This weekend, Anime Festival Asia takes place in Singapore, creating one of the largest gatherings of anime fans in the world! Naturally, Gensokyo Radio will have a presence here as we did at six other events this year with promotional handouts featuring artwork by Rosana Margarida and Ramnik Singh. This convention will be the final destination for our promotional campaign of 2013.
Where was Gensokyo Radio this year?
Gensokyo Radio will have held a presence at seven different locations around the world in 2013, in three different world regions. These places are:
- NipponCon in Bremen, Germany
- AniMinneapolis in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
- Anime Expo in Los Angeles, California, USA
- SabotenCon in Phoenix, Arizona, USA
- Tracon8 in Tampere, Finland
- Anime Weekend Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- Anime Festival Asia in Singapore
This year marks the first year that promotion visited the European region. It revisited the Southeast Asia region this year, following last year’s promotion in Jakarta, Indonesia. In total, we’ve been to 10 separate events in 9 different locations, with Anime Expo being the only convention to have promotion both years. The other two events from last year were Otakuthon (2012) in Montreal, Canada and Anime Festival Asia: Indonesia (2012) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Since promotion this year is essentially complete, I’d like to share with you some of the artwork we received from artists when we did our original call for artists earlier this year.
Who else submit artwork for this year’s promotional handout campaign?
In total, there were six artists that submit seven pieces of artwork in all, with two being chosen for the 2013 promotional campaign. These artists are (in alphabetical order):
- BakaImouto
- KyoukoPro Studios
- Ramnik Singh
- Rebecca Ree
- Rosana Margarida
- Shafira
When I sat down with the other three staff members here at the site to determine which artwork we should choose to print, it took a lot longer to make our decision than we originally thought it would. After an hour and a half of deliberation, we decided to select two pieces rather than just one. Each artist was awarded 500 printed handouts with their credits on the back of each, for a total of 1,000 handouts.
Early estimates are that we successfully handed out roughly 850 handouts this year, more than quadruple the amount that was handed out last year.
Of course, one of the most important steps in promotion is having listeners and volunteers do the floor work of handing out materials at conventions and events. Without our volunteers, none of the promotion done this year would have been possible, and we would like to thank every single person that had a hand with these handouts. We will be updating our credits page here on the site to properly credit those that helped us this year. This list will be completed after confirming with volunteers how they would like to be credited on the site (real or screen names, etc). Among these volunteers are Sonicmega (Sean Chiplock) at Anime Expo 2013, Puzzle Plate at SabotenCon 2013, and DMJ654 at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2013. Thanks to all of you!
Lastly, we would like to ask our listeners and readers to share with us their experience of how they came to be acquainted with Gensokyo Radio, even if it wasn’t necessarily by one of these handouts (though that’d be cool to hear about too). Write about it in the comments section below.
Thanks again to everyone involved in this year’s promotional campaign for making it a big success! We’ll be posting in the coming months about the search for artists for a possible 2014 promotional season, so stay tuned!
Thanks for listening!
