Baltimore Comic Con 2013 was our most successful show to date. Although we weren’t pushing Once Upon a Caper, when I did get talking to attendees about the comic almost all that I spoke to were very interested and asked to buy a copy. Almost a sell out with no real promotion! The encouragement that experiences like this bring is heartening and lets both Leanne and myself leave the show inspired and eager to get back to work.

I was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun’s Darkroom contributor, Carrie Wood. You can read the interview and see a couple of photos of ourselves, the table and our fellow creators in the Baltimore region.

Comic Conventions

Want to sit behind a table and promote your book to the foot traffic in Artist Alley? Artist Alley is the name for the section of a comic convention dedicated to lower cost tables for artists and writers to sell copies of the books, prints and merchandise. The price of a table is usually a lot less than an exhibitor booth, but the larger the convention the more they charge for a table. Small local shows are your best bet when you are starting out and learning what works and how to make the most of your investment. You need to consider your audience before jumping into a table registration.

Anime conventions work pretty much the same way as comic conventions, though you’ll find the attendees are much more open to independent comics. That is the drawback to comic conventions, the audience is a mix of families, teen geeks and older generation geeks, usually with a heavy investment in the Marvel and DC super hero universes. Few independent comics command the sort of loyalty from these readers of major titles like Batman, X-Men and so forth. If these readers have to make cuts to their comic book store pull list, then they are most likely going to prioritize their monthly fix of core Marvel and DC titles. Indie comics just don’t get as much engagement from this audience as they deserve. That’s why Anime cons are such a revelation for creators like Adam Whithers and Comfort Love, creators of Rainbow in the Dark and the Uniques. They were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and interest of attendees at these shows.

Utilizing Your Space

The table is usually about 6′ ft long and bringing a table throw is a simple way to improve the presentation of your work and improve your table’s appearance. It’s a good idea to raise the eye-line a little, for example with a display stand for your books, or signage on table stands. You can also buy a vertical scroll banner, or create a PVC tube display stand to hang your banner or display your prints. I personally think artists at anime shows get a little too carried away creating a wall of their prints to hide behind. Much better to have a table that stands out from the rest than tries to hard and just becomes a blur of color.

My advice, don’t stand there yelling at passersby like you’re some mad circus ringmaster. There’s nothing more annoying than a loud mouth salesman trying to rope you into some sort of purchase or forced conversation. Let your signage and display catch their interest (put in the effort in your presentation) and if they make eye contact with you, then engage them with a smile and greeting and gesture at your work on the table with a wave of a hand. No pressure, just a friendly and quiet offer for them to check out your table on their own terms. Sometimes its good to look busy, sort through your supplies under the table or talk to your neighbors. This also seems to help attract passersby to take a peek without the threat of an immediate sales pitch. In fact, try not to be a salesman at all. Instead engage attendees at your table in friendly conversation about whereabouts they’re from and whether they are interested in your genre. No one wants to talk to an asshole or an uber-nerd, so as Han Solo would say: “I don’t know… Fly casual.”

Cons have hidden expenses. Food, travel costs, hotel costs, merchandise costs. It can be hard to make your money back at a larger show. Sometimes it might be better to think of such shows purely as a marketing / promotional investment. Your job is to get your name and your comic out there. Free flyers or promocards from OvernightPrints.com are one way to do that. There’s usually a table near the entrance where people can leave business cards, flyers and promo cards. Keep an eye on that table through the day as others will dump their cards over-the-top of yours as the table becomes full. You can correct this and makes sure yours are still visible by checking once or twice a day.

Hopefully, those people you meet will tell their friends and you will have tuned more people into your project for future online sales. Make sure you include your web address on everything.

Networking

After the show is over is often the best time to chat to fellow comic creators at the hotel bar or at dinner. It helps to get to know your table neighbors as well as other creators going through many of the same experiences as yourself. You can learn a lot and find ways to help each other. I usually like to get to the show to set up early and then have a quick wander through artist alley to see who else is there and what work they’ve brought with them. You usually get at least an hour or so to set up before the doors are opened to the general public. As for networking during the show, if you have a trusted friend who can watch your table for a short time (30 minutes to 1 hour) then you can scope out some of your fellow creator’s work and pick up a copy to support them.

Try not to leave your table for too long though. That one person who came to the show just to see you might miss you, plus it doesn’t look that great to leave your table unattended.

Survival Techniques

An easy way of transporting your gear (displays, table throw, art supplies, prints, books) from the car or hotel to the convention hall table is a wheeled-suitcase. However, as you become more experienced and ambitious you can buy a hand truck to wheel your supplies to and fro. If you have a table throw then you can hide the hand truck under the table when you’re done unloading. This is now just about the only way I can transport everything due to my spine issues.

Among those supplies, buy a six-pack, or larger, of bottled water. Also, bring snacks like crackers and cheese dip, cereal bars or sandwiches if possible. Convention catering is EXPENSIVE and usually not the best. Finding time to leave your table and run out to buy the food can also be difficult. Unless you have friends helping out, you may have to endure a very long day without a proper meal until dinner, so make sure you have those snacks.

