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Some of the questions required rather lengthy answers, so hopefully this interview will be a moment of joyful reading for you

Is there a lot of money involved in a convention of this size, and did any of it come out of your own pockets?

We've been pretty lucky with Auto Assembly and every year - with the exception of Auto Assembly 2004 - has broken even and left us with some money left over which has either been reinvested back into future years or gone to our nominated charities.
In terms of home much they have cost, earlier conventions were on a fairly small budget, but this year at a rough guess it is going to cost us around £7,500 which has to come from attendees, fanzine sales, and dealer table bookings which is why we we're asking for as many people to pre-register as possible!

How many attendees are you expecting this year, what with the 2007 hiatus and all? The list of pre-registrants you posted looks promising so far!

To be honest, I have no idea! Going by the rate of bookings at the moment, we're ahead of where we were last time at this point so I think we're on course to beat the European attendance record again so we're expecting above 400 but as we're going to be promoting the convention more over the next few weeks as long as locally in the area as usual so we could do a lot better than that.

Which year has been the best so far in terms of visitors, programme, and preparations?

I'd say that each year has had it's own strengths and weaknesses so it's hard to say! For attendance, Auto Assembly 2005 was the best with 409 and currently holds the European attendance record. For preparation, each is about the same and takes us between eight months to a year as it's just myself and Sven Harvey (Auto Assembly's founder) who do the bulk of the core work between us!).

Saying that, in 2004 when we had our first ever voice actor, Wally Wingert, he came over to the UK a couple of days before and stayed a few days after so I had the chance to spend some time with him in Birmingham and a couple of days before Auto Assembly was his birthday so we spent the day in London so that was a real blast! It was the same with Auto Assembly 2005 as we had the chance to spend the day after the convention with Neil Kaplan in Birmingham, so as you can imagine, running these things does have it's perks.

For the programme, as I said, each event has had it's own strengths. Auto Assembly 2004 had great support from Atari and had several Playstation 2 demo machines running the new Transformers game at the time so everyone had the chance to play it all weekend. Also, as Wally Wingert was our guest of honour, he previewed a project he was working on - Uncle Davver's Really Scary Movie Show, and brought along brand new episodes of Astro Boy that we were able to premiere. If that wasn't enough, the convention was even filmed and featured on the G1 Season 3/4 DVD box set from Metrodome!

Auto Assembly 2005 had a great guest line-up, including our first Optimus Prime and moved to a much bigger venue allowing us to have everything in a single hall and saw us being a lot more ambitious with merchandise, producing our own postcards and pin badges and we were very proud of that. We really decided to pull out all the stops with our displays and put on a massive Optimus Prime display with all of Sven's toys and a few of my own and a massive display of original comic and toy box art.

AA2006 had a few teething problems when we tried to do some things a little differently than normal, although it did give us a lot of great new ideas that we hadn't tried out before, but we had some great guests, were joined by David Kaye who was wonderful (and being a big Beast Wars fan it was very much a case of "hero worship"! that weekend). One of the highlights was something I can't say too much about but we did work quite closely with a company that was working on a Transformers product at the time and they wanted to hold a series of discussion sessions during the day at the convention so we randomly picked 50 fans and gave them the chance to take part and get involved. It doesn't look like this product will ever happen, but it was still a pretty unique opportunity!

Is it still as fun and exciting as it was the first time?

The first one for me was strange as I was really there just to help Sven out as it was more of a spin-off from our Star Trek fan club that we were running at the time and Sven did a lot of the work - I just looked after the check-in desk but I still enjoyed the day although it's now a full joint effort.

It's always a fantastic buzz doing it, although it can be nerve-wracking as well until we break even financially! I think the toughest part is the last month or so when we have the last minute rush but it's so great to read all the enthusiasm on all of the forums and reading emails from everyone that it keeps us going!

For how long have you been interested in Transformers yourselves?

Personally, I've only been a fan for about 8 years. I was never really interested in Transformers - more Star Trek and Star Wars but Sven continually tried to get me into them. He bought me a toy for my birthday a few years earlier as a "joke" present (G2 Blowout) but I didn't really get interested until I started watching Beast Wars which got me hooked. I really started getting into things when we ran our first Auto Assembly event in 2000 when I was astonished by the warmth of all of the fans so I can't thank everyone who was there enough!

Are you more into the new stuff (Animated, movie, A/E/C), or is G1 what brings out the most joy?

