The Chicken or the Egg?
Okay, so here we stand at T-minus less than One. We launch our site tomorrow – so, in about 10 hours, Heartless Dark: The Prologue will go live and people will finally be able to see what we’ve been working on for three months now.
And, to be honest, I’m a little nervous. I don’t doubt the quality – the initial samplings we’ve shown people have been met with enthusiastic positivity. I’m nervous cause I’m trying to figure out if we balanced the Chicken/Egg dilemma of webcomics.
You create a comic (or a movie, or a book, or Japanese Porn) in order for people to see it (and hopefully like it). So, in our efforts to get people to see Heartless Dark, we’ve been creating facebook groups, myspace pages, blogs – we’ve been e-mailing hundreds of retailers across the nation – ad naseum. We want people to know about this and tell all their friends.
But how many people can you get really excited about something when they haven’t seen it in the first place? We have a trailer, yes, but comics aren’t like movies in that respect. It’s really hard to come from nowhere and build a fan base before you have the product released.
But (here’s the other part of the egg), if you launch with no fans – then no one will see it. So, how do you show a comic to people that know nothing about it – and, conversely, how do you get people to become fans of a comic they can’t see (yet)?
See the conundrum? So, we’ve tried to do our best – starting a small following, bugging people everywhere to check it out – and we hope that things’ll click. That the few who are anxious to see it (thanks mom!) will spread the word once they do – and that those whom we’ve contacted who’ve yet to get back to us, will, now that we’ve got things running (and, of course, they’ll love it).
So, loyal blog readers (of which there are none, really, but hopefully more soon) – what have you found/think works in this scenario?
To be continued… (I’ll write a follow up after a few weeks to let you know how it worked)
–the creator