Project Waldo

No matter how much an astronaut sacrifices, no matter how hard she's worked to get her shot, there has to be a moment -- probably right after a million and a half pounds' worth of propellant lights up under her -- when she wonders if she's made an error. Having put every last ounce of myself into the promotion of Nonplayer over the last few weeks, I suddenly have a similar feeling of unease going into the debut weekend. Promoting something does some pretty strange things to your head. For one, there's the endless bragging. I've been looking at my comic for long enough that it's hard to see past my own mistakes, but that doesn't square very well with the job of being a salesman. Sadly, I don't think people will rush to pick up the book when I tell them to "check out Nonplayer -- on one panel, a character's eyes don't quite point in the same direction!" So I'm trying to be a good cheerleader for the book. I recognize the necessity o...

Four days to Final Order Cutoff, the last day that comic retailers can order copies of Nonplayer #1 (which hits the stands in less than a month). It turns out that the work of making a comic doesn't stop when you send the finished pages off to the printer. There's this whole other magical, impenetrable thing called "promotion." I don't have much experience to inform my decision-making in this area, so I've opted for the blunt-force approach: I'm contacting individual retailers and reviewers one-by-one via email. I'm sure there are useful force-multipliers that I'm overlooking (for example, a shout-out from somebody like Patton Oswalt , Chris Hardwick , or Felicia Day would probably quadruple my sales, but I don't really know how to make it across their fan-moats). If anybody has any good ideas, I'm putty in your hands. So far, I've focused on Twitter , the Nonplayer website , this blog, DeviantArt , and the Project Waldo Facebook pag...

Emerald City has come and gone, and it's time to sit down with this big sack of memories and sort them out into neat little piles. First off, thanks to all of you who came by to visit the Nonplayer booth in person. Everybody was eager to talk shop, and it was a pleasure getting to put faces to names. I feel like I'm writing this blog for real people now, rather than for a bunch of disembodied internet beings. I hope the folks I met this weekend turn out to be an accurate sampling of Nonplayer readers in general, because every age group, gender, and lifestyle was well-represented. The only thing you all had in common was niceness and smarts. I especially enjoyed meeting all your kids (and I'm proud that I thought to laminate my sample comic before it was drooled upon by so many babies). And to all of you who bought posters, I hope you like them! Which brings me to a bit of business: those very posters are now available for purchase at the Nonplayer online store . One las...

Nonplayer now has a table at Emerald City: L-10, at the rear of the main hall to your left as you enter (against the wall, to the right of the men's room). Poster signing at the Image booth is still scheduled for 11am - noon today, but I'll be at L-10 doing exactly the same thing at all other times. I've really liked the people I've met so far. Lots of folks making their own ways up Mount Comics, and it's all very inspiring. Hope to meet more of you today!

It looks like my initial poster-signing schedule was erroneous. It turns out the convention center opens at 2pm tomorrow (Friday), which, it turns out, is after the planned 11am signing. So it looks like I'll just be doing it on Saturday from 11am to noon. Until that also turns out to be wrong. I'll be at the convention all three days, and the posters will be in boxes behind somebody's table, somewhere. If you see me roaming the floor and you want a poster, we may have to conduct the transaction like a smack deal. I'll send a runner to the stash and have it brought out to you, barring the appearance of 5-0. Still ironing out some kinks, obviously.