by Russell Nohelty

I’ve been working in both book publishing and comic publishing for close to 15 years at this point through my work as publisher of Wannabe Press and editor of the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell comics anthology series. While there is some overlap in marketing strategies between them, they’re remarkably different to market and sell. 

You would think they’re basically the same, right? After all, they are both made from paper, printed with ink, and bound together to be read sequentially. And yet, they are different enough that if you don’t know the idiosyncrasies and particulars of how to market comics, it can completely destroy your launch, leaving you to wonder how your sure-fire novel became a dud when translated into a comic. Here are a few of the main differences.

Art

Each page of a comic is filled with art, which can all be used in marketing. Every one of them is a chance to find a new audience for your books, so they need to feel cohesive with both the genre and the theme. Comics creators can market their work on the strength of both the art and the writing, creating more dynamic appeal.

This means that the artist is as important to selling the book as the writer. While prose readers are mostly drawn to genre, comics people follow artists, which tells them more about the book’s tone than anything else. At Wannabe Press, and in the comics industry in general, we market the heck out of our artists and put a lot of thought into pairing the right artist with the right project to hit the right audience.

Focus on Print

Comics are mainly bought in print, compared to the more than half of traditional books, which are sold digitally. Digital book sales revolutionized the publishing industry but never funneled to comics. There are some great platforms like GlobalComix and Webtoon that specialize in digital formats, but generally comics readers prefer to buy physical comics. This is one reason why comics embraced Kickstarter early on, since printing and shipping books is a lot more expensive than sending a digital file. 

When marketing comics, take time to talk about the size of the book and the paper quality. With comics, the paper quality and final size change the way a comic is read and whether it feels satisfying and high-value to the audience. 

The Market

Comics sell in completely different channels than novels. While graphic novels may be sold in bookstores, single comic issues almost never are, unless it’s as part of a collection. Instead, comics are sold into the direct market. This doesn’t mean direct-to-consumer but rather means comic stores, who for decades were the main buyers of comics. Unfortunately, these distributors require more product than most creators can push out, which locks off this distribution channel to them. 

That doesn’t mean traditional retailers work for comics either, as bookstores and libraries are generally only interested in stocking graphic novels or collected trades, not single-issue comics, and even then mostly for the YA and Middle Grade markets where they already have broad acceptance. 

These tough market conditions are another reason why comics was one of the first, and most successful, industries to embrace crowdfunding. There is a thriving comic market on Kickstarter, and creators who don’t take advantage do so to their detriment. 

Another major sales channel for comics is conventions. Most comic creators have a presence in at least one convention a year, which isn’t true for almost any prose writer I know. Conventions such as San Diego, New York, and Emerald City bring together tons of comic fans together, and many comic creators make a full-time living working “the circuit.” 

One interesting bit about selling comics and books together is that comics readers tend to be a lot more engaged at your table than book readers, who prefer to stand silently reading a book before deciding whether to buy it. This generally allows you to sell comics more aggressively and with more interaction than books. 

Buyers Who Are Less Price-Sensitive

Comic buyers are less price-sensitive than book buyers. It’s expensive to hire good artists, not to mention printing books, which means we can’t afford to price books like the book market. Instead, the comics industry largely focuses on the collectability of their work and sells it for a higher price than most books can manage. It’s very common for a single 24-page comic to be priced $10–$20, depending on the cover. 

Of course, this presents a whole different problem. Since comics are traditionally quite a bit more expensive than books, there are not that many comic readers compared to book readers. That’s why we do things like variant covers for our books, which means hiring better-known artists to create extra covers. It’s not uncommon for a book to have 5–10 different covers with different price points.

These distinctions are not trivial, and taking them into account is often the difference between success and failure in the comics market. Meanwhile, if you already work in comics and are sliding into the book market, make note that how book authors interact with their fans is a lot different than what you were used to in the past. The end goal might be the same (getting a book into your readers’ hands), but the methods and strategies are wildly different.

Explore more articles in THE COMICS PANEL series

Russell Nohelty (www.russellnohelty.com) is a USA Today bestselling fantasy and non-fiction author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He is the publisher of Wannabe Press, co-host of the Kickstart Your Book Sales and Six Figure Author Experiment podcasts, and cofounder of the Writer MBA conference and The Future of Publishing Mastermind. He also co-created the Author Ecosystem archetype system to help authors embrace their natural tendencies to find success. You can find most of his writing at theauthorstack.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs.