The Strange World of Promotions

So…we bought some ad space through Project Wonderful.

I don’t know why we’ve been heretofore reluctant to do this, a good friend of mine works in marketing and told us to do it a long while ago, but we were hesitant. I guess the water just looked really, really deep. As we were gearing up to get a booth at New York Comic-Con, it struck me just how much money we’ve been spending at conventions. It’s a lot, and we haven’t had a lot to show for it. We were going to cons specifically to drum up readership, but experience tells me that’s a tough prospect…certainly, it hasn’t been much of a return on our money.

We decided that, for now, the money we’d spend at a con was better spent in advertising.

So I put up a few ads on Thursday, and have been tinkering with the Project Wonderful bidding process for the past 36 hours or so.

The result? The largest day for hits we’d ever had. We beat our last record by 50%. Also, 70% of the hits we got were new readers. That’s something. Best of all, it seems as though the people who clicked the ad are actually reading the comic. We got hundreds of hits, but TENS OF THOUSANDS of pageviews. That makes us feel like we’ve earned some more regular readers, and that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s exactly what we were hoping for.

On the other end of the spectrum is Project Kickstarter. I’ve been rolling this around in my mind, wondering if it could be a viable way to fund going to print on our first book…and then Jacob beats us to it. In addition to being the Big & Tall Tales letterer-extraordinaire, Mr. Bascle is the production designer for Visionary Comics. Visionary publishes the Deadlands comics. Deadlands is a steampunk/dark fantasy/WESTERN. Not a lot of stuff like that out there, and definitely work checking out and supporting. If you want to do something cool for a member of the Hunter Black crew, or if you like steampunk/dark fantasy/WESTERNS, then you should go support them on their Kickstarter Page.