Thursday, May 3, 2012

maybe I need to start a webcomic...


Skullkickers is now also a webcomic. I started serializing our early issues, one page every weekday, so that readers could discover us, start from the beginning and grow attached to the series, giving us outreach far past comic shop shelves and retailer ordering concerns. I’m thrilled to say that over the past 3 months we’ve generated 1.7 million+ pageviews to 96,000+unique visitors. That is about twenty times our monthly issue audience and reaches people in places that don’t have comic shops at all.

So, reaching people is great and all but how does that translate to actual sales? If most are getting the milk for free, will they buy the cow?

Good news: Serializing the issues hasn’t negatively affected our sales one bit. Our trade sales through comic and book stores are up, steadily climbing. Making more people aware of the series has made them want the current material more, not less. Quality and good word of mouth is helping build our readership in shops bit by bit.

Better news: At conventions I’m selling a lot more. I’m not twice the sales person I was last year, but I’m selling more than double the number of books since we started serializing online. 9 times out of 10, I’m selling it to people who read the series online. I asked almost every person who came to my table if they’d heard of Skullkickers before. No word of a lie, when they said “yes”, 90% of those folks also said they were reading it online. It shocked me.

the rest here, HT @ryanqnorth

1 comment:

leoboiko said...

picturing DeWitt sequential art. the mind boggles.