Gaining public attention and interest, aka effective
promotion, is an area in publishing that I’m a little more familiar with than
this collaboration thing that graphic novels entail. While I cannot tell you
what will get your book flying off the shelf I can tell you about expensive
mistakes. Just not at this moment and on this blog. This blog is strictly
dedicated the expensive mistakes that I make solely with respect to graphic
novels. So far there hasn’t been any. What can go wrong on journey when you’re
still on your doorstep?
I mention promotion because Comic Cons would seem like a
dandy place to get a comic before the general public and distributors. One
might be tempted to think of it as a natural fit. When the promoters of the
Montreal Comic Con brought the road show to Ottawa for the first time this May this would
have seemed like a golden opportunity for local talent (I’m alluding to myself
here) and those in the industry, like Ucreate. It was not.
Here’s a fun fact, while Ottawa and Montreal are on the same
continent and even in the same country they are, actually, two distinctly separate
places. I have travelled internationally
and at no time have I ever come across anyone confusing the two. (Admittedly
this is because most people, internationally, couldn’t find Canada on a map of
the world and have never even heard of Ottawa. And by internationally I mean
that this phenomenon starts in upper state New York and goes from there.) Well,
the folks running the Ottawa Comic Con did just that. They must’ve had it in
their heads that Montreal and Ottawa were the same place.
This would explain, at least to me, why they didn’t make
much of an effort to contact industry locals. After all, why contact everyone when
you already did in Montreal? Or, conspiracy alert, maybe they didn’t even do
that. Maybe they just blew into town in Montreal too. Maybe it’s not a friendly
Comic Con at all, maybe it’s invasive. Just strutting in and rolling over the indigenous
comic industry and pillaging our comic peoples of their comic buying loot and
then skedaddling out of town before the dust has settled from their blitzkrieg.
Or maybe, just maybe, they're aliens using the Comic Con to find converts and
sympathizers to their master plan of total domination.
Whatever the reason my point is, as I mentioned above, when
they came to Ottawa they didn’t feel a need to make much of an effort to
contact anyone locally who might have wanted to participate. I only found out
through a friend that it was happening at all and Ucreate found out through me.
As it stands I’m only pissed-off in principle but had we had
something to promote (ie had we had the forethought to lock a graphic artist in
the basement until they produced) I would have been fully vested in my
pissed-offed-ness (that’s a real term… starting now)