Over at Tom Brevoort’s blog, the game is indeed afoot as his editorial simulator gathers speed. The aim, as he explained in the opener, is the following:
Your goal over the course of the next two weeks is to increase your sales, put out crowd-pleasing, well-produced comic books, meet your financial obligations to the company, and get the books out on time.
As the editor, you can try anything you can think of more-or-less, provided that such actions get aproved by the Editor in Chief and the Marvel braintrust (in this case, played by me.) So your first move is to determine what you want to do with your three books. Do you want to make creative changes? try to put a new cover artist on? Have an idea for a specific storyline? Want to build a crossover?
Literally anything you can come up with is potentially fair game. The more creative you are, the more fun this will potentially be.
But it’s not as easy as it looks, as the second installment shows. Having given Tom their ideas, the wannabe editors recieve a simulated reality check in return:
You don’t have any individual ad budget–the ad budget for Marvel editorial is communal. So most of your ideas towards targeting ads around the net comes to nothing. Eats up a good meeting, though.
You can do viral marketing on the net, but again, you don’t have any budget to spend. And again, any bit of information that you put on the net makes it more difficult to interest the typical comics news outlets in your stories. You definitely don’t have enough time in your week to do both video blogs and the alternate reality game (nor do you have a budget to hire somebody to come up withthe backstory for the game–this you’ll either need to do yourself or convince one of your writers to do for free–and while he’s doing that he’s not working on your books.) Again, you’ll need to give me your current plan now that you have this new information–confirm what you’re doing or make adjustments to what you propose.
… You only receive 4 or 5 office copies of each book you work on, and you receive those after the title goes on sale. So you’re very limited in terms of what you can send out to reviewers. And any attempts to contact the mainstream media will have to go through Marvel’s PR department, who have bigger fish to fry than promoting the latest issue of DAREDEVIL, so nothing much comes of this.
You’re definitely in no position to arrange to give away copies of GHOST RIDER at the movie premiere. This might happen anyway, depending on the parameters of the shindig, but it’s well beyond your ability to arrange.
Attempting to send a copy of the GHOST RIDER collection to Nic Cage for promotional opportunities would need to go through Marvel Studios. The folks there tell you that it’s not going to happen–the movie has its own agenda in terms of what to promote and how to promote whenever they can get Cage in front of the television cameras or on a talk show set.
It may be brutal for the two contestants, but it’s fascinating for the rest of us.
August 21st, 2006 at 3:02 pm
What a facinating insight into how the editorial department works at Marvel. New idea? It won’t work! I thought the idea of viral marketing was that it didn’t cost any money. Isn’t Tom’s blog a form of viral marketing? (Or am I misunderstanding the concept?)
I would promote my books by itroducing a new character: The amazing Straw-Man!
August 21st, 2006 at 3:50 pm
“I thought the idea of viral marketing was that it didn’t cost any money.”
Yeah, but the guy’s idea involved setting up various websites and writing quite a lot of teasers. This, obviously, costs money.
Actually, you can’t do viral marketing without a starting investment, however small be it. You have to at least devote some time to setting it up. You can’t start something from nothing.
August 21st, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Cool.
I would have played if I wasn’t such a chicken.
August 21st, 2006 at 7:57 pm
It’s very interesting, but it immediately struck me that Breevort can’t very well let them “win”, i.e. increase sales substantially. That would be admitting they could do his job better than he can.
Also, it strikes me that the job as approached is mislabelled as “editor”. everyone seems to approach this more as “manager/promoter” of the titles in question. This in turn makes it seem odd (IMO) that there are next to no means at the candidates’ disposal to do that promotion job. Perhaps that is the sad reality within Marvel, but if so it merely means the so called editor doesn’t have a lot of influence on sales. Mostly because the cooperation expects him or her to do a job without providing the means to do it.