Olaf's comics blog

How do you market your webcomic? Do you use Project Wonderful to advertise on other webcomic pages? Good! Have you linked to your webcomic from various webcomic forums and bulletin boards? Cool. Do you go to conventions and promote your comic there? All right! Now there’s not really that much more you can do to promote your comic, right?

Wrong.

As much as I love comics, I think we should all agree on one thing: Comics is just a medium. We shouldn’t market the medium alone; we should market the contents of it.

By that, I mean: It’s great that you try to get your comic popular among webcomics readers. But don’t forget that your comic has content, a story you want to tell, and in most cases, there will be people interested in that content regardless of what the medium is. If you reach out to them, you will notice it in your visitor numbers.

Brad Guigar briefly touched on the topic in How to make webcomics, in the chapter on conventions: I believe he said that if you’re making a comic about gardening, you should consider not only going to comic conventions, but also to gardening conventions.

I think this is a very important tip, and that it goes for more than just conventions. If you make a webcomic about collecting and studying stamps, do what you can to make sure every philatelist on the web knows about your comic. An example of someone who did this right is in my opinion Norwegian cartoonist Mads Eriksen — while Mads is a popular guy at comic conventions, very many of his strips are related to him being a big Star Wars geek, and thus he’s also done a great deal to market his comic among Star Wars geeks. An even better example is Gene Ambaum’s and Bill Barnes’s Unshelved, a comic about a library. Ambaum and Barnes have done a great deal to get word of the comic out to librarians and book affectionados. Check the list of appearances on their website — while still attending a couple of big comic conventions, their focus group is libraries and library associations. I first discovered the comic when I started working as a librarian four and a half years ago… because another librarian had printed a strip and taped it up in the elevator. I get the impression that in the US, most librarians know about Unshelved. Another great example is Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher & Deeper. Cham even gives university lectures about the topic of his university-themed comic!

This should be your goal, too. While you may make a great webcomic, I guess it’s not really a comic about webcomics. So why focus solely on webcomic fans when building your readers? Take what your comic is really about and use that to win readers.

People want stories. Some of us prefer these stories as comics, but we’re in it for the stories. People don’t read Dilbert because Adams creates a Botticelli-like masterpiece defining the true meaning of comics. We read them for the funny situations. xkcd isn’t so popular because Munroe’s stick figures is the epitome of webcomics — it’s popular because many of his readers are nerds, and xkcd often focuses on themes nerds like. I doubt that I would have liked xkcd any less if he had chosen to present these ideas as videos or blog posts. I like xkcd, and it just happens to be a webcomic.

So: Go to conventions and hang out with other webcomic creators all you want (seriously, I encourage it), but remember that many of your potential readers are people who would never consider googling the word “webcomic”. To get these readers to notice you, you can’t just be a big star in the webcomics community — you must actively reach outside it and find those readers where they hang out. If you’re making horror comics, make sure to promote them in horror forums, even though all they talk about there at the moment is horror movies. If you’re making comics about accountants, maybe you should consider using “accountant” as a Google Adwords keyword instead of the generic “comics” keyword that only reaches out for those already hooked on webcomics. You get the idea: Don’t make a comic just for webcomics fans. Make a comic for those people who are actually interested in what you’re writing about, and market it towards that audience.

Good luck!

(By the way, I wrote a post about a similar topic last Friday, when I suggested that if your comic touches upon current events, you should use promotional tools available for bloggers.)

Related posts:

• Books on making webcomics
• Are webcomics readers geeks?
• Getting new readers: Don’t scare them away!
• Is “webcomics” just a word?
• Norwegian webcomics in English