Personally it will always be Beast Wars as this is how I got into Transformers. From a series point of view, I just feel that the stories have a lot more depth and maturity, but humour on a more subtle level as well with much stronger characters. Close second would have to be RiD although that's more because of my friendship with Wally Wingert and Neil Kaplan. Comics wise though, G1 does hold up a lot better thanks to Simon Furman!

When it comes to the toys, mainly I collect RiD and Beast Wars and then I just buy other toys that I like from various ranges so my collection is pretty varied having everything from G1 to Cybertron. I haven't got anything from Animated (and to be honest I haven't even seen any episodes yet!) although it doesn't look like it's something that will appeal to me that much.

Dan Gilvezan was a surprise to most people. do you have any more secret guests lined up for this year's Auto Assembly?

There are one or two other people who are interested in attending BUT it is now dependent on pre-registrations are we are pretty much up to our budget limit for guests. If we can get up to about 425-450 pre-bookings in the next 4 weeks then hopefully we can get another 1-2 guests, otherwise I think we're probably up to our limit as Dan is our most expensive guest yet!

Do you have any more goodies that will be in the "goodie bag"? (The goodie bag is a free bag of gifts that pre-registrants get when arriving at Auto Assembly. It contains everything from exclusive postcards to stickers, snacks, etc.)

We've been pretty pleased with the goodie bags over the years and although this one isn't as good as previous years, we are working on more. I'm in talks with one company right now which could be pretty good and I'm waiting for confirmation from another on what they might be able to send to us as I write this. I've also said a few times publicly that - again dependent on pre-bookings - that we'd love to produce a THIRD exclusive postcard if we can afford to do this, but as these need to go to our printers about two weeks before the convention we need to hit that 425-450 pre-registration figure.

One thing we DO have are a lot of "leftovers" from previous years which we are trying to sort out that are limited in quantities. These will obviously be going to the earlier registrants so for most people who have already booked, they will get extra gifts but we may think about allocating these to give them to more people randomly but we haven't decided yet.

How do you go about organising an event as big as this? Is it easier this year compared to the first one in terms of contacts, people you know, and such?

Wow, how much time do you have for me to describe it all? It could be an article all on it's own to explain it all! lol

To try to keep it short though, it usually starts off with Sven and I drawing up a rough idea of when we want to hold it, a "wish list" of what guests we want to invite and working out what our budget is going to be and what price we want to charge for tickets.

After that we go along to our venue and see what dates they are free (or talk to other venues and see what is large enough/affordable) and then book the hall. Sometimes we make an announcement straight away, other times we try to confirm a few guests first before we make an initial announcement so we can get interest quickly. Then we can set the final ticket price based on the venue cost and then we make the announcement, get the online booking system written and we're up and running!

With the main guests, we usually try to get invitations sent early and ideally we want to confirm them before we announce the convention but that's not always possible so we try to budget them in from the start and try to secure someone as quickly as we can. Frustratingly, it's taken us longer than we wanted this year but we've got people in mind for 2009 and 2010 so that makes things a bit easier for us! However, if we don't get the main guest confirmed straight away we still go ahead and make the annoucement as early as we can so we can get the bookings in so we can get to work on everything!

Once the bookings start, it's then a case of using that money to pay for the venue, continually talking to other guests, writing the convention magazine, talking to artists to get work for the postcards, and talking to potential sponsors - both financially and otherwise - to get support to help us pay for the convention and get gifts for the goodie bag. As well as that we're continually talking to the venue over any issues or plans we have, trying to sort out what dealers will be attending, promoting the convention, trying to get items for the auction and raffle... you name it really!

It does get easier from one year to the next as there are a lot of people we can approach who we have known for several years (such as most of the comic guests, Red Mill Snack Foods and a few local comic stores who have helped with raffle prizes), and Sven always targets the regular dealers which makes things easier, but it's still a big job.

Do you have any form of relationship to Hasbro UK? Are they involved with Auto Assembly in any way?

Sven has tried talking to Hasbro since day one and we've struggled to get anywhere with them. We've had promises from them, they've seemed interested at times and even one year said they attend but either nothing's happened or they've made excuses not to attend. To be honest, I don't think they're too interested to we're not really bothering - we've had more support from other licence holders so we'd rather deal with them.

And with this, the interview is at an end. My sincerest thanks go to Simon Plumbe for being such a good sport and answering these questions, and I'll see you at AA2008!

If you're interested in attending Auto Assembly 2008, please visit http://www.autoassembly.org.uk