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As we gear up for our webinar on digital comic book marketing (You can get your free ticket here), we need to continue our discussion about giving your target market what they want. Today, we’ll explore the idea of hooks.

What is a Hook?

For our purposes, a hook is an aspect of your story designed to attract and hold the attention of your ideal reader. It is a promise that your story will deliver the desired feeling. It is similar to how a successful trailer can give you the tone and flavor of a two-hour movie in two minutes of video and create enough excitement to inspire you to go buy a ticket.

Because comics combine images and text to deliver their message, a hook can...



We’ve been talking about identifying your target market, the obstacles to overcome in growing your fan base, and the tactics you can use to overcome those challenges. At this point, it helps to take a step back and consider what your readers actually want. This will help you understand how to connect with them and satisfy their entertainment needs with your comic.

The most basic thing to understand is that your ideal reader ultimately does not want your comic. They do not want the comics of your competitors or books in your genre. In fact, they don’t want any book at all. This goes for anything they buy or consume from food to clothing to other types of content. This...

Last week, we talked about where your potential readers can come from (See: How Can You Grow Your Target Market?) and the challenges to converting them to comic book readers (See What Factors Limit Growth in Comics?).

Today, I'd like to look at techniques for dealing with each of the obstacles to increasing your target market.

Tapping into the potential market involves looking at both the way you connect with people and the way you interact with them. Remember, you’re not trying to change the way people consume content. You’re trying to build a satisfying relationship with those people who are interested in what you have to say. If only one percent of your...

The combination of media competition, comparative value, isolated distribution and negative perception create an environment that suppresses growth in the market (See What Factors Limit Growth in Comic Readers?). In fact, there are economic indicators that suggest the size of the single-issue comic book market is shrinking.

According to a 2018 study, only 4% of Americans read comics on a regular basis. If there are 330 million people in the US, that’s just 13 million people overall. Industry analysis and comic shop owners claim the Big Two are pursuing tactics that attempt to squeeze more and more money from a limited group of devoted fans while their corporate owners only...

If you want more people to read your comic, you need to attract more new readers to comics.

This is not a simple challenge. The bad news is that the comic book industry faces several substantial barriers to growth that you’ll have to consider and overcome if you want to avoid fighting for scraps. The good news is that comics has a substantial amount of growth potential, so if you can develop marketing that expands beyond the current comic book market, you can succeed while your competition struggles.


As an entertainment medium, comics have six major factors that make it difficult to expand the market:

1. Barriers to Entry: Comics have inherent cultural roadblocks that...



It’s one thing to know how many copies you can sell to your target market (See What Is the Size of Your Market?). It is another thing to understand how much money that market can generate.

Market value is the amount of revenue a market generates over a given period of time. For example, if the average price of a monthly print comic is $3.99, and all the competitors in that market sell 20,000 copies collectively, then the monthly market value of that niche is around $80,000.There are three things you need to remember when looking at market value for independent comics, because like market size, market value isn’t an exact science.

The numbers are going to be gross...

Over the past two weeks, I’ve tried to explain the concepts of ideal readers (See Who is Your Ideal Reader?) and competition (See Who is Your Competition?) in terms of digital comic book publishing. The size of your target market defines various aspects of your project. I’d like to continue this marketing orientation by looking at ways you can think about the size of your comic’s target market.

The theoretical number of readers for your book will influence the different marketing, distribution, advertising, and sales strategies you use. Your market size can influence what type of book you create. Depending on your goals and your resources, it might even lead to...



Your comic may be unique and original, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are probably similar elements in other comics that appeal to your ideal reader profile no matter what your story is about. Understanding what’s already in the market and the characteristics of your competition can provide valuable information in both creating relationships with your reader and producing a better book.

Competition is the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party. For an independent comic book publisher, competition is defined as all media that can appeal to the ideal reader profile. Because readers do not have unlimited time or...

Marketing is a critical skill for independent comic book publishers and Global Comix wants to make sure you have the tools and information you need to connect with your readers. Today I want to explore the concept of the ideal reader and how it can help you sell more comics.

An ideal reader is the specific type of person who would enjoy buying and reading your comic. Some writers like Stephen King focus on a specific real-world individual, like his wife. Others use a theoretical profile. This post will focus more on the hypothetical idea since all of us aren’t fortunate enough to marry our ideal reader.

Are You the Ideal Reader for Your Comic?

If you are a person who...