Promotion

Your work isn’t going to sell itself unless people know it exists. Promotion is hard work and usually not as much fun as creating and telling your stories. I usually find it frustrating to be pulled away from working on more story, however sometimes promoting the work can actually be fun.

For a quick word on getting your finished comic distributed to comic stores, I highly recommend Tyler James’ blog with Tips for Submitting to Diamond.

Social Media

I’ve talked a little about social media in the previous articles in this series, but there are many tricks to getting it right. Of all social media sites, Facebook is by far the largest and it has great tools to help you promote your posts and get exposure. I recommend setting up a Fan Page with Facebook for your comic.

Don’t swamp people with posts telling them to buy your comic. In fact, don’t swamp people with posts all day long either. The social media audience is fickle and selfish and most people don’t like to be drowned with your every whim and thought. Be just a little conservative. Instead engage them with trivia, competitions and content that you make exclusively for those followers. This applies to Twitter, Tumblr and any other social media network. Facebook allows you to SHARE posts by others, and if you can get your followers (all those fans that clicked LIKE) to share some of your posts promoting the comic then you are reaching a much larger audience. It’s the same concept with Twitter, only your goal is to post things that other people will want to RETWEET to their own followers.

Twitter uses hashtags to filter tweets by subject matter, allowing people who search for that subject the chance of discovering your tweet and FOLLOWING you. For example, #StarWars. You can tag other Twitter uses into your tweets by preceding their name with the “@” sign. This makes your tweet show up in their feed as someone who has mentioned you. Perhaps they will retrweet you to their own followers?

Facebook has a similar concept, you can tag friends and fan pages into your post by typing the “@” symbol followed by the name. So, I could be making a post about something to do with the Star Wars bounty hunters and tag the @Star Wars: Bounty Hunter fan page into my post. This alerts the admins of that page and lets them see your update. They can then share your post if they think their audience will enjoy it.

Although Reddit is relatively popular, I have heard so many complaints about the elitist culture there that you may want focus your promotional activities elsewhere.

Getting Listed

The more places you sign up to list your comic project with, the more notice your comic is going to get online. For example, if you print an on-demand comic with Ka-Blam, they have their own store, Indy Planet through which you can choose to list your comic for sale. There really is no good reason not to list your comic there unless, for some reason, you do not want to sell it right away. There’s also a number of comic book directories and comic book forums where you can either list your comic or consider banner exchanges or advertising.

Advertising

You don’t have to spend money, but it helps. Things you can do for free are identify online communities with an interest in the genre of your book and find ways to reach out to them, even to help them. By building a good relationship with online communities you can go a long way in promoting your work without having to necessarily spend a single dollar.

Think before you spend. You want to make sure that any ad you might place online or in another publication is going to get seen by the type of person likely to be interested in your book. You can pay to promote your Facebook posts, but it is relatively expensive considering that it is hard to nail down a geek audience when you’re putting your trust in the automated filters you select. It is probably a lot better to pay to advertise on websites related to your comic’s genre. Think about the sort of ads you see online that actually interest you enough to click on them. They probably had something in common with the site where they appeared. It seems obvious, but it is very easy to chew up some money in the wrong places when trying to promote your comic.

For Webcomics you can do free banner exchanges via InkOutBreak , certainly the most innovative community in the medium. I also recommend trying to advertise on sites like Top Web Comics and The Web Comics List. These places have massive visitor traffic and I’ve had a big boost in website statistics whenever I’ve run an ad. Keep in mind that a lot of people want to advertise and only so many ads are allowed to run each month to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of exposure. This means that although you might want to advertise right away, you will find you are on a waiting list that can take up to 6 weeks before your first ad starts appearing!

Probably the smartest place to advertise in print for comics is comic convention programs / souvenir books. This costs a lot more money, but it is cheaper than most magazines and it is super targeted. Consider that everyone who attends gets a copy and almost all of them like comics. Makes sure your website address is included in the ad or I’ll hit you!

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – The Harsh Realities
Part 3 – Making Webcomics
Part 5 – Comic Conventions