The Web Comic Project: Day 76

I asked Bryn Colvin, writer of the brand-new web comic The Copper Age, to share with all of us her inaugural promotional efforts:

The Copper Age launch.

Before the launch, we recruited 38 people to help out on the day. We created a pack for them – banner code, blurb, links etc. Two people interviewed us for their blogs, we were also interviewed on blogtalkradio on the Sunday of the launch. Our support people were not just comics folk – there were friends, family members, erotica writers from my other work, and a fair few pagans. It meant we were presenting our work to people who do not normally encounter, much less read comics.

Over the weekend, at least 30 people were posting our links on twitter (some overlap with the helper’s list, and some who got involved because they had followed links, liked, and wished to share.)

We posted articles on http://thepaganandthepen.wordpress.com/ and also used myspace, facebook, tribe.net, various pages on ning.com, goodreads.com a number of egroups – some comics orientated, some horror, fantasy, steampunk, pagan and places I tend to hang out.

We had 928 hits on the site on the Saturday when we launched, and 388 on the Sunday. 17 subscribers on the RSS and 6 via email. Half a dozen people joined the yahoo group based newsletter. Over the weekend we also had 272 hits on our fictional newspaper – same setting as the comic, and more than twice the hits we usually get on a regular weekend.

In terms of numbers, we’re very happy with how it went. Thanks I suspect to the many links to our pages, we now appear on the first page of google listings for ‘Copper Age’.

The feedback has been tremendous, we’ve had lots of wonderful and very encouraging comments from people. I mean to collect some of them up and re-post them. My feeling is that the team of supporters (who were brilliant and did a lot of work on Saturday) made all the difference. It allowed us to reach out to all kinds of people.

Thanks very much for sharing the info, Bryn. Getting so many people to help launch a web comic isn't possible for everyone but it's a great idea. Twitter is really impressing me as a promotional tool for web comics (the trick, I guess, is to get the attention of twitterers with huge piles of followers). Bryn and company seem to be going after non-web comic readers too (note highlighted text). I'm still trying to get a handle on just what constitutes "the web comic community" but if you work outside the majority's sphere of interests searching for a fresh audience is probably not a bad idea.

Thanks again, Bryn. Best of luck to you and artist Tom Brown.