Promoting your book with a Webcomic
Building an Audience
Now that I’ve completed two, full length graphic novels and have started the third, I decided that if I am to get published by a real publisher, that I need to start building an audience. In the age of the internet and print-on-demand companies, you don’t necessarily need a traditional publisher to get your Book out to the masses, but either way, you need to have a fan base.

Since I’ve just completed my second book, Spectre: Chasing Shadows, I decided to start posting all of my work (starting with Spectre: A Dark Matter) on a weekly basis to a new webcomic site I created called www.Spectre-Space-Comics.com.

I have Spectre: A Dark Matter which is about 76 pages. I have Spectre: Chasing Shadows which is about 110 pages and I will be starting the next book, Spectre: Rogue Asteriod which will probably be in the neighborhood of 100 pages. If I post one page a week starting with "A Dark Matter" I will be posting for 2-3 years before I run out of content.

I intend to keep creating Spectre Stories for the foreseeable future, but if for some reason it takes me an incredibly long time to finish this work, I have a nice buffer of +2-3 years. I used a wordpress site hosted by Hostgator with the Comicpress theme and the Comic Easel plug-in. It was relatively easy to set up, (See my Building a Blog Post) though I was having some trouble with the left sidebar for awhile. I fixed it, though I’m not sure what I did.

By posting one comic page a week while promoting my books for purchase if a reader would like a copy (again, I can print on-demand) I can slowly bring people to the site. I hope to build a list of subscribers who enjoy reading and come back each week. After posting 14 pages up to this point (as of December 29, 2014) I am starting to get a trickle of visitors. Keep in mind, this process does take time. Once I have posted about 20 pages, I will up my promotion activity to build the audience faster. I want to make sure there is enough comic page content to make it worth it.


The Spectre Book Page shows the reader the Spectre Book Collection that I am starting to build.

I’ve just discovered webcomics and how other artists are promoting their work though this medium. I’ve read books by much more successful comic artists such as Jason Brubaker’s Unnatural Talent and Brad Guigar’s The Webcomic Handbook. These books really get into the detail needed to be successful by guys that do it every day. The ultimate goal here is to build the audience you need to read what you are producing.

As I do start this process of building an audience, I will be posting updates about my successes, failures and any helpful tips or avoidable pitfalls I come across. Since I am only a few months into building my webcomic and only have a handful of comic posts so far, I don’t have much to report up to this point. But, stay tuned…