As this blog post goes live, the first copies of Free Sunnyville have been sent out.
The first copies has been sent out to Forbidden Planet as well as to the libraries in West Fargo, Fargo and Moorhead. Copies have gone out to two of the local media: Fargo Monthly (a local magazine) and the High Plains Reader (an alternative weekly). Starting this week, copies will be sent out to various libraries, namely the ones with really big budgets.
Free Sunnyville is part of the marketing drive of my work. I’ve talked about it in the early days of the blog, but it is worth repeating. You need to market your work. It doesn’t matter how good your product is (be it comics, a book, a new car, your organic food store, etc) – if you do not market the product, then it will NOT sell no matter what its quality is.
While I was attending night school at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, I took a marketing class from Matthew Archambault. He and the other students responded positively to my work, but he emphasized it was nothing unless it was marketed. That is something I’ve taken to heart.
An average or above average product that has superior marketing will perform better than a vastly superior product with lousy marketing.
So how do you market your work? That is an entire blog in itself. There are good marketing blogs out there as well as many useful books. I did put up a post about promoting your comics and also reviewed one of the Guerrilla Marketing titles. It takes time, effort and maybe even some money, but you have to do it. What’s more is that you must do marketing whether you go it alone or your work is handled through a publisher.
Besides Free Sunnyville, I use other means of direct mail to the press and to potential customers such as postcards and sales letters. Social media is a useful tool as well. It’s cheap and easy to use. I make aggressive use of Twitter as well as Facebook, Google Plus and Tumblr. Word of mouth can be useful too as well as my good reviews.
Getting back to the Guerrilla Marketing books, these are must-haves for marketing techniques and strategies. The first book was written in 1984 by Jay Conrad Levinson and has sold millions of copies since. A trip to your local library or bookstore should turn up plenty of these titles. Besides the aforementioned book I reviewed, I also have copies of Guerrilla Publicity (ISBN 978-1598698459) and Guerrilla Marketing For Free (ISBN 978-0618276790). In fact, I may need to review those books.
There’s no shortage of marketing resources if you know where to look. But marketing is something you have to grin and bear. Without any of it, you can’t sell your comics or anything for that matter.
