6Apr/120

Question the Default Assumptions

April 6th, 2012

Any serious creator should have a business plan if they want to make money doing what they are doing. Part of developing that business plan should be a long, hard look at the challenges that the creator has to overcome. There should also be an examination of the default practices of the people who are currently making money, especially those practices that address those challenges. Ultimately, the creator has to decide if those practices make sense for someone with far less resources and infrastructure. That decision-making process is easier to do if there is a good understanding of what benefits (if any) those default practices actually bring and why.

In general, three major challenges facing the first-time comic book creator include distribution, genre and format. To a degree, these are interrelated and can only be addressed seperately to a point. The most obvious challenge is distribution, which makes it a logical starting point.

Diamond Comics is the main distribution channel for comic books in North America and, as such, has become a monopoly. This is the result of years of optimization by superhero publishers who want to sell their products to specialty stores who will then sell those products to their customers – who are mostly superhero fans. This supply chain is known as the Direct Market and it operates exactly the way it is meant to. From the perspective of the largest comic book publishers, the monopoly aspect of the Direct Market is not a bug, it is a feature that restricts access to the market.

Unfortunately, most first-time creators make the very common mistake of believing that this distribution channel can (and should) be used by anyone. They neglect to ask the basic research questions that are common to anyone building a business plan – Does the default distribution channel work for me? Will the default distribution channel get my products to my target audience?

And really, it depends on what the needs of the individual creator really are. If you are trying to sell a 24-page monthly superhero comic to superhero fans, then the Direct Market might meet your needs. If you aren’t, then it probably won’t. Understanding that the Direct Market should not be the default distribution channel for the vast majority of comic books (and why) is a huge first step.

So what is a good distribution channel? Well, that depends on the genre, doesn’t it? Most first-time creators have a hard time remembering that there are other genres besides superheroes. It sounds really stupid to walk up to someone and say, “Hey, I see that you like watching DVDs. Would you be interested in watching my DVD?” Why doesn’t this sound stupid when DVD is replaced with comics?

Somehow, this has become the basic marketing strategy that everyone uses. This default assumption implies that comic book readers are interested in the medium first and the content second – which is why everyone is trying so hard to get their work into specialty stores; that’s where the comic book readers hang out, right? (Actually, that’s where the superhero readers hang out, which is only marginally helpful if you are working in any other genre.)

One of the basic questions in every business plan is “Who is your audience?” If the answer to that question is any variation on “comic book readers,” then you need to put some more thought into your business plan. Basic market research will tell you that there is a population of people who are, in theory, sympathetic to the idea of comics as a mechanism for telling stories. However, the vast majority of them do not know that comics are anything more than superheros – mostly due to poor market visibility.

But if you are making a science fiction comic, it would not hurt you to sell directly to science fiction fans first and let the comic book retailers catch up once you have established an audience. If the choice is to educate superhero readers or non-comics readers on the fact that non-superhero comics exist, which has a better return on investment?

Many people believe that selling digital copies of comics will enable first-time creators to do an end-run around Diamond and the entire Direct Market system and sell their work directly to readers. This will only work well if the creator is savvy enough to market their work to genre readers. Most creators are not this savvy.

As a rule, most digital business plans work on the assumption that the digital sales front will enable an end-user to purchase a service or a tangible object – the digital sales front merely works as a substitute for the storefront. Sadly, selling pixels is not always the best way to monetize content.

But just because selling comics on the web is not a great profit generator doesn’t mean that the web is a bad prospect for initial serialization. In fact, putting a comic out on the web is an excellent means of building an audience. Serializing a book a page at time has been proven to be a best practice among webcomics creators for years. What most creators struggle with is how to monetize the content that has been provided for free.

Again, it helps to look at default assumptions about format and decide whether those defaults are actual best practices or just in place because that’s the way that it has always been done. For example, who says that comics on the web have to be complete pages? European comics like Asterix were originally serialized at the rate of half a page a week in anthology magazines, but the collections are where the money was made.

