it was time to get back to the pad to get moving on my illustration job.

At least I know that God is at work down here. On Thursday night, when I first started thinking about selling comic books on Venice Beach, I was thinking that it would be nice to earn some money to off-set the costs of this trip, and that very same night I got this illustration job.

And now I have to get back to it!

Tags: adventures, art, Benny Bunny, blog, business, Comic Books, comics, fans, fun, life, me, memories, photos, pics, sales, travel, venice beach