Kickstarter Comics Tip: Getting Coverage on Comics Sites
By Zack Quaintance — I have been running this website for two years and some change, sort of gently ramping up how prolific and comprehensive the site strives to be over time. One of the features we do with regularity is Small Press Previews. This feature, however, was not my idea, not entirely. It was born out of the high frequency of pitches I get for indie comics coverage.
These pitches vary in terms of how professional they are, and they come to me at such a high frequency that I often struggle to parse which of them would be on interest for my readers. To be quiet frank, most emerging creators tend to request reviews. The hard truth of the matter, however, is if those creators don’t have a pre-existing audience, it doesn’t matter how many indie comics sites like mine review their book — few people are going to read those reviews.
Following my site analytics over time, I’ve found that a few things bring readers to reviews. The most effective way to get a reader to read a review is for it to be a Big 2 comic, plain and simple. Past that, there is a descending hierarchy of indie publisher that brings in readers for reviews, and it descends (at least for my site) along the lines of Image -> Vault Comics -> BOOM! -> the field. The exception to any of this is whether a creator has a big name already. This is all to say that I didn’t invest a terrible amount of time in procuring comics news site coverage when I launched the campaign for my crime comic, Next Door, the exception being podcasts and YouTube shows with friends, because I enjoy doing those.
Instead, I honed in on the platforms on which I already have an audience. Twitter, my own site, and The Beat, using a few targeted pieces on these sites to create a mosaic of coverage to reach potential readers who already have an interest in my work, and, presumably, what I might have to say in a comic. And I think this is the smart way to do it. In fact, a fellow kickstarter creator, writer David Pepose, in recent years has put on a masterclass on how to do this, slowly expanding his audience while rolling out increasingly varied work that extended that audience across platforms, groups, and sites, supplemented by a really thorough convention schedule that lent itself to networking. When Pepose launched his new Kickstarter this week for The O.Z., he was known to both news sites and readers. He wasn’t just showing up with a press release, asking for news sites to give him a shot on the strength of his idea.
This all brings me to today’s…
ACTIONABLE KICKSTARTER COMICS TIPS: Contact news websites cold is a waste of time when you’re running a Kickstarter campaign. Take it from me, someone who has written for these sites for years now. You need to have laid groundwork with these sites well in advance, long before showing up with your own project to promote. This can be done in a wide-range of ways, including volunteering time to write for those sites, contributing to those sites Patreons, and taking a patient approach to building an audience for you personally that you can eventually bring to those sites.
Rather than cold-contacting news sites hoping they’ll like your elevator pitch and artwork enough to volunteer time covering it (nobody is making much money doing this, if any), I’d advise instead to spend your time being a Good Comics Citizen by writing about comics, while dedicating more of your promotional efforts to co-promoting with other Kickstarters.
Join us tomorrow for an interview with the colorist from Next Door, Ellie Wright!
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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.