And, to be honest, collections make sense as a money-maker for comics that were originally presented for free on the web. If the audience for your comic is not the default superhero reader, then there are less expectations that have to be addressed. These readers might be more likely to purchase something with a spine if they are already familiar with the original content. It is important to understand that you are selling paper, ink and convenience – not the content. It is even possible to provide an easy value-add to a collected edition of a webcomic if you were so inclined; present the free web version in black and white and present the collected print edition in color.

It is important to remember that priting costs scale in favor of collected editions. The margins that come with printing monthly comics are as thin as the product, which means the money has to be made in aggregate and the break-even costs require a huge amount of sell-through. Basic math indicates that a thicker profit margin requires less absolute sales to reach the break-even point.

Another example of a default format decision is the size of the printed page. Currently, monthly comics are printed at 6.625 inches by 10.25 inches. But when it comes to printing costs, it does not cost much more to print comics at 8.5 by 11. Interestingly, the only group of people who expect the monthly comic size are superhero readers. Most non-comics readers are more comfortable with magazines, which are printed at 8.5 by 11. (The additional square inches of the slightly larger page actually work towards the benefit of the creator, because it allows slightly more content per page.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. There are as many ways to make comics as there are creators who want to make them. I believe that the key to a healthy comics market is diversity – in genre, in format and in distribution methodology. It’s nice to think that there should be a one-size-fits-all solution, but that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense in practice. Tailored solutions have a better overall chance of success. At some point, the Diamond monopoly is going to collapse and it would be beneficial to have multiple proven alternatives in place when it does.

More importantly, there is no compelling reason why a first-time creator should be interested in providing solutions for large corporations – they have staff to do that for them and will not reward your efforts. There is, however, a compelling reason to figure out how to get your comic books to your target audience in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible. And sometimes that means figuring out that “default” implies that you can change the settings to suit your needs.

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6Feb/110

If Indie Comics are Going to Save Our Medium, What the Hell are they Waiting For?

February 6th, 2011

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle about creator owned comics lately. For my money, the best post I’ve read so far has been Carla Speed McNeil’s take on the matter. Of course, she’s talking about self-publishing, not creator owned comics. And I generally refer to what I do as making independant comics.

We may not all be using the same terminology, but we’re all talking about the same thing – making our own work for our own long-term benefit. The only real difference is the scope of the conversation. Some talk about why large publishers should change their editorial policies or refine their marketing presentations. Others talk about distribution and retail opportunities. These are worthwhile and necessary conversations.

The thing is, though, that I greatly prefer reading articles that contain a tone of “we should” instead of a tone of “they should.” They should implies that someone else has the onus of responsibility to change their way of doing business. Someone like Tom Spurgeon is in a position to point out where they should probably make some changes. (That’s not meant to disparage Tom – it’s a great analysis and recommended reading if you want some strategic goals to work towards.)

But I like Carla’s take on the situation better because it’s more tactical – down in the trenches where the little fish like myself live. It provides some pointers that I can use immediately or in the near term. And it’s got the tone of “I did this,” which is pretty close to “we should” by way of “you should, too.”

One thing that Tom and Carla have in common is the fact that they both mention marketing, which is one of the biggest obstacles that any comics creator has to grapple with. It’s a nebulous entity with uncertain goals and not everyone is good at it. Behind printing and distribution, the number three service of good publishers is marketing.

As far as I’m concerned, the one thing that all indie creators would benefit from is some form of marketing tool that we can plug our products into in the same way that we can plug our content into a Print on Demand vendor like Comixpress. The results that I derive from this tool would depend on my goals and how much good effort I was willing to put into it’s use. And the mileage would (and should) vary between users, based on experience, target audience and quality of content.

I’m not smart enough to come up with this kind of tool on my own – my marketing abilities are limited. But I have done a lot of thinking along these lines and come to some conclusions. Here are some points that might be able to help some of my fellow creators moving forward.

- If the health of an artform can be measured by how many people are working in it with no serious expectation of long-term reward, the comics medium could run a triathalon – so don’t pay much attention when people predict that comics are going to die off. There are a lot of really creative people being drawn to comics right now for a very wide variety of reasons. If nothing else, these people form a primary market of readers who pass around each other’s books and make recommendations to their peers.

- Digital distribution is merely another form of publication. And every form of publication still falls prey to the need for marketing. If you cannot successfully tell someone about your product in paper format, what makes you think that you’re going to be more successful telling them about it just because it’s on the web? (That assumes that you had a website for your printed product in the first place.)

