B&N Week 145: Managing Your Brand

[Steven Forbes]

It’s a beautiful day in the Tuesday-hood, a beautiful day in the Tuesday… Fine, so I don’t have the best singing voice. That doesn’t matter! What matters is that we have another Bolts & Nuts today! That’s important! So, let’s get to it!

Today’s question is really quite simple:

What are you doing to manage your brand?

Now, most of you are thinking this: Steven, I don’t have a “brand.” All I want to do is the work. The work, mind you, is different for everyone: for writers, you want to tell your stories, whether creator- or corporate-owned; artists, you’re storytellers in your own right, gravitating to a certain type of story you enjoy drawing [and some of you going on to writing your own stories, too]; inkers don’t generally get the chance to tell their own stories, unless you’re like Jimmy Palmiotti and got into writing your own stories through the “backdoor” of being a world-class inker, but your work is not unimportant, either; colorists, you may want to try out different techniques and effects; letterers, you’ll want to get into logo design and, if you go really deep into lettering, font design. Editors, your job is deceptively difficult: trying to help the creators tell the best stories they can within their abilities.

Each of these jobs has a brand attached to it, and quite often, that brand is the individual. That brand is you. This is not to say that there aren’t “houses” or “studios” that have several people doing the job, such as ComiCraft for lettering. However, more often than not, the brand is simply you.

Again I ask: what are you doing to manage your brand?

Today’s world is extremely small, and shrinking daily. The internet has brought us together, made collaboration cheap and easy, and has given everyone a who wants to be heard a voice. Creators of art, whether they are in words or pictures, always want to be heard. So, how do you go about managing your brand?

Click here to read more.

[Ingrid K. V. Hardy]

Interesting stuff, Steven! And it could well apply to nearly anyone.

[Steven Forbes]

Thanks, Ingrid!

That's the point of the bulk of the Bolts & Nuts articles: advice that can apply to nearly everyone, but definitely with the comic book creator in mind!

[Charles]

I read the article on the ComixTribe website, then clicked on the link which brought me to this discussion thread.

This was a very nice article, lots of good substance in it. Very sage advice on the branding aspect of things.

Also, I happened to take note of the link at the end, the one that leads to the Pouch of Nuts page, which lists all of the Bolts & Nuts articles in numerical order. I'll have to do a little more browsing, and rummage around in this pile of links, to see what other tasty morsels that I can find. That's a big pile of Bolts and Nuts, though, so it will be the article titles that prove to be the deciding factor, as far as which ones that I will check out first. There's one hundred and fifty of them in all, and thus far, I have only read two of them. It would probably take quite a while to read them all.

On a side note, there's one possible typo in this article #145, where it states:

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The first thing you need to do is to take an unobjective view of what your brand is.
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Since this is a permanent archive, one intended for lots of readership over an extended period of time, if "unobjective" is a typo, then you might want to consider correcting it. I'm pretty sure that you probably meant to say "objective," instead of "unobjective," in that particular instance. Not trying to nitpick, here. It just sort of stood out as I was reading through the article. If I'm wrong on this, then my apologies upfront.

[Bishop]

Originally Posted by Charles

On a side note, there's one possible typo in this article #145, where ti states:

The irony here cracks me up.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by Bishop

The irony here cracks me up.

Indeed. And believe me, I make tons of them. But, forum postings tend to be informal dialogue, whereas his article series that presently numbers 150 is a far more formal category of writing. Because his aim is to clearly preserve this tome, and for it to be both a resource and continually read by countless others going forward, it's important for any typos to be weeded out over time. Why? So that there's nothing eventually left that is said that wasn't what he intended to say.

Even in these forums, I have corrected typos on numerous different occasions. When I blog, as seldom as that may seem to be, I correct typos intermittently - only to later discover that there are still more typos that need fixing.

At any rate, it was just something that grabbed my eye, and I decided to make him aware of it, in case he wanted to correct it.