Convention flu is real and often unavoidable around so many people. Let’s be honest, some of the attendees are going to have really poor hygiene and you just shook their hand. You can bring antibacterial hand soap along or just remember to wash your hands regularly. I know it sounds weird having to point this out, since most people seem to think they are immune, but having come back home with con flu in the past, you either heed the warning or learn it the hard way.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – The Harsh Realities
Part 3 – Making Webcomics
Part 4 – Promotion

I will be more than happy to answer any questions and ammend this article to help flesh out areas where I have been too brief. So feel free to comment or email me.

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

Creating Webcomics

In Part 1, I gave an overview of different types of comic mediums and in Part 2 I discussed some of the hard realities of making comics. In Part 3, I talk about my experience with webcomics.

Whether you draw on paper and scan it to your computer, or you create it digitally in a program like Manga Studio or Photoshop, once you have some completed “pages” you might be ready to debut your work publicly. This means you’ll want to think about a website and domain name, as well as creating accounts with social media like Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and a Facebook FanPage. I have heard less attractive things about Reddit.

We host our own WordPress blog and have the ComicPress theme installed which upgrades the blog to work for graphical posts. Both are free, but require a degree of technical aptitude that might suit a professional web designer better. So we pay for our own domain name, webhosting and occasionally a little help from a webdesigner for the more technical things like backing up the site and making updates.

However, if you don’t have much of a budget or don’t know much about webdesign, it’s probably a good idea to test the waters using a Web Comics hub like Webcomicsnation.com. You sign up with them and upload your pages to their server. You can customize the look of your page to a degree, but you are basically hosted by their site. This can be limiting aesthetically, but it can at least be a good place to get started quickly for free.

Storytelling

If your webcomic is newspaper strip inspired then you’re probably working with 1-4 panels. You have to think about the width in pixels of the strip for display on a user’s monitor or mobile device in a web browser. Keep a hi-resolution original of everything you do before you downsize it to low-resolution for the web. For Blue Milk Special I create the strip at 400 dpi at about 7.5 inches wide. When I downsize it for the web I reduce dpi to 72 dpi and adjust the width at the same time to 950 pixels wide. This works for our web page layout.

Whether it’s comedy or straight drama, the structure should still utilize the limited panels to effectively communicate the idea. Ideally, the first panel needs to establish the key character(s) and setting. The second panel clarifies the situation and the third sets up your curveball. The last panel is either a reaction or punchline. By the way, don’t title your comic after the punchline, and don’t promote/share the strip online by revealing the punchline in your write up. That would be spoiling your own gag.

If you’re making a more traditional format comic that is oriented more towards portrait page layout, then you need to follow the same sort of concepts you would for a print comic. One thing to consider is that if you want to publish your webcomic in print someday then you may want to be careful about cliffhangers and big reveals. Generally, you don’t reveal something massive half way down a page, or on a facing page because the eye will skip ahead and spot it before you’ve finished your sequential build up. A good rule of thumb is that any even numbered page is the place to have a big revelation and you should try to avoid anything major. This is just a guide. I slightly messed up on this with Once Upon a Caper toward the end of the book. The good thing is that it doesn’t matter online in webcomic format.

Promoting your Webcomic

Like the Billboard Hot 100, you can list your webcomic with a top webcomics ranking site like TopWebComics.com and climb your way to number 1 each month. Blue Milk Special peaked just on the edge of the top 10 before we felt we had hit a glass ceiling with that audience and decided to turn our energies to other mediums. However, by simply being on the list you are getting free advertising as webcomic readers can stumble across your comic. I already mentioned social media and you should not underestimate it. You can build a following by posting samples of your work and taking advantage of the internet meme craze by tying your commentary into current trends in pop culture.

With Blue Milk Special, we’ve always had a running gag where Darth Vader had a coffee mug that he carries around with him all the time, only it has a Star Trek Federation logo on it. When the new Trek films came out, we were able to share some of those strips along with specially created ones to capture new readers. Regardless of whether your webcomic is a comedy or serious, there’s always something going on that you can use to help expose your work to a larger audience.

Twitter allows your readers to connect with you and hear what you think about your work but also life. You can engage those followers and build that audience by creating exclusive content for social media to help promote your work. We recently started running trivia contests for our readers on Twitter to win an exclusive signed 11×17 print. The rules were that you had to be following us on Twitter and provide the correct answer to qualify. We will run similar competitions for other social media sites in the future.

The Webcomic Community

I can not stress how innovative InkOutBreak.com is from a reader’s point of view. InkOutBreak.com alerts its users whenever you have updated your site with a new strip or page. The reader can navigate between their favorite webcomics by a framed menu bar that tells you how many strips / pages you still have to read to catch up and jumps you from one site to the next on your reading list when you are ready. The reader won’t lose their place if they are still working their way through your archives.

Once you appreciate how beneficial the framed menu bar is for your reader, you’ll realize how revolutionary InkOutBreak.com truly is. Because it is user friendly, it is a more inviting way to pull people into the world of webcomics and keep them engaged while exposing them to similar themed comics. You can cross promote your neighboring webcomics with banner exchanges. There is also a very helpful community forum where both creators and readers can intermingle and share feedback and new ideas. InkOutBreak.com is an incredible way to approach reading online and every webcomic creator should be a part of it.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – The Harsh Realities
Part 4 – Promotion
Part 5 – Comic Conventions