Archive for the Microniche Marketing Category


5 Things Niche Companies Do Right

February 15th, 2009

In January, I wrote a short article about 5 Things Niche Companies Do Wrong. Things like not planning to suceed, failing to listen to expert advice, etc.

Today, I want to present the other half of that equation, things that niche companies use as natural advantages over larger, clunkier companies. I’ll do my best to present you with some examples as we go along. Bear in mind that every company in anime and manga is a “niche” company. Even the big ones.

Disclaimer – none of these examples were solicited, nor do the companies have the vaguest clue I’m using them as examples. They are giving me nothing for this, so don’t even start.)

5 Things Niche Companies Do Right

Treat Consumers like Friends

One of the undeniable facts about fandoms over general consumer markets is that your consumers are the “fans” of the product. They will act as if they have a personal stake in the product – even if they never support it finanically. If you take a second to think about it, you will have no trouble thinking of an example of someone publicly trashing a movie they haven’t (and won’t) see or a book they have no intention of buying because they felt betrayed by the contents.

As a niche company, we have the right and the power to be friendly with our consumers – to talk to them when they come into the store or up to a table at an event, or get emails from them, and respond personally. If we truly engage with the fans, they will feel even *more* involved with the product and if they like it, they will spread the word.

My best of breed example of this is Comic Fusion, a comic store owned by my friend Stacy. She’s taught me everything I’ve ever needed to know about networking. She isn’t smarmy or market-y. She just talks to people. She’s friendly to her customers and to people she meets. (She’s from California, so she can’t help it, really.) As a result, her clients *LOVE* her store. They bring friends, they bring family, they bring anyone they can drag along with them. And every single person who walks through the door is another new friend.

There was a dreadful article I read recently about ways to capture the young female comic market (Pink and flowery comic boxes? Seriously?) and I thought – all they need to do is have someone like Stacy at the counter. Their store does not have overstuffed chairs (another idiotic suggestion, as if comic store owners want people to sit there and read, not buy) but they have the friendliest, most welcoming customer service EVER. Now that’s how you get and keep customers.

Be flexible

When the standard methods lead to a shrinking market, looking way outside your comfort zone is the best way to grow.

Recently, all the press has been on the young teen female readers, but you know, manga’s already done there. The girls who got into that when they were 12 are 15, 18, 20 now. There’s damn little for them. Stuff for young teen male readers has enough of a “universal” appeal that those titles are doing okay. But who is actually *buying* manga the most right now? Adults. Yes, those of us who are way too old to be reading comics are the ones holding the damn industry afloat.

So, when while every company is scrambling to be the next Twilight, which is already a bad idea, Viz announced a bunch of licences at NY Comic Con that appealed to a more mature readership. And, I am assured, are mostly off-beat and unusual.

This is the company that made the tween/teen manga world explode here with utterly banal, insansely popular Shounen Jump and Shoujo Beat magazines. And now, all of a sudden, they are looking to more mature manga? Why? They had a winning formula! Because young people grow up and if you have a 15 year old, in a few years, that kid is not gonna want to read about 15-year old ninjas anymore. Viz took the leap out of the typical, to the real *next* audience. