by Egofreaky on Thu Mar 24, 2005 12:37 pm
Well, there are no major comic chains in the country. The only chains I can think of Phantom Zone, and Comics R Us, and both only have 3 stores.
I've noticed a lot of the comics from the mid90s that got newstand distro also featured ads for comic stores.
I think a lot of comic stores don't want to advertise in stuff now cause it DOESN'T get the newstand distro... People are going directly to the comic shops to buy a copy, so they already know it's there. It's kinda like preaching to the choir in that respect.
I've tried to get advertising for OzTAKU in the past. The problem I came up against was that a lot of large companies, such as Atari and Nintendo, wanted the advertising at rock bottom prices... One media buyer gave me a figure that he expected to pay that was actually below the cost of what it would have been to print the actual page.
One problem is that your comic isn't going to have nearly the audience capacity that a professional magazine will. Why bother giving you $500 and get 1,500 viewers, when they can advertise in Nintendo DS mag or whatever for $12,000 and get 150,000? (that's the way MadMan put it to me, although, they're still giving us dirt cheap printing rates).
You really need to capture a large audience if you want advertising. You have to be able to sell your audience. The bigger the audience, the easier it is to sell. It also helps if you're willing to go part in to bat for the advertising company as well. OzTAKU is offering to do product placements in certain comics designed to be advertorials for our global release, anda number of companies have thought this a VERY itneresting concept (some had no idea what the hell we were talking about... "Who would pay attention to the cartoon character?" "Ummm, everyone reading it. They bought it because it's a comic book, so they're paying attention to the comic characters..." "ohhh... I still don't get it.")
The long and short of it is, unless you're going to have a readership of at least 10,000, you're going to have a REALLY hard time trying to sell advertising space. A couple have managed to do it with recent releases, but it's going to be a hard push.