Engaging, well organized and deftly written; a treasure trove of valuable information for those who want to sell at...
This book provides a comprehensive guide to becoming a vendor at anime, comic, and sci-fi conventions.
Lewis likes to call herself a “vendorpreneur” who has carved out a very successful niche: selling products at conventions that appeal to pop-culture enthusiasts. In an instructive debut book supplemented with color photographs, Lewis painstakingly details a selling process to help the novice vendor establish a business, avoid pitfalls, and follow in her footsteps. The author begins with five “cardinal rules,” an overview of basic strategies concerning customer psychology, merchandise acquisition and selection, and pricing. Part 2 comprises the bulk of the book; here, Lewis offers a “Business Battle Plan Blueprint” that walks through every step, in sequence, a vendor needs to take to prepare for and attend a convention. Each phase, positioned as an “assignment,” includes simple step-by-step instructions, augmented when necessary by illustrative examples from websites as well as photographs. Phases include conducting online research, finding unique items on Japanese sites, investigating wholesalers, and crafting a merchandise plan. This portion of the book is sure to be of great value to the beginner and could help even experienced vendors improve their game plans. In Part 3, Lewis wraps up with a useful overview of convention registration requirements and logistics. She also uses photographs of her own booth to illustrate stall setup and merchandise placement. Throughout, Lewis sprinkles “Sensei tips,” short pearls of wisdom based on her experiences, as well as “Oops alerts,” which highlight “regrettable new-vendor decisions that led to disastrous sales results.” At the end of this entertaining book, the author appends a listing of “trusted suppliers” that should save the reader considerable research time. Lewis writes with an enthusiasm for her subject in a style that is breezy, informal, and a joy to read. Her merchandising expertise and knowledge of the subject matter shine through as she delivers on the promise of the volume’s subtitle: “An insider’s guide for new anime vendors.”
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9964536-0-8
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Anime Vendor
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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