More about applying webcomic promotion techniques to weblit

So I’ve been looking into webcomic promotion some more and I came across a wonderful post.

Webcomic Promotion: Reach Beyond Comics

Reading it I had one of those ‘not just yes, but hell yes’ moments of agreement. The writer put into words something I’ve been trying to express for some time with varying degrees of success.

On the web, comics are just one more fun thing to look at. It’s all part of “the web,” and people don’t get their guard up so quickly. They go from blog to animated cartoon to webcomic to photo-sharing site to social network and back to blog again, without paying attention to the differences between these things. It’s just one big mush of fun. They don’t feel like they have to be “comics fans” to read a webcomic.

See that sentence there, the one about how people go from one thing to another without paying attention to the fact that they’re all very different animals? There is absolutely no reason that Weblit can’t be a part of that as well. We already are part of it. The internet is for fun, and we’re part of the fun. A small part for now, but that just means we have to reach out.

The post then goes on to explain how webcomics can reach outside the comic book community. For us this would be reaching outside the teensy-tiny weblit and indie community. What he suggests, though, can be applied to us as well (just swap weblit for comic).

So what are you waiting for? The plan here is obvious. Get your head out of the comics community sites like this one, at least for a little while. Get yourself out there into the rest of the web — or even the rest of the real world. Don’t be a pest (that should go without saying), but find the communities whose obsessions intersect with the subject matter of your comic, and participate in those communities as a useful, helpful, friendly face. And eventually some of them will follow you over to your comic. And then more, and then more. Maybe. If you do it right. And if your comic is great.

Go and read the whole post and the comments. There’s some good stuff in the comments as well (especially when he uses a specific comic as an example of how to do what he suggests).

There’s really nothing else I can add.