If you didn’t catch it Tuesday, the tenth and “final” weekly installment of my column at Newsarama.com went live yesterday. I went out with a bang, offering one free copy of LACKLUSTER WORLD #1 to the first 100 people that signed up. 2 hours and 34 minutes after the column went live, all 100 copies had been reserved, and I’ve since been receiving steady online orders from fans that missed out, yet can’t help themselves but to buy a copy.

During the SS run, I exhibited at two conventions: Heroes Con and Wizard World Chicago. Within the first hours of each show it was clear that SS had been making an impact on people. Person after person approached me to thank me for “the great column”. Half of those, give or take, purchased my comics. Perhaps their purchases were signs of gratitude for “the great column”. Perhaps they were real interest in the story and art as I displayed it though SS. How can I really know?

As I confessed in Sequential Smarts #5 (Public Relations), my decision to write the column boiled down to one factor - my own self-promotion. Without that, I simply would not have had a good enough reason to go through with it. The end results were very inline with my expectations. I had no delusions that I would be some new exploding force on the comics scene, but I did expect (and receive) a very large marketing push, that at the very least, put me on the radar of almost everyone in comics.

Despite, my self-serving reasons for writing SS, I truly did try to write the best column I could, giving away the most honest, no-bullshit marketing information I know when it comes to self publishing comics. In the end, I wrote 22,500+/- words on marketing comics and if the hundreds of comments and emails full of praise and “give me more SS!” are any indication, my time and effort were clearly well spent.

So, the question is: What now?

Well, I intend to write more installments of Sequential Smarts, albeit on a much less frequent basis - maybe every six weeks.

Additionally, the encouraging response has me moving to collect these 10 articles, fill in some of the information gaps that may exist, and edit the whole package into a printed handbook/workbook of sorts. But… it would be dishonest of me to say that the idea wasn’t on my mind from the very beginning.

I’ll spill more info on this as I make progress. And at the moment I have more pressing projects to work on.

So, if you’ve been reading, thank you.

If you’re signed up for a free comic, it will be there soon.

And if you want more Sequential Smarts, just wait while I reload the cannons.

Last but not least, I want to thank my SS editor, comic collaborator, and friend Chris Arrant (his Livejournal and his website). Without him, SS would have never found its home at the comic-news-mothership, Newsarama, and very possibly might not have ever been written.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under About Comics, Personal, Sequential Smarts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.