Planning.....Ever Heard Of That? A Little Important Advice For Publishers

Seriously, a LOT of publishers and even event organisers are very far from being organised. 

Example: it is December -you are a publisher and you are going to attend an event in May. 

When do you begin publicising?

DECEMBER!

"We're going to that event next May"......April: "We are going to That Event in May.  Come along and see us!"

That, for many, is it.  You will get "Tomorrow we are going to be at That Event!"

Too late.

Diletantes.

You send out a PR in December, possibly with some images of you at the last event you attended, and tell people what books will be available. It is THAT simple

You gradually build from there -no, you work it out because I'm not doing this for you unpaid!

When Mike Allwood was organising the Bristol International Comic Expo he understood this -and he appreciated the effort.  I'd build up before an event, post on the days of the event and in the following couple weeks report on what I had heard and seen. 

I took photos.  It seems almost impossible to believe but in the age of digi-cameras, phone cams and so on that publishers and exhibitors DO NOT take video footage (if I have to explain to you WHY video footage is good PR then please go visit another site) or even photographs. 

Yeah, okay, Cinebook The 9th Art were at such-and-such event.  Did okay.  So?  I mean, okay, nice for them but so what?  Comics are a vizual medium.  A couple of lines of text....meh.  But you show a video of customers bustling around your table that makes me sit up and think "Hey -they did do well!"   Photos are okay and can be taken throughout an event but people can always say "Yeah, they took that photo in the five minutes some people were just checking them out.

I love Cinebook The 9th Art but it mystifies me that they do not do this.  Go to You Tube and type in Cinebook The 9th Art and you get:

"Cinebook Ltd is a British publishing company that publishes comic books and graphic novels. It describes itself as "the 9th art publisher," the 9th art being comics in continental Europe, especially France, Belgium and Italy.

They typically translate French comics into English and have also issued an original series about the French Queen Marguerite de Valois, also known as Queen Margot. Cinebook works with a team of translators, including native speakers of French, British English and American English.
This channel was generated automatically by YouTube's video discovery system."

And what you get are some very prosaic model photo shoots.  Cinebook should be setting up a channel and use it.  Okay, not my business but if even a great company like that fails here....

Look for British Comic Book documentaries and see the appallingly low number (I can count on one hand).  Cinebook -as should other publishers- use You Tube and how to use the channel to promote your books and creators are extensive.

Oh, please, if you are told that a blog (CBO) that reaches many thousands of comic fans will only accept a simple Word Doc PR plus some jpegs (seperate attachments) and definitely NOT pdf or links to file share sites then just provide the word doc and jpegs because either people I know are very, very stupid or they simply do not care and think "Screw it -send a pdf and let him do all the work and waste time: what else does he do?"

Ignore that very simple rule and your PR gets deleted.

But if you are a small publisher or a larger one: take advantage of everything available to promote yourself/company and books!