Please support local work, the worst kind of selling

Now that I have a separate homepage again, this blog is now officially a blog! So the first article that I'm going to blog about is my frustration with Singaporean comic artists and publishers when they try to sell their book.

The first thing that I always hear is... "Please help support local work". Now, of course, we would love to support local work, that is, if only we are interested. Moreover, what is the difference between your work, and other local work that was published before and used the same slogan? There is very little motivation to pick up a copy unless I am a super close friend of the artist or happen to be the artist's student. The key thing is to differentiate and target appropriately who you want to buy your book, not just "friends who happen to have SGD12-25 for donation".

Now if the artist is satisfied with selling small runs of 200-400 copies for self-gratification only, that's fine and there's no need to carry on reading. But if you want to sell more, a marketing plan that is targeted, will certainly serve better. Targeting the right group of readers by demographics, aspirations, interests, etc. will certainly boost your chance of success. For example, a comic book could position itself as an "adventurous educational science comics", targeting primary school kids and their parents. Clearly, this works much better than "Please help support local work".

I would suggest artists that have difficulty understanding this concept to imagine that they have to put an ad about their work on an online forum. Perhaps a real-estate forums, automobile forums, or supernatural forums, but NOT an art/artist forum. You're targeting the public, not artists, so putting your stuff on an artist forum will not help you to sell more except within your artist circle. Also, there is a need to differentiate yourself from others. There's no use in doing another romantic vampire comic unless yours is better than the best seller.