In our never-ending quest to get more readers, Will and I have come up with a contest. Think of it as our own version of a crowdfunding campaign, but instead of pledging money, you bring readers to Hunter Black. In exchange, we will give Hunter Black swag (and stuff cooler than swag) away.
The drive runs for four weeks, from July 13th to August 10th. Every reader who brings us a minimum of FIVE readers will get their choice of one of our posters, signed by both Will and myself, for free. Not too bad. Get us TEN, we’ll give you two of the posters, get us FIFTEEN, and you get all three.
After TWENTY new readers, something new and wonderful happens. A contest begins. The person who gets us the MOST readers over TWENTY gets a choice of prizes. You either get an original piece of Hunter Black artwork, signed by Will…or you get to submit a character to us that we will use in the comic at our discretion. It could be your D&D character, your WOW character, or just someone who looks like you. We might kill the character off, he or she might become one of the Thirteen Wizards, we won’t know until we see what we have to work with.
The second place winner, gets us more than TWENTY but less than the winner, gets whichever of the above two prizes the winner didn’t take.
The last prize is special, and it could conceivably go to more than one person. If you get us interviewed, reviewed, or profiled on one of the big industry news-sites, and for us that is Newsarama, Comic Book Resources, Comics Beat, Bleeding Cool, Comics Alliance, or io9…you’ll get both of the main prizes, plus we’ll send you a free (signed, of course) copy of the first book. We’re still about 6 months to a year from going to print with the first book, which will collect “Betrayer’s Blood,” “Whetstone,” and “The Way of Scabbards,” but one of the first ones we get from the printer will go straight to you. (Yeah, this gets the best prize, because it’ll expose us to THOUSANDS of potential new readers.)
I’m sure you’re wondering, “How will they know who sent them what readers? How will they monitor this?” Easy. Just have the person who you refer to the site send us an email FROM THEIR COMPUTER, by clicking on the “CONTACT” button, and have them tell us WHO referred them to the comic in the email. The emails give us IP addresses, so we’ll know that there’s no funny business.
Come on, y’all. This is pretty cool. It requires not too much effort on your part, and you can get some cool stuff out of it. I’m sure most of the people reading these blog posts know 5+ people who would enjoy reading Hunter Black…and that could pay off for everyone!
Say, have you considered joining the SpiderForest webcomic collective? According to some pretty great comics I read, they’re open for applications until July 24th. If you’re completely unfamiliar with any of the SpiderForest webcomics I’d recommend checking out “Spine” and “LeyLines”. Of the ones I read, those are the ones I imagine that you’d like the most.
Oh, you wanted readers, not other webcomics? Well, shucks. I don’t really know anyone. So hopefully I’m not very representative for your readership in that regard.
Hey, sorry it’s taken me so long to respond to this! I’ve been swamped and exhausted lately.
Anyway, I think I can speak for both and myself when I say that we’re reluctant, at least for the foreseeable future, to become a part of any webcomic collectives, and I’m aware of quite a few. (SpiderForest was new to me, I admit.) It might be something we’ll look at a little farther down the line, though.
Thanks for the suggestion!
My son is working on this.
That’s what we want to hear, Evan!