Posted in: Comics | Tagged: boom, Comics, dynamite, entertainment, matt hawkins, ross richie, top cow

Comic Publishers Using Facebook Live For Promotion

Published Fri, 13 Jan 2017 15:30:04 -0600

I think this is the start of a new trend. A week or so back we saw Ross Richie, publisher of BOOM! Studios using Facebook Live to entice readers to make a trip to their LCS to help boost sales. The video got picked up by a lot of news sites, helping to boost the message and then other picked it up from there.

The advantage of Facebook Live is that its an instant connection to your followers, and for good and bad, it's an unedited delivery from the heart. There is no clean-up, re-dos or filters. Your only choice is to either keep talking or end the stream. It's part of why Stephen Amell from Arrow has built up such a strong internet following, his fans feel genuinely connected to him through these unfiltered moments. And once you're done, the video stays available for other to watch later and share.

After seeing Richie do his appeal, it occurred to me that comic creators are pretty good with doing live feeds, but publishers are still getting the hang of it. Piazo, the publisher of the Pathfinder RPG game had a new Humble Bundle start up with Dynamite that includes both game materials and comics. To promote the bundle, the did a 10 hour live stream that included everything from talking to the writer of the comics to playing the actual game. Now this was a much more organized and planned streaming event using Twitch, but its a similar idea.

And now Top Cow is getting into the act with a short live stream from Matt Hawkins. The message was simple, he wanted to show off the books they have coming out next week as any good publisher / creator would want to do. In 1 minute and 16 second he was able to hype his new book Dante with Darick Robertson, Image Plus which has two Top Cow related interviews, the trade for Mechanism by Raffaele Ienco and issue #17 of Postal by Bryan Hill and Isaac Goodhart. All of which was just off the cuff and honest.

I think this is the type of quick, short burst, advertising that can appeal to comic readers in this era of hyper-connectivity. Readers who spend a chunk of time on Facebook are more likely to sit through a minute long, off-the-cuff pitch for new books than they are to go and look at five-page previews and solicitations. And it's free. I see this more 'gonzo' style of advertising as much more efficient than the more labor-intensive YouTube videos that companies like Marvel and DC do. I'd expect to see a lot more of these types of live stream and posted videos from publishers in the future.

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