Dear Early Morning Writer.
A few words .
First! You need three things to make a convention.
1.MONEY- The Easiest. you can get a facility for three days with a large room which is all you need to start, usually for below $100 USD a day.
2.LABOR- Harder- You need people to help you and you will find that 80% of the time you will be disappointed. People will talk a big line but when it comes time to produce they will squirm out. What I did with the Weekend was make it so you needed almost NO labor to run it.
3.ATTENDENCE- This is the hardest and most intractable part. Remember that for all people…ALL PEOPLE, wargames is a social hobby they engage in for pleasure, pure pleasure. They are also HUMAN and naturally lazy. Why should they go to a convention if they already have a gaming group. People are also habit driven. If you make a convention it is something new, and you have to convince them to go. If you make a convention model that requires attendance of 1,000 then you are going to fail.
Now let's get down to your items.
"The Four Cornered Weekend- West."
First off, drop "The West." I did not copyright "The Weekend". First off-- I can't. It's a common term. You cannot copyright general words or common forms of speech. Jim Dunnigan tried it with "Nazi" and the courts chopped him off at the knees. More than that, I didn't get into the convention business to make money or for an ego thing, I got into it to provide games and fun to gamers, and to bring back a sense of fellowship, camaraderie, and good times that was getting leached out of the conventions of the HMGS and others.
Your idea of the four corners is good because it gives you a neato name that is rememberable.
Themes in a convention for example, are perfectly useless. No one is going to go out and buy an army for a theme like "The Hanna Barbarian War." They are going to put on the games they have, and play the games they want to play in. I use a theme merely as an excuse to slap some comic photo or a pin-up of some good looking girl to get peoples attention. I have no illusions people are going to fall all over each other trying to fulfill it. People want to come to the convention, have fun, play games, socialize with their old friends, meet new ones, eat, have fun, play games, drink, tell tall tales, cat about people who aren't there, and have fun. Did I mention the having fun?
That's a long way around to tell you that they want to do what they want to do and your wants have nothing to do with it.
I go back to the basics.
First of all you have to WANT to have a convention. If you are not fired up by the idea of it and have some cause to champion YOU will not have the stamina to do it.
Let's take MONEY.
This year after a dry spot of several years The Weekend finally broke even. The money we took in equaled the expense of the rental of the ballroom and other rooms and services at the facility.
Wait. I lied.
That's just covering the immediate expenses. Each year I put out a quarterly PRINT newsletter to my 300 addressee mailing list I also put out a 48 page full color After Action Report/Keepsake booklet, and lots of other publications that cost with postage and printing is about $800 USD a year. That's all out of pocket BEFORE any direct costs for the convention! That hurts when you are on social security. However I do it because of love for the hobby and the convention and it is inordinately pleasurable to do.
BUT OTTO! You say, why don't you do it electronically?!!!
Simple- waste of time. No one will read it. Electronic advertisement is worth what it costs you. Nothing. No one reads it, no one writes it down and whatever you put in it has no more impact on a viewer than the 6th porno image before the present one. With a pamphlet or flyer it may hang around on their desk for a week or two and they might actually read it.
Let me tell you this about "marketing." If you have a product people want they will tear it out of your hands to get it. You don't need advertising. If you have to convince people to buy it, then that's marketing. Since I've retired
Any and every "marketing expert" will tell you that the best most effective, and most powerful marketing method is "word of mouth." I's also the cheapest. That's what I've used on the weekend. That it costs nothing helps you when you are starting out.
2,LABOR The Weekend has been going into its ninth year. It's still largely a one-man-show- Me. Most of the time when people have "wanted to work with me" on something either in The Weekend or when I was working on HMGS shows with Walt O'Hara, or other projects, what they meant was that they wanted to approve the work that I did. That's right, they were not going to do the work, only approve and tell me what they wanted me to do with the work that Idid.
Start small so you can handle the whole of it yourself if you have to.