- Sitting around and waiting for a large corporation to change their editorial policies to suit your long-term goals is not an effective strategy for personal success. Nor is waiting for someone’s permission. But that’s not an excuse to skimp on editors.

- Marketing to the core audience of Marvel and DC readers does not work reliably enough to be called a best practice. This is as good a reason as any not to engage the Direct Market any more than is necessary to cover your bases.

- There is a distinction between commercial material and good material. There is good commercial material and bad commercial material. And there is simply good material that just isn’t commercial. Some people like that kind of thing. Other people really like material that cannot be easily categorized. The trick is finding those people.

- Comics are everywhere, a format that everyone knows and comprehends. It makes sense that the potential exists for a larger market for comic books than the Direct Market. If you are going to have to educate readers on the fact that there are other genres besides superheroes anyway, it is just as easy to do so to people who have never read comics before. And, I would argue, much more advantageous to everyone else because you’re introducing a fresh non-comics reader to a large universe of material instead of recruiting someone already inside the fold. When in doubt, look outside for new readers.

- It is easier to sell someone on the concept of comics than on any one specific comic title. This is the reason why I keep going on about a catalog – by providing a variety of choices, there is a suggestion that something might appeal. It’s also an easier sales threshold to meet, as well as an opportunity for education.

I don’t really have a good conclusion for this, but I will say that you will get good results if you spend as much time making comics as you do talking about them.

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6Jan/110

New Strategies for the New Year

January 6th, 2011

After nearly a month-long hiatus, I figure that this blog has lost all three of it’s regular readers and I now how have to cultivate another group of interested parties.

With that in mind, I’m changing my focus just a little bit for the new year. One of the responsibilities that I picked up during the month of December was to increase the exposure and brand awareness of the DC Comics Conspiracy – the local comics group that I belong to. I have not actually had a chance to implement anything yet, but I do have multiple overlapping marketing strategies.

These include:

- A catalog for the DC Conspiracy members and their publications. Cinebook, Fantagraphics and Picturebox have all sent me beautiful catalogs with the books that I ordered from them. A catalog for the DC Conspiracy would make an easy free handout for interested consumers in nearly any venue – if no book on the table is interesting, perhaps something in the back catalog might strike their fancy.

- Diversifying the kinds of shows that we attend as a group. Small Press Expo is our big show of the year – which makes sense, it’s a local show and we’re the local comics group. Not representing ourselves at SPX is just lazy. The past two years, we’ve had enough creators to take up a full row of tables and this year will probably be no different.

However, there are other, non-comic related shows that we can attend in the DC metro area – literary shows, craft shows, neighborhood street festivals and so forth. The concept is that by being the only comics creators at the show, we will stand out from the crowd. This strategy will probably take two years to really gather momentum, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

- Selling adspace in our comics newspaper, the Magic Bullet. The first issue debuted at Baltimore Comic-Con and was free, which meant that it disappeared really fast – almost to the point where we didn’t have copies for contributors. Almost. Taking a cue from other comics newspapers, we’re including ads in the subsequent issues. Hopefully, this will allow us to also find venues for distribution, on the theory that if you bought an ad, you’ll want people to read the newspaper and see the ad. We have also set up a Kickstarter project for printing the second issue of the Magic Bullet.

Obviously, these ideas are still in their infancy, but it makes sense to start doing something practical rather than just talking about doing something.

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14Dec/100

A Personal Note and Further Reading

December 14th, 2010

I apologize for the lack of content in recent weeks. Before Thanksgiving, my mind was wrapped in happy thoughts of vacation. Since December started, however, my mind has been preoccupied by thoughts of a surgical procedure that has been scheduled for next week. Whatever attention I have left has been claimed by the day job. The extent of my thinking about comic books has been torn between the vain attempt to not come up with any new stories and final production details on the graphic novels going to print in the spring. Marketing just isn’t holding my interest at the moment.

I recognize this bundle of justification as the excuse it is and would not ordinarily offer it – except that I don’t want people to think that I got discouraged. Sidelined, yes. Discouraged, no.

