This year's Anime Festival Asia is quite different because the Creators Hub is tucked away at a corner. In the past, it's located at the back of the hall along with the commercial booths.
Not only that, there were no more exhibitor badges. Instead, our passes were just paper wristbands 😐
The first thing we noticed during setup day was the spelling mistake... XD
I sold pretty much the same stuff you saw at STGCC except for the pre-order of T-shirts. I was also the only vendor accepting PayLah! payment by scanning my QR code and 4-5 customers made use of it. P.S. you can sign up with my referral code: EVAB7P459 and receive $5! from DBS 😁
Colin from my yoga class (and Patreon) came down to support! Yes he's wearing the #saikangwarrior tank for guys, available at
Yoga Inc. shop 😍
Aaron, who has been a regular fan visiting my booth every single time, also came down to collect his pre-order T-shirt :)
Ummi, my new fan from Instagram, also came down to pass me her handmade crochet present!
They are very cute and I'm displaying them on my shelf now 😍
Midori Kame, my patreon, also came by to give me her handmade present!
Can you believe this bag was handmade!? I'm going to use this to collect cash at my booth next time, kaching! She also told me I could borrow her Lolita clothes to wear to AFA next year since I will not be having a booth, yeah or nay? 😅
Our neighbours were two ikemen artists.
They draw very nice gay artwork and even bought my books to support.
They are
https://twitter.com/sixty69night and
https://twitter.com/PenguinFrontier
Here was my team of helpers and them!
My thoughts
Oddly the crowd this year was very different from past years. There were more students than working adults and they were into yaoi BL (boy's love) stuff. There was even a weird guy who came up to me and said that I shouldn't be there because my comics were not anime enough 😠 It's a very narrow minded way of thinking that anime and manga must look like a certain way. He probably made that comment because he didn't see anybody buying things from my booth.
In the past years (2014 and 2016), I would be so busy until I could not get away from my booth to walk around, but this year I had lots of free time... ... 😰 But luckily I still managed to sell 195 comic books, slightly worse than
STGCC, so it wasn't that bad. Many people were also more interested in my 2nd book: "Eva Goes Solo" instead of my latest book "Eva, Kopi and Matcha 2.0". Maybe because the 2nd book was cheaper and mainly about Japan. With that in mind, I'm not sure if I will return to AFA again...
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Thank you all who came down to my booth to support my books and/or goods during AFA! Also special thanks to Emmanuel and Steffi for helping me at my booth and helping my fans take photos!
See you all again in 2019! (maybe at STGCC... I don't know)
Great to see you there @ afa although I didn't buy any comics from you. Actually I didn't buy any as I think I have passed the stage. I did see youngsters appreciating local comics and do hope to see you again nxt yr!
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