Comic Sales Soar After Artist Engages 4chan Pirates 305
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Lieber, the artist behind the graphic novel Underground, discovered that someone on 4chan had scanned and posted the entire comic. Rather than complaining, he joined the conversation, chatting with the 4channers about the comic... and the next day he saw his sales jump to unheard-of levels, much higher than he'd seen even when the comic book was reviewed on popular sites like Boing Boing."
Re:Good? (Score:5, Informative)
What Monty Python Did (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good? (Score:3, Informative)
4chan isn't just
Re:the other trend (Score:1, Informative)
Somebody needs to douse Gene and Lars with gasoline and set them on fire.
Re:Good? (Score:3, Informative)
Along with a steady dose of bestiality and incest.
The classic greek gods got on with a lot of that anyway.
Re:I think exposure to piracy normalizes sales. (Score:3, Informative)
Joe Konrath did some experimenting earlier this year, and found evidence of correlation...if I remember right, he put all of his books on his site for free for a day or so and asked people to put them out on torrent sites, share with friends, etc. According to his analysis, his sales increased markedly shortly thereafter. Not proof, but pretty hard to ignore that there was probably some strong correlation there.
Re:Here are the files (Score:3, Informative)
ComicRack [cyolito.com] is simply the best.
No, really, it is. But Comix [sourceforge.net] is passable if you want a leaner program.
Re:Imagine that! (Score:3, Informative)
One other thing: be sure to listen to it with headphones! It's been mixed with that intention...you can use "regular" speakers, but a lot of the dynamics are lost.
Cryptomnesia (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, but as shares concentrate into the hands of the few and powerful,but sales dwindle
Then the music publishers affiliated with the major record labels will likely start making accusations of cryptomnesia [wikipedia.org], or accidental infringement of copyright in a work published years ago, against indie songwriters and recording artists. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music [vwh.net] for an example of how it could go down.
Re:Imagine that! (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks! That's basically why I do it...it's something that I really enjoy. I make music that I personally want to listen to. While there aren't many people that share my tastes, there are at least some out there :-)
I'd suggest starting with the "Lost on the Way to the Laundry" stuff (only two tracks up there at the moment)...it's the most accessible.
Somebody should mention (Score:4, Informative)
The B&W chapter 1 preview PDF on the author's site is NSFW.
Harlan Ellison? (Score:3, Informative)
Is [youtube.com] that you? [youtube.com]
Re:A little perspective (Score:1, Informative)
Re Point 1: the comic was MADE available for free at Steve's site in response to the 4chan thread, not before it, that's the point.
Re:Good? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Imagine that! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Example (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A little perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Point 1: Underground could already be downloaded for free [undergroundthecomic.com] from Lieber's Web site, so it being "pirated" on 4chan wasn't that big of a coup.
Not quite. He originally released chapter 1 for free, not the entire book.
Somebody from the 4chan /co/ board then bought the full book, scanned it, and put up a thread with these scanned images. Steve Lieber took notice, joined the thread, and has now put up the book for free on his website. He also added a donate button in case you only want the digital version and want to kick a few bucks his way.
Point 2: Comic book companies do not track sales on a daily basis. The sales that went "through the roof" were sales of signed print editions from Lieber's Etsy store [etsy.com].
The online store is most likely not on the scale of national comic book stores, but who knows? Maybe a large number of his sales are made online. Regardless, it makes the sudden increase no less impressive.
So rather than a massive vindication of 4chan, "engaging your audience," or anything else, I see this more as a case of: A.) creator makes a product available online; B.) author manages (if inadvertently) to find an effective marketing channel for said product; C.) people who spend most of their time online notice the marketing and buy the product.
Pretty simple, really. Engaging his audience helped, but he would have been happy to engage anybody that came his way to begin with. The problem is, "build it and they will come" doesn't really work on the Web. Lieber lucked out that someone else noticed him and chose to promote his product in a way that he couldn't on his own. He was smart enough to pounce on the opportunity.
To be honest, I don't see your point here. You're arguing that the author was not "engaging his audience", merely finding an effective marketing channel for his product. But, the "marketing strategy" he discovered was engaging his audience; jumping into the fray so to speak, and directly communicating with the people copying (and most likely reading!) his book. He must have linked his website during the discussion, but I don't know if I would call that marketing, or even much of an advertisement, really. They already had his product, after all, just digitally instead of physically.