It is fair to say that I have done a lot of thinking lately, but I have not come to many conclusions. But while I am waiting for that to happen, I thought that you might be interested in some things that other people are saying on the same topics. After all, a lot of people have noticed that the marketing and distribution system is not optimized in any of the print markets – books, comics and role playing games.

Comics meets microtargeting sounds an awful lot like an early prototype of my catalog idea. I should probably get in touch…

10 Things to consider before self-publishing. This is the kind of thing that can never be said enough. It is difficult enough to create and attempt to be recognized without having to listen to people whine about how their unrealistic goals aren’t being met. If you are not willing to learn what the frequent pitfalls are, you deserve to fall into them.

A scene that celebrates itself has nothing to celebrate. I thought this was an excellent piece of harnessed rage. I just wish he’d fleshed out some of his points.

Rethinking conventions. There’s some good math in here and it mirrors what I’ve been thinking about larger, superhero-oriented conventions.

Want a recommendation? This kind of connector site is an example of one of those niche services that are likely to spring up between readers and creators as the distribution/marketing space mutates.

Speaking of which, Seth Godin’s The Domino Project is aimed at optimizing that interface.

Neal Stephenson is also doing something interesting with The Mongoliad. Why? Because he can. Which is really the key insight, here.

I’m not sure what to think about the idea that marketing isn’t currently a science, but will have to be in order to keep up. It sounds right.

9 strategies to make your ideas more successful comes close, though.

Copyright and the economy of webcomics is a 52 page pdf. Make of that what you will.

I like the idea of an exclusive members only sales site, but it really only works if demand exists first.

Finally, 17 alternatives to PayPal. If only because it’s worth knowing what the options are.

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18Nov/100

What is the Intended Audience?

November 18th, 2010

So we have a catalog. So what? Who’s going to read it? Who do we want to read it? As it turns out, these are distinct questions with distinct answers.

The list of who’s going to read it starts with Jess Nevins and his son Indiana Henry and goes from there. Archivists, journalists, reviewers, retailers and other interested parties are the most likely suspects in this particular scenario.

On the other hand, the list of people that we want to be reading is a little more vague. There are any number of good demographics that are just outside the current comic book market: art students, tattoo artists, graffiti artists, design majors, makers, costume people, Burning Man participants, people who play rpgs, hipsters, punks, goths, rockabilly kids, Rastafarians, old hippies, furries, sci fi geeks and/or Def Con attendees.

In theory, any and all of these groups contain people who have read comics in the past or are open to the idea of reading comics. Many in this theorhetical subset of “open to the idea of comics” and/or lapsed readers probably don’t know that there are non-superhero comics available. Would they buy non-superhero comics if they knew about them? Maybe. Maybe not. But isn’t that the point of marketing – to set up the potential for new readership?

One thing is certain: there is no point in marketing a catalog for the Indirect Market to the Direct Market’s customer base. It’s good to let them know that it exists, but it isn’t important enough to waste time contributing to the ongoing noise. If that audience was interested in the Indirect Market, they would be going to SPX or APE or any of the other shows of that caliber and ilk.

However, it’s one thing to identify an audience and it’s another thing entirely to market to them. One approach might be to pick a group – tattoo artists, for example – and figure out where they congregate. As it turns out, there are a bewildering number and variety of tattoo conventions around the country and throughout the year.

A standard for most conventions is the so-called “Swag bag” (aka Stuff We All Get). Most conventions are happy to take marketing materials for Swag bags because that’s the whole point. In the event that a catalog would not be acceptable for the Swag bag, however, it’s just as easy to walk around a tattoo convention and talk to the individual artists – especially if that conversation is basically “here’s something free, please put it out in your waiting room for people to flip through.”

It isn’t really necessary to do this for every tattoo show in the country, however. It really only makes sense to do this for a few key shows. A place like Las Vegas would be a perfect epicenter for this kind of “outside the traditional audience” marketing. After all, it’s basically the convention capital of the United States. Not every convention would be a perfect fit – the National Potato Council is probably not the correct audience, but the Adult Entertainment Expo might be. Or the Promotional Products Association Expo.

