Sabaku Con

Sabaku overall is a good convention, and if you keep your costs low, can be wonderful! The Venue// hotel isn't laid out well, this hotel isn't meant for anime events, and felt like space could be used better. The staff put up signs to help with finding places, which was nice!
Staff where nice when I saw them, and very cool to see the owner checking in on staff.
The layout for the room the artist alley and vendors is small, towards the end of a hallway, so feels like the con was pushed in a corner if you didn't see the rest of the hotel.
2023 apparently went down in attendance with 2k attendees from what I was told, but the attendance didn't mean less sales for me, i made as much as ABQ comiccon, and had less overhead since the booth was slightly cheaper and free parking! I do because of less vendors/artists it keeps the profit higher for the artists. The attendees are so sweet, and if more love and care went into this con in terms of reaching out to the community, I feel it can grow. The bummer is the buying your booth at the con mindset, if you are solo as a artist, it means you have to leave your table alone for 20 mins while you wait in line, or if you forget to get your booth, someone will buy it while you're busy making sales. I feel if the con can do what FanExpo's do is let the process be ALL ONLINE with payment, and you get till the end of the show (not hours before it ends) to buy your same booth.
So if you are local/ low costs of travel, have a variety of products besides prints, I feel you will do well at this convention!

The set-up was weird, but overall we did okay.
Didn't see too many "resell" artists, but there were a few (mainly selling their old plushies, or something).
But this is a small, local con. None of the big name artists come down because it's not a big show. You can't expect them to.

As for the staff, they were helpful and kind. I've always had good experiences with Monkey Paw.
Albuquerque is pretty close, so it's doable.
I ended up re-buying my booth due to placement and requests for me to come back.
A couple other non-resell artists and not printer paper artists re-bought too.
Don't be salty.

Sabaku is the biggest anime con in the state of New Mexico, but there only seem to be two or three, so thats not a huge accomplishment. The convention never responds to emails, and when you call, they'll say "call back tomorrow and ask" or "the information will be online in a week" and never actually get you the info you're looking for. The only way I was ever able to actually get a response was through Facebook messenger, and even then I had to fish the answers out. They just moved to a new building which was "bigger", but it's really not. There are no places to sit or gather in the main area, so people just camp out in the aisles in front of artists booths, because of the subpar layout. There is no jury, booth sales are first come, first serve, and it shows. While there are more artists who sell the national standard of prints and acrylic charms than ever, there is still majority printer paper artists, people who resell things straight from China, and people treating the AA like a yard sale to sell their old manga and Pokémon cards (wtf Sabaku). The worst thing was a few of the artists were terribly annoyingly talkative people, and it led for a whole section to have terrible sales from attendees avoiding them. Like most Monkey Paw cons, they offer you the chance to buy your space again for the next year at the end of the convention, trying to basically turn their AAs exclusive to (I guess) try and keep the same sort of terrible shit being sold there, as the only ones who seemed to actually buy the booths a year in advance were the annoying resell "artists" and the printer paper artists. If you're used to Monkey Paw's bullshit and are willing to take the risk of shitty sales, or are just local, sell at this con. Otherwise, save your money and time and plan for a better con elsewhere.