Broken Frontier

This past week, I had one of the most surprising things in my short career happen.  I woke up to a stack of e-mails NOT advertising “Viagara.”  Well, those were there as well, but, in addition to those was a about twenty or thirty “Congratulations!” e-mails.  I’m usually pretty up on why people are congratulating me, but this time I was baffled.  It turned out Elk’s Run was in last week’s Entertainment Weekly, and we got an “A.” 

After a brief run around my neighborhood looking for a store that had gotten the new issue in, I finally found the article, sat down and gave it a read.  It was a great concise review, cut right to the chase on the concept of the book, and gave it a grade.  In 5 sentences, the article managed to pitch the book better than I’ve ever been able to, AND managed to get us interest from a whole new audience.  It’s incredible to see the power of these words.  Since the review ran, we’ve seen our online sales triple, and hopefully, with this week’s Diamond reorder, we’ll see our direct market sales raise up as well.

But why? What makes this review have more meaning?  Well, I think there are a couple of reasons.  First, Entertainment Weekly’s readership is just plan massive.  It’s one of the best selling magazines on the stands, and it’s grown into an institution.  Secondly, they don’t cover comics, so having our comic be one of the four comics they’ll cover this month gives it even more weight.  Third, while the internet might be the voice of the direct market (or at least one of its most vocal elements), for now at least, it’s validity still hasn’t been proven to the rest of the world.  In other words, when I show my mom reviews from websites, she’s happy, when I showed her the review in EW, she started to cry.  EW means something outside our small industry, and from that comes a portion of that validity. 

The internet is valid though.  The internet is where you get your fans, where you build your audience, because even though it’s still only a small part of the industry, it’s where the most vocal members thrive.  Read a Talkback on Aint-It-Cool-News’ comics coverage, or virtually any thread on Newsarama or Comicon Pulse.  You’ll see, for better or worse, some of the most fanatical comic readers spend their time on the sites, and if you want to really give your books a chance to survive, it’s these fans who can make it happen.  Books like Sleeper, Runaways, Teenagers from Mars, and Spider-Girl were all saved by this wellspring of support.  They made themselves so vocal that the powers that be and the rest of the industry took notice. 

At the same time, those fans are fickle.  You get into competing to have people click the link for your interview, preview, or press release.  You end up having to strategize, sending out your press releases on ‘slow news days’ so that you’re assured it’ll actually run.  Getting these fans interested in your work, as an indie creator anyways, can be a lot of work, but it pays off.  Those are the people’s whose support gets the book noticed by retailers, who in turn recommend it to customers, who in turn, might just be that connection you’ve been looking for.

NOTE: Sorry for the absence of columns the past few weeks, and the shortness of this one.  I blew out my shoulder two weeks ago and typing is a bit of a chore.  I have so much writing to do that I end up having to spend my time on the scripts with deadlines.  But, I’m pretty much fixed up now, should be back to 100% by next week.