Last week I did my first ever review for eatsleepgeek.com. It was a review of the first volume of a graphic novel written by David Doub. (You can check it out here if you missed it) David was kind enough to write a series of three articles about the self publication process exclusively for our readers. This is the first of the three, and takes a look at the double edged sword of marketing. Our regular comics editor Cool Terry will weigh in with his thoughts on David’s book later this week. So enjoy David Doub in his own words.
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The Good and Evil of Marketing
First I say marketing, but that’s just a label or term like everything else but it’s a term people understand and so it makes communication typically go either. It also can hinder you, but I’ll make that more clear in a moment.
You see we classify, term, label or put things in “market” to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. You can look for Country music or Superhero Comics or Horror movies and you have a fair expectation of what you’re going to get. There are no surprises and you know you won’t be disappointed in what you got.
Now that’s a double edge sword for several reasons. One, the more set a “market” becomes the more rigid the rules for that market can become. Like say, a country song is not a country song unless you sing with a southern accent, have a twangy guitar and talk about southern things like riding in your pickup or playing with your dog down by the pond. The expectations become too specific and so when someone gets a product that varies too far from the “norm” the person usually judges it by the “market” and not by its own merits.
I bring this up because on pushing my comic Dusk, I am stuck in a similar trap. Dusk is a vampire story, so that makes it fairly easy to push or market to people and sites that are openly interested in Horror. Also it makes it easier to market it people who like comics. But then this makes it also harder to push to.
Some people like comics, but don’t like horror. Some people like horror but don’t care about comics. Now people can have very valid reasons for not liking either, but for some people it’s a subconscious opinion formed because of what they understand about what the words Comic and Horror means to them. Now I’m not saying Dusk is genre and medium shattering and transcends all boundaries, but I like to think that it’s a good story. And some common among Comic and Horror fans is that they enjoy a good story, so that’s why I think people should reach outside their boundaries and try Dusk. Hell I think that should apply to all things in life.
The same words that make our life easier so we can communicate our likes and dislikes may also be prisons that are preventing us from trying and enjoying things we never knew we liked in the first place.
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If you’d like to check out Dusk, you can order it from amazon.com, check it out here.
