Marvel and DC are not in the comics business, they are in brand management business and they’ll do fine, comics stores or no. Spider-Man and Batman have an audience far beyond comics. And complaining about their market dominance is a little like a small grocery store complaining when Walmart opens up in town. OK, you can’t compete on price any more. So what else have you got?

The trick is for the indie creator or indie publisher to cook up new ways to get the product out there. Me, I sold my comics on a street corner for three years and now there’s a whole generation of people in my city who might not have gotten into comics had they not met me on the street. What can you do, in your town, today, that no one else has thought of doing?

For me, I’ve begun to think that indies, at least as the industry is set up right now, are mainly only going to appeal to a audience who is a certain age and/or from a certain regional area.

When I was fresh out of college I had such passion for comics, especially indy comics. I did hours of research every month in order to make my Preview orders, did reviews of smaller books that I loved and went to cons hoping to get more.

Now, I’m 30 something years old. I have so many responsibilities, a lot less free time and energy to be passionate about much. Comics have just really moved down the ladder of importance and I don’t want to commit to that level of effort anymore.

Perhaps if I lived in a better regional area, where cons where easier to get to it would be different. Though honestly after reading Johanna’s MOCCA report above and seeing that $5 price for minicomics which made me go “Are they insane?” so maybe not.

There really aren’t any bad guys, unless you just count the system that makes things so hard.

(I’ve also been burned preordering things that sounded good but turned out not to live up to their promise, so I’d rather see the thing itself or see reliable reviews.)

And I should have said that this comic is a great way of doing something different to get noticed. It’s both a sample *and* a position paper!

[...] be taken to task — Johanna Draper Carlson has some views on the thesis of the thing over at Comics Worth Reading. I’ve jumped into the debate, as has SLG EIC Jennifer de Guzman. It’s a good [...]

I send out advance copies and review copies — we’ve been getting some good coverage in non-comics publications lately, like Booklist and VOYA. Some non-exclusively-comics blogs have been giving us coverage for books almost entirely ignored by the comics blogs, too — like the Skelebunnies reviews on BoingBoing and NPR’s Monkey Sees and, strangely, considering how much coverage the rejection of Warlord of Io got, the new Rex Libris trade. (Though the latter is still pretty new.)

I wonder, sometimes, just how elaborate of organizations people think small presses are. The editorial and marketing/promotions/PR department is me and Dan, and I work part time now because of the sad state of business. And I’m also the entirety of the production department. (Which reminds me — I have a lot of proofs to check.) I say this not to complain, but to give a clear picture of what we do.

I think to say that anyone is placing a “responsibility” on readers in a misinterpretation of the situation in the comics industry. Having to be an informed reader who is active and assertive about what you want to read and support isn’t a matter of “how it should be” — it’s just a reality in the way the industry is. We all — publishers, retailers, readers — have to do more than might seem “fair” if the independent industry is going to survive.

It also has swordfights.

The problem — as said in the piece — is that there’s no “bad guy” per se, and no easy answer.

I think the issue here might be that the Captain Blood piece *presupposes* (at least, it did for me as I was writing it) that publishers and creators are performing due diligence in getting the word out to readers to the best of their ability, and that it’s not *that* onerous a chore for readers to show up at their LCS with some Previews codes and order comics instead of rolling with the buy-it-if-I-see-it method.

That’s based on my own flaws (I tend to forget to note good stuff I see online myself, and then don’t see it on the rack, and therefore don’t buy it, and then wonder far too late whatever happened to that cool thing I saw way back when), and feedback from folks that work in comic stores — they get a few dedicated customers that show up with codes and special orders, but most buy what they see. So the intent wasn’t to say “readers, it’s *your fault*” as much as “readers, you’re empowered with lots of resources and information, and if you don’t do this nobody else will.”

As Justin says above, readers can’t be expected to be 24/7 research machines either. If a publisher and creative team wholly fail to try to inform people that their book exists, and it tanks, well, I don’t think anyone is saying that’s the fault of the uninformed reader.

I’m working with SLG and Ape Entertainment on a constant basis, and I can vouch for the fact that both companies are trying to encourage a culture where their creators do a fair bit of self-promotion, because the publishers are already worked to the bone and can neither afford to hire new staff to work the forums, blogs and other media rounds and literally don’t have enough hours in the day to do it themselves.

On the “focus on what *you* can do front”, I suppose I could have written a four-page comic about how hard I am working at promoting the twenty-four-page comic, but that would have been silly and nobody would have cared.

More seriously, we (self-promoting smaller-press creators) *are* working to make things better. We try to make it easy by putting comic excerpts up on ComicSpace, MySpace and what-have-you, posting on relevant forums, and always making sure the order code is front-and-centre and convenient. I look at folks like Skipper Martin and his Bizarre New World project, and Ken Marcus’ Super-Human Resources, Des Taylor’s efforts with his Katie Rogers book (that’s a very Ape-centric line-up, but I’m currently involved in a thread on their creator forums about self-promoting, so hey) — they work like madmen to get out there, push their books, and *make it happen*, but it *still* requires people to note that order code and place the order, because a lot of folks *still* won’t stock more than one copy of Bizarre New World, and once it’s gone it’s not there to be seen, so nobody buys it, so nobody even knows the demand is *there.*

So I’m trying to nudge people into that “if you see it and like it, order it” frame of mind.

Trying to distill a fairly complex situation into four pages of a re-scripted, re-lettered comic book featuring a Seventeenth-Century-wrongfully-imprisoned-doctor-turned-swashbuckling-pirate-captain (thanks, Stephen!) on a lark doesn’t exactly do the situation justice, but the intent was to galvanize, empower and encourage, not make people feel small for “not doing enough.” If that’s how it comes across, there’s been a serious misstep on my part with the writing of the thing.

Thanks for starting the conversation about this. Apologies for length!

I have to say, Johanna, and I don’t mean this in a mean-spirited way, but saying that is about as “tired” as anything else said about the state of comic book industry. I assure you, publishers are very well aware of this. We may not be doing as much as we can, but we’re trying, and repeating this constant assertion as if it’s some kind of new insight doesn’t add much to the conversation, either.

Nonsense. I admit it would be different if Previews allowed for websites to be thrown in with a solicit. What I gather from indy creators says they do not. But then, I have to wonder if some publishers would go to the trouble.

With this way of going about it, through the customer, the best you can hope for (aside from your initial orders) would be a well-informed trade waiter.

I go through Previews every month- have done so for over a decade. But since I order from a mail-order company (it was mailordercomics, but I’m trying DCBS now since some discounts are a bit better), the local retailers don’t get to know what I like. However, having visited them, I’m not sure they ever wanted to know anyway.

Vicious circle, eh?