Convention Track

I would love nothing more than to be selling at conventions! It seems like it would be the perfect situation as Travis and I love to travel and would have a total blast. So when we closed our shop we diligently set about attempting to register to sell at some East Coast Steampunk Conventions. We even set aside some money to pay for the booth and travel and all that. We found dozens of events! How awesome! And every single event we looked at is full on vendors. Oh. Well spite. So we moved onto looking at conventions going on in 2013. And again either they are full or they haven't begun taking submissions and there is no information on when they will open for that. So I'm at a total loss. Is there something I'm missing. Some secret as to how this all works. Is there some ethereal waiting line somewhere that I should be standing in and instead am wandering around beside it going ...uuhhh ..wtf?