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Getting Small Press (Comics) To The Masses
Comicguy456 writes "At the recent Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo, a panel was held to discuss how to get the masses to check out indy comics. In this transcript, experts including Sean McKeever (The Waiting Place) and Max Ink (Amoeba Adventures) talk extensively about creating, selling, and marketing such books, as well as the small press industry in general. Manga is covered as well. " In many ways, the same advice here applies to people trying to get word about out bands/books/games etc etc.
availability, portability, ease of distribution, (add a few more benefits that we'll never see because of the crippling restrictions placed on e-books by adobe and a slew of others).
/. story), - well, I guess everyone can infer their own conclusions.
Heh, considering a large percentage of newspaper people thinks that there will only be electronic news a few years down the line (see previous
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The problem with the indy comic (or sometimes called comix) are that there is a huge amount of shit. This casts a bad light on the whole scene. Out of the gazillion indy comics that came out in the 1980's the only one still standing is TMNT, and that's because it was a cross-over to kids' fare. (The original TMNT were not like they are now.) And for a while, any moron could get published--people were buying them by the cartload just in case one gem was among them--what they ended up with was the equivelent of toilet paper. The industry now needs better, more insightful, and intelligent comics, not a new flood of crap. It damn near killed the whole indy industry last time--we don't want or need a repeat.
And something tells me that "Small Press Comics" don't have the kind of money to put into serious ad campaigns.
Now I suppose some of the more successful ones like UserFriendly are an exception to this, but unless these comics get a lot of free press/exposure, they will remain "Small Press".
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
independent comics are actually much more known to the average comics readers than independent music is to the typical music listener (everybody?) The reason I'm saying this is because nearly every comicbook store I know has quite a lot of the indy stuff, as opposed to the couple of music stores I know that carry indy music (especially since the amount of comic stores : music stores is like 10:1 at least!)
I'm not quite sure why this is, perhaps the market for comics is not as highly populated by mainstream stuff, leaving a lot of space for indy works, or perhaps the taste of comicbook fans is generally much more diverse? Who knows.
It's pretty weird though to read about independents not getting a lot of attention when you can walk into a comicbook store somewhere in Europe where they need to import everything and see independent comics lying all over the place.
The people who read that kinda stuff probably see the material being so non-mainstream,underground, not well known,hard to find and get as part of the interest in it in the first place. This is definetly not a marketing problem. The people who want it know exactly where to get it.
So, yeah, it's a good opportunity, but take it with a grain of salt.
Do domain names matter?
On the whole, crossovers in my opinon have always only served one purpose: sell other non-profitable titles. "Gee, Spider-Man is kicking ass, but the Human Fly is not, so let's place Spidey in that and see if it floats!" But the writers (I think) use them to confuse the storyline so that you don't discover that they're hacks.
Calling it the ghetto is very appropriate. Good call. The Death of Superman was a monster hit, since nobody expected it to be a big deal--they were always talking about killing Superman, but it was assumed they didn't have the balls to do it. (surprise!)
I never bought that issue--never collected Superman--still don't. What really hurt my local store was the rebirth of Superman (the opaque white wrapping) and he assumed (fool!) that it would sell nearly as well as the Death did...he's still stuck with about 2000 issues of that. Can't give that crap away.
If you self publish and want to reach the masses, you must find a distributor or sales agent. The masses go to bookstores. Bookstores hate buying, dealing with single or few title authors directly. If your product is good and the market is there, the books will probably sell.
Find a distributor or salesagent who deals in other independent publishers. These people have relationships established with distributors and stores. They can get your books (maybe) into stores.
You will still have to market and advertise on your own but it will mean zero if you don't already have the comics/books on the shelves in the stores.
They have to stop sucking.
If you look at the comics from 30 years ago, you'll see complete stories in one comic - or possibly two at the most. Also, characters where recognizable even if they, say, changed clothes.
Today, both of these things have changed. To get a complete story, you've got to buy 10 or 15 comics. And this isn't only because the stories are longer and more complicated - todays comics seem to have more advertising instead of storyline. This is also prompting what I call "soap opera syndrome" - the comics are becoming WAY to melodramatic to try keep you interested between stories so that you'll buy the next one.
Also, a lot of the drawing is done so hastily (note that I'm not saying that the artists are bad), that the only way you can recognize the characters is because they have the same clothing from one frame to the next. Their facial features/size/build keeps changing.
Two things would make me buy comic books again (note that I wasn't alive 30 years ago, but I used to buy old comic books because they where good).
1) Enough with the cliffhangers! They suck! If you need more story, make a longer comic and charge more!
2) Draw well!
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The "masses" don't read comic books, anyway. The "masses" of comic book readers, IMHO, don't walk into a store and walk out with a bunch of unknowns. They walk in knowing their favorites and looking for specific issues. The only way to attract the "masses" to an unknown is to get it known.
Sci-fi mags half a century ago had the right idea. They had a well-known author write a short story that could have sold the mag entirely on its own merit. The rest of the mag could be a number of shorts by unknown authors. Each reader then found the authors that appealed to them.
One good way of introducing indy comics is to include a short sample at the back of a popular comic at no extra cost to the reader. Including several would be an optimal way to expose the "masses" to a variety of indy comics they may find interesting.
Online comics is another good way of exposing indy comics to the "masses", though the crowd is a little different, so this must be nurtured carefully. (Too many people get used to their free online content and won't pay for the same content.)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)