What I Learned in Comics: Rethinking Conventions
But as I stood in NYCC crunching the numbers in my head I thought, “What if I DIDN’T blow $500 to $1000 doing a convention and selling books? What if I put that money into my website?”
Let’s face it factory fans, if you’re going to build a webcomic, you have to promote and a comic book convention is a place to do that. But before you blow your wad on a fun-filled weekend of meeting fans, imagine what you can do with that money if you just spent it on Banner ads.
Hell, Project Wonderful ads are usually so cheap, I could buy an ad on the most popular webcomic out there, Questionable Content, for $150 a day for the top banner. That’s three to six days at the top. If I buy the side ad on the right, currently at $3, I could buy it for the year! QC gets hits in the 150K to 350K range. I’d only need 1/100th of the fans to get FIVE TIMES the amount of exposure I’d get a convention.
This is very, very interesting.
Math is very compelling. But math doesn’t take into account human variables.
What if you’re at a convention and some TV producer sashays by, sees your stuff, listens to you talk, gets inspired, buys some of it, and then later wants to do a deal?
How do you figure any of that serendipity and unpredictability into inflexible math?
He has a webomic, so yes, pimping it on the Net makes a lot of sense. But we’re In Here. All those people who do things Out There are, well, out there.