I thought this post might be of interest to everyone, but especially to Rick and Marty. There's an online comic book called "Girl Genius" written and illustrated by a husband and wife team, Phil and Kaja Foglio. It's won numerous awards and has been going for the past fourteen years.
At this year's Con, a woman who works as their business manager, Carol Monahan, (in the top photo on the right) gave me a sales pitch and told me all about their comic. She seemed very knowledgeable about the whole business of running a self-published comic business, and gave me some examples of her role in advising them, and how she's saved them money in cases involving printing the hard copies. She charges them by the hour for her services.
"Girl Genius" seems to be doing a thriving business in selling printed copies of the books in spite of the fact that the entire comic can be read for free at their website. The creators published it as a web comic at first to generate low cost publicity and moved on from there.
Anyway, Carol seemed very friendly and personable, going so far as to invite me to e-mail her if I had a few general questions about publishing my comic. She is based in Seattle so I thought that she might be someone worth networking with, especially if she's at this year's ECCC. Rick, maybe there's someone among your TAG North friends who knows of her? Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there in case you get a chance to meet her and get a read on her.
8 comments:
Interesting. Seems likely they'll be at Rose City CC... we may need to look these folks up. Did she tell you anything that you think you'll apply to your comic endeavors?
Well, there's nothing that I'm going to act on immediately. But her telling me that the Girl Genius people still sell books even though the comic is free online was an interesting fact. I figured that would be true, but it's always better to hear it from a reliable source with first-hand knowledge.
Also she was throwing out general numbers (which I don't remember) about their print runs. So she probably has good judgment about how much return on investment there is for each dollar you spend. Again, it's good to have someone with first-hand knowledge about how much to spend and how much to charge for your stuff to get maximum profitability.
I may e-mail her and show her what I'm working on just to see if she has anything general to say about it, and find out what her fee is, and how she thinks we might be able to work together when the time comes, (if she's interested.)
I have heard you guys talking about the Rose City Comic-Con, but it didn't sink in. So you and Marty have a table there and you will be there selling stuff. I didn't realize that you had taken it to the next level. I see online that they have a pro application. Wonder if I should apply.
And here's a link to their Kickstarter campaign for publishing their 13th volume of Girl Genius.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/girlgenius/girl-genius-volume-13-agatha-heterodyne-and-the-sl
Seems like they have developed a pretty good following that they can rely on to fund their publications. They also seem like a good model of how to bootstrap your business with low-cost strategies using social media.
Yeah, my friend Kevin Hanna used Kickstarter to fund publishing his comic. He made his goal and then some.
Marty got the table and asked me if I wanted to join him and I said yes. We'll see how it is... its a smaller con than ECCC, but it's run by the same people and it seems to be growing. I'm hearing noises that giant cons like SDCC aren't so good for the vendors, so perhaps Rose City is the right size.
I like the idea. Someone who is muse-like about how to do business. People what best sellers and that never happens. Lots of ground work has to occur before best sellers happen.
Small cons are where I think it's at. San Diego Comic Con is Cannes now. Be there or be square.
Thank goodness you finally showed up Ellis. Again, I was starting to worry about your absence.
I'm out here. Agonizing over a good drawing currently in my head that I can turn into a mnaga studio painting.
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