The People’s Publisher

The other day while sitting in our weekly marketing brainstorming session, an old sales lesson (from my days as a door-to-door salesman) came to mind. I used to sell product that, quite simply, sold itself. At the time I found that my job was not so much about convincing the prospect of the product’s superiority but rather it was to convince the prospect to take a few seconds to physically hold the product. Once the prospect started playing with the product “demo,” it was pretty much smooth sailing from there…

You can have the best possible pr and marketing campaign in place, a team of sales all-stars hammering the phones day in, day out, but without a good product, you can only work your sales magic or “sell the sizzle” for so long before you have to answer for the quality of your product or service.

Our sales and marketing team is really fortunate in that we have a very good product to sell (and by no means is this meant to be a pat on our back; rather it is a kudos to the Z2H community members who are posting up quality story pitches). From our perspective, once we direct a journalist or even a web surfer, for example, to check out the various pitches posted by the community, it doesn’t take much selling on our part to convince them that there is really some good content on the site — and that there is a very strong product, overall.

As you can imagine, this makes our job on the sales and marketing front that much easier….

GZ

The first blog post, coming to you right from the media room! Why the media room? Well, the media room is where we tell the media - and by extension, the world - about all the pitches that are being submitted through Comic Creation Nation.

We’ve had some great press coverage in the last few months. A large part of this was because of the “ReBoot Re-launch” campaign, which caught the attention of publications, such as The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Globe and Mail, to name a few. The ReBoot campaign was successful in large part because of the amount of suggestions from the Z2H online community, and the willingness of Rainmaker Animation’s writers to implement those suggestions.

Most recently, we launched the Comic Creation Nation, a campaign that gives undiscovered writers a fighting chance to have their own story ideas developed into digital comic books, laying the groundwork for potential development into future film, TV, animation, and video game properties. Similar to the ReBoot campaign, we received some great media coverage on this campaign. This campaign is unique in that it is the first time that “the gatekeepers” don’t choose which pitches to further develop. How the pitches fare is completely up to the community to determine. And, what the community backs, we back. It’s that simple.

Well, we look forward to sharing your work with the world. From time to time, check the media room to see what’s been written about this campaign…