Commentary on various aspects of publishing and marketing, primarily focused on books, magazines, and social media.
Support Independent Comics!Independent comics (and manga) being released today, 4/20/05, courtesy of ComicList. Not all of these titles will actually arrive in all stores. If your LCBS offers a pre-ordering service, be sure to take advantage of it.What are you reading?AC COMICS Best Of The West #49, $6.95A. D. VISION Maburaho Manga Vol 1 TPB, $9.99ANARCHY STUDIOS/HARRIS COMICS Gold Digger Vol 5 Pkt Manga TPB, $9.99 Vampirella Comics Magazine Burns Cvr #9, $9.95 Vampirella Comics Magazine Harris Cvr #9, $9.95ANTARCTIC PRESS Gold Digger #63, $2.99 I Hunt Monsters Vol 2 #4, $2.99 Mangazine Vol 3 #64, $9.99 Ninja High School…
A few weeks back, we took a trip south to visit my mother in Virginia, and I decided to hit Diamond's Comic Shop Locator to see what the four-color world was like outside of New York City. Punching in the zip code of her suburban Richmond town, I was surprised to see only three shops pop up, none in Richmond itself. I input a few more zip codes for Richmond proper and parts due north, and still came up with the same three shops. Odd, I thought, but Virginia is a bit of a conservative state - to this NYer,…
This guy I work with says, "I've really mellowed out the past month or so."We're preparing for a massive move over the weekend, almost everyone on my floor is shifting places, and he's calming himself down as he tells me and a co-worker about the storage facility where we can send the overflow of boxes of media kits, etc."I lost my mother last month."I hate moments like that, especially with people I barely know. I never know what to say and, not being particularly religious or anything, even the simplest platitudes like "God bless." are awkward. Worse, though, is that…
As an unashamed, born again player of Dungeons & Dungeons, I was excited by last month's official announcement that Devil's Due was on the verge of "acquir[ing] the license to the entire D&D® library." While I've enjoyed some of the D&D-based novels TSR/Wizards of the Coast has published over the years, too many of them have been bland, formulaic marketing promotions for their latest gaming supplements or campaign setting, and I hadn't picked up a comic book version in...well, ever, actually.My return to D&D two years ago coincided with my return to comic books, and it was at my first…
It's a sad fact in the comics industry today that succesfully launching a brand new title is a Herculean feat for the Big Two, requiring a massive marketing and promotion campaign with no guarantees of success. For independent publishers, it's a near impossible task. Even sadder is the fact that the lower half of the Diamond Top 100 - wholly dominated by mainstream super-heroes, historied licenses and/or A-list creators - typically bottoms out around 25,000 copies, making "successful" a somewhat relative term. So what to do when a really good comic book comes along, one not in the front of…
It's no secret that creative types can be pretty thin-skinned when it comes to their art, especially when they're in their early developmental stages. Personally, when I first got into the poetry slam scene - competitive poetry readings, for the uninitiated, where original poems are performed and then judged on a scale of 0-10 by five random members of the audience - I was pretty thin-skinned, ready to curse out, throw beers at, or fight judges who gave my poems low scores. After awhile, as happens to most poets on the scene, I matured, wrote and performed better poems, and…
Marvel EIC, Joe Quesada, and his main partner in crime, Brian Michael Bendis, caused a minor tempest in a teapot a couple of weeks ago during Newsarama's "Quesadarama" PR stunt that gave Quesada "control" of the site for the week. He posted an entertaining mix of informative and self-indulgent interviews with the likes of Kevin Smith, Allan Heinberg and, in a series of five installments, Bendis. During the third installment, the duo hypocritically riffed on the state of online journalism and the merits of Rich Johnston's rumor column, Lying in the Gutters, as well as the signal-to-noise ratio on various…
