comic book sales Posts

Comic Book Marketing for the Mentally Challenged, Part IV: What the heck are “Affiliate Programs” and how do you get started with them?

Since I started my latest series of articles on marketing for comic book publishers I’ve received emails asking me about affiliate programs and what they are. The best way to describe what an affiliate is to someone is as a freelance commissioned sales person. An affiliate will go out and using whatever methods they specialize in will go out, market your product and refer sales back to you. These methods might be blogging, articles, PPC, coupons, classifieds or one of about a thousand other techniques.

It doesn’t matter how they do it, what matters is they bring sales to you in exchange for a commission that can be anywhere from 5% up to 50% or more. The percentage in any given case is determined by the company recruiting the affiliates and is based on what margins the company can give up and still make a decent profit. A lot of affiliate programs pay in the 8-12% range. As a comic publisher I’d probably offer around 25% of a sale to my affiliates. But that’s me. If you go too low, you won’t get anyone to sign up…too high and you won’t make any money. Read More »

March 6, 2008 | 2 Comments

Affiliate Marketing for Comic Book Publishers, Part 1: Social Networking

I’ve talked before about affiliate marketing and how it relates to the comic book industry. In fact, small press comic book publishers can learn a lot from affiliate marketers and how they earn their livings.

The first affiliate marketing technique every indy comic publisher should familiarize themselves with are the social networking tools. The biggest of these are Digg, Facebook and Technorati.

Become familiar with these sites and become comfortable in using them to promote yourself and your comics. Use them to make a name not only for your comic books but also for yourself. Stories about or by you that get picked up and go viral are just as important to the development of your brand as the ones on your comics are. Read More »

November 12, 2007 | No Comments

Comic Book Publishing — Marketing Techniques for Dummies

Greetings!

I get a lot of emails asking me about my thoughts on the state of the comic industry in general and about the state of the indy side of the industry in specific. It’s funny that I get this email because my actual involvement with the industry is very limited — I don’t really sell to many comic shops, I only do a couple of convention appearances a year and those are generally science fiction oriented ones (go BayCon!) and I don’t really participate in any of the thousands of comic message boards out there (sure, sometimes I get sucked in to posting a couple of responses on the Dimestore forums, but the overall attitude of comic “fans” these days really turns me off).

Now that I’ve written a few times about what I’ve done in order to get Cadre comic book sales up in nearly the 9000 copies sold per issue range the emails have changed focus to “what about comic book distribution.” The problem with emails like that is what the writer is actually saying between the lines: “Okay, now you’ve told me that selling comics on my own is hard work and I’m a lazy bastard, tell me how someone can create a new distributor because my books weren’t good enough to be picked up by Diamond.” Or “were picked up by Diamond but I don’t support my books with marketing or money to make them successful.”

Truthfully, for the industry as it is now, Diamond is great. Sure they don’t support indy books, but why should they? The majority of indy publishers think “advertising” or “marketing” means to set up an account on Myspace or ComicSpace. Sure they might be doing a couple of conventions or take their books around to some local shops so they can act like “big men on campus,” but they have no clue what it takes to run a successful business. Read More »

September 19, 2007 | 1 Comment

The Ancient Chinese Secret for Indy Comic Sales and the History of Nifty Comics

A friend of Nifty Comics and fellow indy publisher, Shawn Granger of King Tractor Press, asked me after my last post how we’re starting to hit semi decent sales now after a year and a half back at publishing. I actually get a lot of requests to go over the process — one guy emailed me after his saw the Cadre in a local Borders store up in Seattle — and so I thought I’d share what I sent him to see if it helps.

The first thing to keep in mind is that Nifty Comics has been around in various forms since 1995. We’ve run through Diamond and Capitol City (when they were around) in the past and had some pretty decent sales. During the comics boom in the mid-90s we had a mini series that sold right at 30,000 copies. Of course, this was when comics were selling hundreds of thousands and millions, so our numbers were considered crap for anyone trying to be serious publishers. A good thing that came out of it was that BKN International optioned a pilot of the Cadre. It didn’t go anywhere, but it’s pretty cool to have a 20 minute animated version of a comic I created.

We run a couple of issues post-crash, but the numbers were abyssmal — under 1000 (under 500, actually) through Diamond, direct to stores and FM International. Although the books we ran were all “Small Press Spotlights” and received great reviews. Read More »

September 19, 2007 | No Comments

The Cadre ranks in Diamond’s Top 300 Comics Sold…well, kind of…

I’ve been neglecting Nifty Comics a bit lately because of my other work. As most of you reading this know, I do a lot of film and television work in addition to running a small internet business outside of the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, that stuff takes up most of my time…as you can probably tell from the fact that the Nifty Comics website hasn’t been updated in a few months (heck, the last comic we put up for direct order was Cadre #4 and Cadre #7 was just released in stores!). I’m hoping to change that and get back to posting once a week, along with adding more content to the “Storytelling” section of the website. In theory, anyway.

Well, this weekend I’ve spent a lot of time working on getting the Nifty Comics house back in line and one of the things I did was send out all of the Cadre #7 orders to retailers, distributors and fans who have ordered the issue. I knew that we had a little over 7000 preorders back in August but what I very quickly realized was that we’d sold out almost completely of the entire 8000 unit print run we’d done. By “almost completely” I mean “I’ve got about 15 copies left and that’s it.” That’s right, Cadre #7 has sold more copies in its first month than any other normal issue we’ve done. Fionn #1 sold more but it was a special issue done for an event which boosted sales on it. Now, all of the past issue have sold around that number or more over time (Cadre #1 is up around 15,000 units sold), but this is the first time we’ve hit 8,000 units at release.

I was excited about the number, but not overly so because we’ve been selling pretty well for the past year. I wasn’t excited, that is, until someone suggested I take a look a Diamond’s Top 300 Comics and see where I would rank with those numbers. Read More »

April 19, 2007 | No Comments

Success Kills — why more comic sales might not be a good thing!

I like to ramble on in this space from time to time about my experiences as an independent comic book publisher. Recently I wrote about some of the things I do to expand the sales and reach for the comics I publisher under the Nifty Comics banner. I also talked about how our initial orders (meaning upfront orders that come in either before printing or right as the comics are released in the first week afterwards) have started to hit the 8000 mark.

Now, I’m going to tell you why getting 8000 in sales can be a bad thing if you’re not ready for them. (read entire article at www.ComicBookMarketing.com)

March 19, 2007 | No Comments