The point I’m trying to make is not just that the Indirect Market has to think outside the box when it comes to audience, but that it has to come up with completely new boxes, full stop. Finding a group of people with tangental interests and talking to them is only so effective as a single individual trying to sell his own work, but a group marketing artifact like a catalog does a lot of the heavy lifting all on it’s own. The pitch isn’t as important as getting that catalog into the hands of someone who might be interested in it – or might hand it off to someone else who doesn’t know yet that they will be very interested in it.

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11Nov/100

Transition to Journeyman

November 11th, 2010

I was prepared to talk about audience today, but I’ve been having conversations about the Common Marketing Platform idea since last week and some of the feedback has contained reasonable points that deserve discussion.

One suggestion was to form a publisher for indie comics. This is a noble goal and might lie in the future at some point, but it’s not the best place to start – for purely financial reasons. The start-up versus typical projected return (bankruptcy) is dismal for publishers of any stripe. A catalog limits the exposure of the enterprise to calamity.

But the idea is not without merit. In fact, I think it’s worth unpacking what a publisher does to see what concepts we can re-purpose (if any). What does a publisher do that makes being one (or having one) so desirable?

As near as I can tell, four things: risk management (ie. deciding which books to buy), infrastructure (ie. printing, editing, distribution), branding and marketing. As anyone who’s been watching Mad Men knows, there is a subtle difference between branding and marketing; branding is the reputation of the entity, marketing is the active promotion of that brand.

In this idiom, the reputation of the publisher stands behind the quality of the product. Thus: “buy this book, I vouch for the quality.” Which is pretty much the point of a catalog; the ultimate association for the audience of a catalog should be “if it’s in here, it’s worth picking up.”

Branding the catalog as a place “where people can find the good stuff” is not only a good idea, but it’s also setting an expectation of quality. Quality means quality control. Publishers handle quality control in their acquisition process through risk management – which books have the greatest chance of earning out?

That’s not the only quality management model available, however. A historically acceptable alternative has been the craft guild. Three tiers of experience and ability that clearly communicated what quality of work could be expected. At a certain point, the apprentice gets to the point where they feel that they have what it takes to get to the next level. The create what’s known as a journeyman piece as an example of their ability and level of craft. (Masterpiece comes from the submission of a piece to prove that the journeyman is now a master.)

Narrowing the focus of the catalog into something that showcases the journeyman pieces of indie comics sets audience expectation and sets a bar that the creators must traverse on their own recognizance. It also signals a level of credibility and professionalism to the audience, which is important at this level of the market – creators disappear all the time.

This approach suggests an alternative content schema. Instead of making a periodical that repeats the same information from volume to volume, the creations profiled would only appear in a single issue. This allows a creator space to present examples of work and biographical information. By implication, the audience is not only looking through a catalog, but they are also participating in the decision process about whether an apprentice creator is ready to transition to journeyman.

This enables the audience participation that we had identified earlier as a measurement of success. It also makes a free PDF version of the catalog that much more appealing for those without a paper fetish. It doesn’t mean that we’re trying to overturn Previews or challenge it in any way. (By definition, anything in our catalog is not in Previews, anyway.) We’re just trying to figure out how to sell our comics.

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5Nov/100

Digital vs. Analog

November 5th, 2010

I had actually planned to make this post at a later date, but Alistair brought up a good point in the comments yesterday and I felt that the answer was too important to bury in a comments thread.

Wouldn’t an Amazon.com-like model be more encompassing? As to “browserbility” the second model [a website] would be more comfortable using any number of in-site search engines, you’d just have to be specific in your tagging so a potential reader would then be able to search for related stuff that might interest them.

Leaving aside the fact that these kinds of websites already exist and are mostly unknown, setting up a website as an aggregator runs the risk of becoming “just another link dump website” that people stumble upon and mean to go through at length, but never really do. The dominant model for these kinds of information aggregators are blogs, which update daily. and if you’re updating daily, you’re not a catalog – you’re something else entirely.

He has a good point, though. In this day and age, creating a non-digital product on purpose is unusual enough to generate comment (which is what we want) and probably requires some kind of justification (for exactly the same reason); any kind of rational analysis of alternatives starts with requirements.

1) The marketing platform should be finite. The reader should have a sense that s/he ccan get to the end of the list in a reasonable amount of time.

