SEQUENTIAL SMARTS #5: Public Relations
People don’t read Newsarama.com, The Pulse, Comic Book Resources, or The Comics Journal for the advertisements. They read them for the articles.
Sure, these outlets need paid advertisements to stay afloat, but marketing your comics is a difficult task, and as I thoroughly explained last week, advertising is not the best way to do it. You need to promote your comics through credible outlets that already have people’s attention. You need to transform your dreaded advertising into interesting content that people actually want. You need Public Relations.
The true concept of Public Relations (PR) can be a hard thing to grasp if you have never worked with it before. It’s intangible. It’s zeitgeist. It’s a philosophical concept like love or friendship or anger, but in its most basic definition, Public Relations is just that – your relationship with the public.
Building PR for you and your comics requires time and strategy. You have to constantly keep your master plan up-to-date by contacting media outlets, staying alert to what others are doing for PR and constantly brainstorming clever ways to seem more interesting than everyone else. It can become complex if you let it, but the basic steps of building it are simple. For example…
Why do you think I’m writing Sequential Smarts?…