Really, you just knew that there was no way that I’d be able to pass up this blog post from Tom Brevoort, didn’t you?:
Everybody in this industry has a real love-hate relationship with the Internet. You wouldn’t believe how often we all tell one another to stop going online, and to stop worrying about what’s being said–all at the same time we’re all looking online at what’s being said. It’s like an addiction.
It can be a wonderful thing to get the kind of instantaneous feedback that the Internet provides. But it can also be crippling. Like those who work in almost any entertainment media, the people who make comic books are simultaneously supremely confident and emotionally needy.
And when the relationship goes wrong, it can destroy careers. We’ve seen a couple of creators who became so reviled after they melted down publicly on the Internet that it began to affect the sales of their books. In other instances, creators were so traumatized by the harshness of fan reactions to their work that they retreated entirely, and some of them even left the business for awhile.
Much more in the link, but no commentary from me. I’m sure you can all fill in my particular blanks on this subject.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:49 am
That reminds me of a story Mark Waid told at a con about the internet being like Phantom Zone Viewer (or whatever it’s called) that Superman had in the Fortress of Solitude.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Actually, that blog post sounds like really good advice. It is easy to get too caught up in what people are saying on the net, both for creators and fans.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Someone should ask David Choe what he thinks about creators being on the internet…
March 28th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I know it’s very a small percentage of readers that actually post in forums, but I wonder how many read them. Is it really large enough to affect book sales directly? Or is it that most people who can influence a books sales, i.e. those in the retail end of the industry, do read online blogs, forums and websites and are influenced by them and then they in turn influence others.
That being said, I believe Chuck Austen’s work on X-men deserved all the harsh criticism it got and that Ron “I’m from HOLLYWOOD” Zimmerman actually got off with less than he should have do to his very active defense by Marvel.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
“I know it’s very a small percentage of readers that actually post in forums, but I wonder how many read them. Is it really large enough to affect book sales directly? Or is it that most people who can influence a books sales, i.e. those in the retail end of the industry, do read online blogs, forums and websites and are influenced by them and then they in turn influence others.”
Those are good questions. I think the retailers are pretty Net-connected, but it’s hard to say if the things they read here have much effect on what they buy for their stores. At the end of the day, it’s all about the balance sheet, and the retailers have to have a feel for what their local part of the market likes if they want to stay in business. But you never know. If something ignites a twenty page thread in Newsarama it just might make the local patrons feel just as passionate.
As for your first question, I think the influence of online fans is directly proportional to overall sales of the book. Something like Civil War or 52 is pretty much critic-proof, but a more marginal book like Jonah Hex or Runaways (or just about everything published outside of Marvel and DC) could be greatly affected by online buzz, simply because those books are so close to the red-line to begin with, and a few thousand sales could make all the difference.