Going Postal...
The past week has been spent sending out our first wave of marketing materials to comic book retailers. Conor and I mailed out letters to 390 U.S. retail stores last week and are sending out more in the next 24 hours.
Will it work? Well, earlier today we received a great email from Ralph DiBernardo of Jetpack Comics (Rochester, N.H.), who stated, "In an age when everyone thinks email marketing is the way, I applaud you for taking the time to create interesting letterhead & envelope... Thanks again for hitting us old school. It absolutely worked." To hear that made our day - and now we're off to stuff some more envelopes and continue our quest to turn this into a successful comic book series...
The Long Road to Retailers...
This week we are prepping our direct marketing campaign to North American comic book retailers. As a new title with upcoming talent it's crucial to spread the word and we've devised a pretty cool campaign to make as many retailers aware of us and Kill Shakespeare as possible.
Two excellent young interns have started to work with us. Mike Klassen, from Sheridan College, and Charlie Jay (above), from Ryerson, have brought theirs skills and talents to the Kill Shakespeare team. They have been spending the last week or two putting together a great deal of data for us and will be helping us out over the next few months. If you are someone who may have the slightest interest in K.S., you'll probably hear from them sometime/some how...
More details on our campaign as we move forward with it.
Official Previews Ad is Released
The official Previews ad for the first issue of KILL SHAKESPEARE, which is released to comic book retailers throughout North America, has been released this past week. Featuring artwork by Andy Belanger and cover artist Kagan McLeod, the ad displays the two covers available for the first issue as well two pages from the book.
When I first received this artwork I got an immediate call from artist Andy B, telling us how excited he was to see it. Even Conor, who will admit that he often doesn't take the time to celebrate milestones properly, became super-excited about the upcoming release when he first looked at it.
The logo is a temporary one - we've just finished work on a revised version that is exciting everyone in Andy B's studio. The design of the ad was created by the inhouse team at IDW Publishing. Thanks to our editor Tom Waltz and IDW E-I-C Chris Ryall for overseeing this. (And for those that might catch them, I'm not sure who to blame for the punctuation errors... normally I blame Conor but I'm not sure about it this time...)
For those that don't know, Previews is the monthly catalogue/listing of all titles that are available to be stocked. The February issue highlights those that will be released in April.
For retailers, the ad is on Page 263 and the Ordering Code is #FEB10 0959.