The webcomics blog about webcomics

Marketing Koans

Hopefully back to normal data access next week; in the meantime, I found something interesting at Occasional Superheroine: marketing yourself and your comics.

Valerie D’Orazio writes extensively on dead-tree comics and on the surface that’s the intended audience of this piece, but she’s really talking to anybody that’s creating comicslike art independently (which is as neat a definition of the webcomics-as-job crowd that I can come up with). What should be of special interest to any independent [web]comicker are items 3, 6, 7. To wit:

3. You Are Selling YOU

It is important that you have another non-comics stream of income either coming in or immediately waiting in the wings … if you seem desperate, if that next [project] is going to be the difference between you paying your phone bill or having to use smoke signals, people are going to pick up on it.

Do a quick check on your overall image. [Y]ou should be able to present yourself well. You should be able to be interviewed well. You should speak clearly. And you should be positive about yourself and your accomplishments.

6. Network Network Network

If you want to build or increase your network base, be “cool” about it. Don’t seem like an opportunist. Opportunists are talked about behind their back and called Opportunists. You avoid this by relating to the people you wish to network with as human beings and not Editor #5 or Big-Time Writer. Be natural.

Remember the old adage, “the people you see on the way up are the people you’ll see on the way down.” Say you’re moving up the ladder and you decide to treat Assistant Editor Y like crap. Assistant Y could be the guy in charge of hiring your ass one day. He or she could be in charge of the whole editorial department, even the president of a company. This happens more times than you think. And now Assistant Editor Y, who you dissed eight years ago, tells everyone: “don’t work with X.” And you’re X! Don’t be X. Don’t even be W.

7. Reach Outside The Comic Book World

The success of comics like Perry Bible Fellowship and Y The Last Man have largely come from outside the standard comic book community. There is a whole untapped market of potential readers out there. Find other on-comic niches that might cotton to your comic and reach out to them.

Go read the whole piece — it’s brief, full of terrific ideas, and should give you plenty to chew on.

RSS feed for comments on this post.