By Zack Quaintance — So, I’ve been writing about comics a long time, and one thing I get hung up on is how all new books pick an equation of existing properties to market themselves. On a light week, I probably read at least two new book announcements, and every book has one. Like for example, Game of Thrones meets Spy vs. Spy (hey, that sounds cool…). The idea is to find a magical combo that will fire dopamine in readers’ brains, making them think MY OLD FAVORITE THING + MY OLD FAVORITE THING…this must be MY NEW FAVORITE THING!

And, I’ve mocked my fair share of these. I’ve made jokes on this site and on social media about how Breaking Bad is the most common ingredient in these equations…and yet when was the last time you read (or enjoyed) a comic that felt like Breaking Bad? See also, Star Wars. Sooo many new comics are some combination of Star Wars, that reading that a comic has something in common with Star Wars, is a quick way to get me to tune out.

But now it’s my turn to admit that writing those things is really freaking hard. And I know because the first one I wrote for my own book (live on Kickstarter now!) was objectively very very awful. I’m actually stalling at this point, so embarrassed am I to type it, but here it goes…

Death of a Salesman meets Noah Baumbach movies, plus some Ed Brubaker comics.

I love Noah Baumbach movies but that just wasn’t it.

I’ll pause for long sighs, but yeah, that was it. That is what I thought would really get the masses of comics readers on Kickstarter excited. Arthur Miller, meets some winking one-liners about how hard it is to be clever and unappreciated, and comics about criminals…all in one package! The thing is, in the process of describing my project aloud to another human, I slowly came to realize that my Kickstarter doesn’t have thing one in common with that description. Which brings me to…

TODAY’S KICKSTARTER COMICS TIP: One thing I’ve learned is that the first step in marketing your comic is figuring out conversationally how you can talk about it — its strengths, storyline, themes, and characters — aloud to real people. If you can talk about it in a way that gets you and people near you excited, those ideas will also do the best job of getting that all across to potential backers once you type them out. When talking about my book, for example, I found The Dregs, BTTM FDRS, and Stray Bullets all coming up in conversation, often…and bingo, there it was. So much better the first one; so I said goodbye to Arthur Miller and there it was.

Special thanks to expert comics promoter David Hyde of Superfan Promotions for being the human being who had to tell me with a straight face I could maybe do better than that equation. Tomorrow’s blog will look at how I, a writer with no drawing ability I’m willing to show in public, put together a team of more talented people to help execute my vision.

You can browse and potentially back the Next Door: Neo-Noir Comic One-Shot now!

See our past top comics to buy here, and check out our reviews archive here.

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.