2) The creator should have some kind of investment in the marketing platform as a whole. The easiest way to do that is to charge a nominal fee for advertising placement – $40 for a basic ad. Just enough to make the creator put forth an effort to see the platform succeed, but no so much as to break the bank.

3) The platform should work as casual advertising. Advertising works best when it finds a brand new customer who didn’t know that they wanted the product because they didn’t know that it exists.

4) If possible, the platform should be able to fit into pre-existing infrastructure.

Let’s go to the blog idea – a BoingBoing for the Indirect Market, if you will – and see how well it meets the requirements. An blog that posts one advertisement for a comic property per day isn’t necessarily a bad idea, actually. Chances are that someone has already done this. If they haven’t – set it up and tell me how it works.

I doubt that people will be willing to pay money to put an ad in a brand-new blog that nobody’s ever heard of. Even if the listing was free, how many would actually participate? Even if they did, how much effort would they put into promoting their listing, much less the platform as a whole?

On the other hand, people are willing to pay for an ad in a paper catalog because their money goes to the costs of printing and distribution. And if there is a discrete object that can be handed out, creators would be willing and able to pass it out whereever they went. You cannot leave a website in someone’s bathroom as a form of marketing.

And if the book cost $1 or $2, it could actually be listed in Previews. In theory.

There’s no reason why there couldn’t be a digital supplement to a paper catalog. If it was printed on a quarterly basis, monthly updates could be easily issued in PDF format.

Again, there are logistical and operational details to be ironed out. These things take discussion. I appreciate Alistair’s point because it shows that he’s reading and he cares enough to bring it up.

Thank you, Alistair.

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4Nov/1013

Common Marketing Platform

November 4th, 2010

The original draft of this essay had a not-that-great introduction that was marked for revision. Then Tom Spurgeon wrote this, which makes the point I want to make perfectly:

First, our standard for what constitutes a major PR campaign on behalf of a comics effort has changed irrevocably since the time when certain kinds of placement — just one or two or three of the following list — would be an astonishing thing. It’s a universe removed from the time a few mentions in industry magazines sufficed (and, ironically, may have driven more actual purchasers to the targeted projects, a story for another day). Second, the splintering of media coverage into a billion social networking avenues and a million news sites of stratified legitimacy seems to both clash with and facilitate the exponential growth of interest in such articles. Third, an individual’s relationship with the insistent drone and occasional raised-voice of modern publicity is just that, but I’d suggest a lot of our sensitivities have developed to the point that we kind of feel our way through our impression of each one on a project-to-project basis, and as much as people want to boil that down in flippant fashion the way I did, as much as people want to pontificate on message boards like they’re million-dollar experts in modern media, no one really knows how these impressions are formed. Maybe the one thing about which I have no doubt these days is the extent to which this arena of comics and for comics has changed.

As of right now, there is no such thing as a common marketing platform for the Indirect Market. There is no single place that an up-and-coming creator can plug into as a matter of course to ensure a consistent level of exposure. On the flip side of that, there is no single place where people who are interested in indie comics can go to find out about everything that’s out there.

We should build one.

In order to do this, we need to start with the question of what a common marketing platform would (or should) look like in the comics idiom. I would start with Previews – arguably the default common marketing platform for the Direct Market. It is a paper catalog that contains all of the product that any given customer or retailer can purchase through Diamond Distribution. If it is in the catalog, it can be ordered (in theory). This is an age-old concept that dates back to the Sears catalog system (and beyond). It’s a solid, old-school, time-tested business model that bundles marketing with ordering in one handy package. Remarkably, it still works, even in this day and age.

What portions of this model can we adapt and which portions should we leave out? I would start by excluding the expectation that everything in an Indirect Market catalog can be ordered through a central distribution point. I am not interested in setting up a distribution company at this time – but if someone else wants to step up and make an effort, I’m not going to stop them.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of a paper catalog. The one thing that a decade plus of Amazon.com has taught us is that digital is fantastic for specialized, specific searching. If you get a book recommendation, you can look up the author and purchase the work right off Amazon’s infinite bookshelf at two in the morning without an issue. However, the killer app for analog is browsability. And browsing is what a catalog is all about. Thus: paper.

