This weekend was Penguicon. I was mildly silly and signed up for way more stuff than I should have. I didn't see any of the panels except ones I was on, but those were a lot of fun.

Penguicon does a very nice thing for the attending authors. They have a room set aside for book sales. You don't need to pay anything to use the room, not even a small percentage.

However, if you use the room, they require you to spend a few hours manning the book store.

This is not a hardship. I already knew most of the attending authors, and had a chance to meet a few more. When there were no potential victi... buyers we chatted among ourselves, compared publisher horror stories, discussed other venues, and such.

In year's past, Penguicon got a Square reader and handled all the payments. This was a lot of overhead for a volunteer run convention that's perpetually understaffed.

This year they decided to have the authors provide a QR code for their books so the customers could transfer money to the author's PayPal account. Or if the author were manning the room at the time, they could pay the author directly.

Unfortunately, they made this decision on April 12, just before taxes were due, and a week before the convention.

So, on Thursday, before the convention started on Friday, I finally had time to start putting together the QR code.

My love affair (such as it wasn't) with PayPal is pretty much over.

I didn't want to use my old PayPal account for the books - trying to keep business money separate from personal money - so I created a new PayPal account with a new email.

Oops. There are two kinds of PayPal accounts - business and personal. I foolishly took the default and ended up with a personal one and then discovered that you can't generate QR codes from that.

But there's a "convert my account to business" option. That worked, and I now had a page that generated a QR code for my business.

What I wanted was a QR code for the price of the books, so someone could just scan and pay, no worry about how-much or mistyping, etc.

The web page says "Customize you QR Code with a price", but there's no link associated with it.

Clicking the QR code on the page (a likely place to go to customize the code) takes you to a login page so you can pay yourself.

So I tried the "Help Chat," and after a couple tries got a very helpful customer service person who is now my Personal Small Business Assistant.

She suggested that maybe you can only generate customized QR codes via the phone app, not the web app.

Pretty stupid, IMHO. Phones are notoriously awkward for data entry and layout type tasks.

But, download, install, and sure enough, I could generate a QR code on the phone, hook up the phone to my laptop and download the QR code, move that into a graphic design tool to add text (like the book title and price), and once I got clever, even put a picture of the book and some advertising blurbs.

This worked! I printed out my new QR code and tested it by buying a copy of Promised Rewards and seeing the money show up in my PayPal account.

Yeah, it cost me the transaction cost, but it was worth it to validate the system before I put it into operation.

It also triggered some sort of PayPal fraud system, and they froze my account.

I sent an email to my Personal Small Business Assistant, and she assured me that this happens and she'd send a note to the fraud department to reconsider whether or not I was a crook. It might get cleared up next week some time.

But I wouldn't be able to use this account this weekend.

Now it's Friday, and I'm due at the convention in the mid afternoon.

Venmo is another option for paying with a QR code . It turns out that's a subsidiary of PayPal and has many of the same website programmers (who flunked out of kindergarten when they couldn't figure out that the In door as also an Out door).

The instructions for making customized QR codes references parts of the page that don't exist.

After way more finagling and profanities, I did get QR codes for my books made up and even sold a few books.