3. ATTENDENCE- Invite all your wargaming friends. They'll come because they are your friends, and they like to hang out with you. They may give you a little money they rarely will give you work, and most of that will be useless. Their ideas are not your ideas. But if you start small you can see how the attendance goes, which is what you will live or die on.
4. MODEL- You have to figure out what your "idea" is, what is the "model" of the show. I made "THE WEEKEND" on a different model than historicon. Historicon, Gen Con, and all the other big conventions are dealer shows. People go to buy and gawk and see, and maybe play a game. The Weekend has no dealers, though we are, after eight years attempting to get a dealer presence it is NOT going to be like the big shows. As I said before, the model is the SOCIALIZING people do at the big shows which is in with among, over under around and through, the games, the dealers etc. That's why the center of ballroom, the focus of the entire con is the munchie pit with its circle of comfy chairs where people can socialize between games and the games around it . Many people have said to me that "Everytime I come to the Weekend" I play more games there than I do the whole rest of the year! they can game CONSTANTLY.
That's the model. I don't have to entertain them with razzamatazz and costumed re-enactors and swag bags and all the rest, I just have to get them together to PLAY!
You have to figure out what the model is going to be at your WEEKEND. I see you have a plan based on your corner idea. What happens if no one shows up with an 18th century historical game? What are you going to do, leave the tables lie fallow? Or do you know you have enough 18th century gamers.
Like I said, start small. Find a hotel with a 30 by 30 room they can rent you for cheap and have tables they will provide you NO CHARGE! Then get your friends together and put on your games, and have enough chinoiserie like badges and forms to make them think they're at a convention, and stand aside and let them have fun.
Have munchies. A couple boxes of soda, a case of beer, a pile of junk food, that's all you need. Trust in the generosity of gamers who will also bring their own.
Don't worry about negotiating with a hotel. These 
s on TMP who go on about hotel demands have never negotiated with them. EVERYTHING is negotiable. Remember what each side wants. YOU want to put on a convention. THEY want to rent rooms. EVERY hotel will give you credit towards the cost of the room you use for rooms they rent to people coming to your event. An empty meeting room to them is simply an unproductive piece of equipment. They want to rent hotel rooms. You bring in people who are going to use the room and they will always give you credit toward that cost, especially if they have dining facilities and others they make money on. So if they won't talk about that say "Thank you very much" and go to the next hotel down the road. All hotels got tables. They have weddings, they have business meetings, they have social events. They got tables. Once again, learn to say no if they want to charge you. If you are in the favored position of being able to take a large number of rooms, you are blessed, the hotel will bend over backwards for you.
Ignore the sneerers who say "the XXXX hotel is a dump." They wouldn't come if you gave them a free room at the Waldorf with a tart on their pillow.
ALWAYS look at the facility from the standpoint of the gamer or dealer. What is the most important thing for them? How hard it is to load and unload their stuff and how far they have to carry it. At the Contiental, three doors open up at ground level to a vast parking lot. If they didn't have carpeting you could DRIVE your truck right up to the table.
Contact me if you need help.
ONE THING, THE MOST IMORTANT.
Always pay your own way. Do not give yourself a free room. The hotels are adept at doing this and will offer you to move your rent onto other attendees. Don't do it! If you do this you sell your soul, and everyone will know it. You can be silent as a tomb but they will know. Giving yourself a free ride makes you think that all the others are saps and you are putting something over on them. Humans are animals, they can sense fear and contempt.
Keep the idea that we are all gamers, we are all equal and it doesn't matter if you spend a lot of your own money and never get it back, or that you do so much work (who asked you to) or "It only increases my buddies bill by a little." Its a "F**k yer buddy move." Leave that for Junta or Diplomacy. Also don't give yourself a special badge unless it's enormously self deprecating. People want to game with their friends.
If you're not into putting on a convention as a labor of love…
don't do it.
adds artillery to his soft-plastic Union forces.
