Not Comics: Gerard Jones On The Value Of Publicity

The writer Gerard Jones has a post up here about the value of publicity, using the more blunt question "does publicity sell books" as its starting point. Jones is a working writer, so his answer reflects his own experiences: some publicity will drive some sales, but mostly the overall effect of publicity is building opportunities of all kinds over the long term. Sounds about right to me.

One of comics' many hang-ups is that we don't have a realistic picture of what publicity and marketing efforts on behalf of a work or creator should actually look like. This is sometimes seen in a critical way looking at individual comics or people that someone thinks should be receiving more attention, but the hang-up gets even more play as a kind of magic marketing bullet applied as the band-aid over some perceived lack of sales. The basic problem with this is that such efforts are usually defined by the thing-not-achieved rather than by any stricter sense of what the effort might look like independent of its effectiveness. So saying a book needed better marketing to be successful means that it needed the marketing that leads to a book to being successful. This may drive several years of Internet conversation -- it already has -- but it's not that helpful in applying things to the real world, where this stuff either works or doesn't.
 
posted 5:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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