Wizard World Chicago (an amazing convention) drained me of freebie Dumbing of Age bookmarks, so it’s time to stock up before the next convention. (Mid-Ohio-Con in my hometown of Columbus from October 22 through 23!) But rather than go with the old bookmarks, I decided to experiment with double-sided postcards for freebies. This way I can get more comics on there. This is good, because I don’t have many stand-alone comics anyway. Choosing two consecutive or similarly-themed comics is much easier than trying to find a solitary strip that would appeal to a random stranger.
I’ve ordered about 500 of them. Let’s see how they perform at Mid-Ohio-Con…
Loading ...
How do you grade their performance? Just in terms of how many get picked up?
I never really know whether the freebies are having the desired effect, or if people just grab ’em thinking “oh, looks interesting” and then either don’t read them or read them and think “huh, LOOKED interesting, but wasn’t.”
The easiest way to tell if they have any effect is if they read them and laugh. There’s no way to tell if they actually go home with them and plug in the URL, other than somebody telling me about it later. Which happened…. once?
But mostly, yeah. If most people look at some comics, shrug, and walk off, then I probably need to find some better comics to put on there. But if they laugh, then grab one or two for their friends, then success!
I can’t speak to David’s freebies because I picked up DOA and Shortpacked! bookmarks to go in my existing Shortpacked! books,so I wasn’t the freebie audience. However, while I was killing time waiting on a sketch, I wandered over to Joel Watson’s Hijinks Ensue booth. His bookmarks led me to buy a book and become a regular reader. It’s a purely anecdotal evidence, but they certainly worked in that instance.