Various Ways To Sell Comics

I know that the goal of comic book creators is to sell comics that they've created. But the truth is that many comic book creators become discouraged when they see that their chance of making any kind of income through the comic book they have created is very slim. I don’t blame them. Comic books are very cheap, therefore you have to sell very many of them to make a decent profit. The other approach is making your comic book a graphic novel. This allows the creator to sell it at the price of a regular book with pages of 60 to 200 plus. But either way, if people don’t know about your comic book, you can forget about trying to make money from it.

The thing about when you want to sell comics as the usual 32 pages book is that your comic book would have to come as a series of separate issues. In this way it may be cheaper to produce. You can have a series with 5 issues that come out in different days of the year. The revenue made from issue #1 can be used to cover the expenses for issue #2. In my opinion this is probably the best way for beginning comic book creators to start.

On the other hand, if a creator thinks that making a graphic novel is more convenient for him/her to start with; you can go for it under two conditions. You have the funds and a marketing plan. I say this because the marketing is the most strenuous part any creator experiences when producing a product. These days publishing your comic book doesn't have to take fifty dollars out of your pocket if you do the writing and drawing yourself. This method is known as publishing on demand. For first time comic book creators, the difficulty of marketing your comic book can be ten times harder.

The truth...

The percentage of people who have created a successful comic book or strip is very small. If a person new to the field of creating comics knew what many successful comic book creators went through to get where they are, most of us would be discouraged and probably run from the field. Now to talk about making a large amount of money when you sell comics, this would take time and lots of work.

The multibillion dollar comic book industry is mostly run by a few major comic book companies consisting of: Marvel Comic, DC comics, Image Comics, and Dark Horse. Most of the money made in the comic book industry comes from the titles in these companies, like: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-men, Marvel Knights and so on. And only a few people were involved in creating these ideas. I am saying this to show that people who are successful in selling comics are usually those who have experience and a background in producing comics.

It would be easy for someone who is known for working on titles like X-men to come out of Marvel and produce his own comic book and sell comics. This was the case for Todd McFarlane. McFarlane reached star status in Marvel comics. When he came out of Marvel, he was involved with other illustrators in starting Image comics. Once he published his title called Spawn, it quickly became a hit because of McFarlane’s name. The thing is, not everyone who wants to create comics would get the privilege to work for a giant publisher like Marvel Comics and not everyone who worked for Marvel is well known.

How I see it is, there are two ways one can break into the comic book industry by creating comics and to sell comics. The first way is by developing a name for your-self with a publisher, which could be done by integrating oneself with existing publishers and editors, getting hired as staff in an editorial office, and getting published by a lower quality publisher. The second way is by independent publishing. Let me add, both ways are extremely difficult, can take years to getting positive results and could cost you big time money.

My goal is to encourage all creators who have great ideas and want to produce comic books that are constructive and have content. Don’t get discouraged, because there are other methods to get your work to the audience for less money or time. Thanks to the increase in technology, the conventional (going through the big time publishers) way of breaking into the comic book industry to sell comics is not the only way. I’ll explain.

Overcoming the marketing problem

The hardest and biggest hurdle comic book creators have to overcome is marketing their comic book or getting an audience to their comics. Once people know that your comic book exists and like the comic book, to sell comics would be a lot easier for you.

First of all and most important when you want to sell comics is to have a good quality and appealing comic book to sell. To sell comics it is significant you start the process right. Develop an appealing comic book that you know a certain group of people would like. If you have not read my 5 must do steps to developing an appealing comic book, please take some time to read it.

The next step to sell comics is to market it to those people you made the comic book for. The people whose needs your comic book is meeting. In this way you are almost certain to have a buy. You can do this by creating a website for your comic book and then you refer interested people to that website to check your comic book out. In these days you can create a website without spending a dime, but the bad part is that your website would be sitting there with zero hits.

You would then have to pay hundreds to even thousands of dollars to market your website and get traffic to it. That’s the problem. Like I said in these days you can definitely get around it. There are websites like Smackjeeves and Comicgenesis that lets you create your own web comic for free. You can create your web for free and submit it to Onlinecomics for free. Doing this may help develop the popularity of your comic book in time.

Then again, maybe you want to publish and have hard copies of your comic to sell to people like the traditional way. You can also follow the same approaches stated earlier to develop the popularity of your comic book.

Know that once you begin to look into selling hard copies of your comic book, then you are branching into the realm of creating a small business with your comic book being your product. This would definitely cost a lot more and take a lot more of your time.

However, creating a comic book and marketing it through the internet is now one of the most convenient ways to get your comic book recognized. Like I said before, once your comic book is recognized and liked, to sell comics would be easy.

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