phrases. - The Official GlobalComix Blog

Earlier this week, I started listing concepts that can help you market your comics using social media. (See How Should You Market Your Comics on Social Media?) This post continues that discussion, with more advanced techniques.

9. Consider the potential backlash your book/team/ marketing could create. In the current social environment, any story can be seen as offensive to one group or another. Because your story will inevitably stand for something, it is likely to stand against something else, and the people who support that “something else” can quickly undermine or overwhelm your marketing efforts. While you can't predict every possible attack on your book, think...

Last week I introduced some ideas for engaging with your target market for your comic (See What Is an Example of Social Media Engagement?). This post (and the next one) will go into more detail in terms of tips you can use to improve your engagement and connection with your potential readers.

1. Consider keeping your personal social media separate from your comic book social media: Because your friends and family might not be a part of your target market, they might not be interested in your antagonist character design survey. At the same time, your target market might not want to see your foodie posts or your vacation photos. Social media profiles are free, so it only costs you a...

It is not enough to have a comic that you want people to read. It takes more than understanding your ideal reader and your competition. The process doesn’t end when you find out where your target market gathers together. You have to interact with readers in the right way, or all your marketing efforts could be wasted. We’ve been using my Blood Bond comic example for a few weeks now. Let’s look at the broad concepts of social media engagement and then walk through the steps with our imaginary comic.

The first and most important thing to understand is that social media marketing is not an exercise in aggressive selling. Think about your own time on social media and...

We’re working on the digital marketing plan for the fictional comic Blood Bond.

We know what our story is about (See What is an Example of a Story Synopsis?).

We have a theoretical model of our ideal reader (See What is an Example of an Ideal Reader?).

We’ve even figured out how to find our competition for this comic (See What is an Example of Competition Analysis?).

Now we’ve reached the point where we can start to find and connect with ideal readers to create a market for our comic. This post will focus on finding your people using social media. The next one will discuss what you want to say and how you might think about saying it.

What Social Media...

Last week, we began an exercise designed to explain the four parts of developing a digital marketing plan. I offered a fictional vampire crime graphic novel called Blood Bond to use as an example. (See What is an example of a digital marketing story synopsis and What is an example of an ideal reader profile?) Today, I’m going to walk through how you can analyze a competing comic that appeals to your ideal reader.

If competition is the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party (See What is the Competition for Your Comic?) then the competition for Blood Bond is any comic that appeals to the reader who likes supernatural...

Earlier this week, I put together a story synopsis for a story called Blood Bond. The purposes of the exercise was to provide an example in developing a digital marketing case study (See What is an Example of a Digital Marketing Story Synopsis?) The next step in the process (See Our Video on the Fundamentals of Digital Marketing) is to use the synopsis to define the ideal reader.

Form 2 of the Global Comix Digital Marketing Materials is Ideal Reader Profile Analysis Form. This breaks down the ideal reader into four segments: demographic, psychographic, genre and generation. Because the characteristics of an ideal reader can be found in your story (See Who is the Ideal Reader for Your...

Abstract ideas are useful in understanding digital comic book marketing (See our video on the fundamentals of digital marketing here), but concrete examples can make the concepts more real. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to walk you through the steps of building an online comic book marketing plan with a hypothetical example. Let’s imagine I’m planning to publish a three-issue limited series called Blood Bond in time for Halloween 2021. The story combines crime noir and supernatural horror, where vampire police attempt to destroy the vampire hunters controlling organized crime. It centers around one detective who stumbles into the secret war.

My first...

Chris, Eric, and I wanted to thank everyone who supported, promoted, and attended our first webinar last week.

One of our main goals at GlobalComix is to provide the skills and information to help comic creators and publishers be successful. We hope to carry the positive feedback we received from this first event into additional events throughout the year.

If you didn’t get a chance to see our presentation, or if you’d like to see it again, please feel free to watch it here.

If you’d like to get a free consultation on the digital marketing for your comics, please let me know and we can get the process started.

If you have any questions, please let me...

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...