But if there is no expectation that someone browsing our Indirect Market catalog can order any book contained therein through a central distributor, what’s the point of advertising? Unless there was something within the individual advertisement of providing a customer with an unique means of finding the advertised item. Something that pointed towards more information – previews and the like. A URL in each advertisement? No, that would be too easy.

Obviously, there are any number of operational details that would have to be ironed out before something like this could become a reality – starting with the very obvious logistical issue of letting people know about the concept in the first place; I still meet independent creators who don’t know that SPX exists. A common marketing platform only works if there are a vast number of creators invested in it’s success. And that only happens if all or most of those creators are actually listed in it’s pages.

First things first: tell everyone you know about this idea – especially creators in the Indirect Market. I’m not concerned that someone is going to come along and steal the idea; if someone had wanted to do this, they would have done it already. Nobody is going to do the work for us, though. If we want to do this, we have to do it for ourselves. And we should.

But first, people have to start talking about the idea.

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28Oct/103

Caveat Creator

October 28th, 2010

At this point, it is very important for me to manage your expectations. I’m going to start by setting some.

To quote Cory Doctorow:

The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette’s attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won’t get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.

I’m not about to dispute this because I know it to be true. Making money from making comics is hard work – and mostly fruitless labor, without any tangible rewards. The ability to get by on the satisfaction of a job well done goes a long way when you decide to go it your own. Again, this is exactly as it should be.

If it is too easy to achieve success from nothing, then the achievement will count for less. There should be a required level of effort/commitment for anyone who claims to be serious about making comics. An initiation. An apprenticeship – with the implicit understanding, of course, that there is no promise that the apprentice creator will ever graduate to journeyman, much less master.

Statistically speaking, this is never going to be untrue. There will always be people who did not succeed, regardless of what measure of success is used. However, it is important to realize that there are multipliers that can be applied. Stepstools, if you will. Good marketing, for example, can be a very effective multiplier.

Marketing cannot make everyone a success, but it can be used successfully. I want to make this clear as I talk about the concept of a common marketing platform in the coming weeks. This will not solve every problem faced by every creator in the Indirect Market. However, if used correctly (in conjunction with well-built websites, for example), it can be a game-changer. And I think that if we have the opportunity to change the game, we absolutely should. After all, nobody’s going to do it for us.

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Posted in Doing it wrong, R. M. Rhodes, Scope | 3 Comments »

21Oct/100

Fit For Purpose

October 21st, 2010

If you’ve been following along for the past few weeks, you will notice that what I’ve done so far is identify the basic elements of a business plan. I’ve gathered the facts and examined the assumptions.

We have a scope (“we, the indirect market“). We could not really identify the purpose until we had something meaningful to measure against – so we came up with something (“reader relationships, aka fans“). We identified strengths (“groups and collaboration“) and weaknesses (“marketing“). This is all off-the-shelf information that you can find if you do enough reading, but it’s not really aggregated anywhere, which is sort of the problem.

Ad hoc efforts yield ad hoc results. But if “we, the indirect market” want to use the strengths of “groups and collaboration” to overcome the weakness in “marketing” to generate “reader relationships,” then we should probably be a lot more precise in our planning.

Utility dictates that the best place to start is by fixing your weakness – preferably by leveraging your strength. Unfortunately, anyone who’s read our essay on groups can see that most comic book groups in the United States are obviously ad hoc affairs – with the notable exception of the National Cartoonist’s Society.

In the face of ad hoc infrastructure, a good strategy is to create a supplementary infrastructure that the existing groups can plug into, if they want to play. A friend of mine once told me that “if you cannot find a venue to play in, you should figure out a way to create your own venue.”

We should work to achieve our purpose by organizing a group. Initially, this group should do one thing: establish and sustain a common marketing platform. It would be premature at this point to create a group to do anything more, because we have not really established what works and what doesn’t. (In fact, I’m not entirely sure that there is a single business model that works for everyone – I’m reminded of David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists.)

How we will do this is a topic for further discussion. For now, the point is that “we” should do something. And this is as good a goal as anything else, at this time.

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Posted in Groups, R. M. Rhodes, Scope | No Comments »

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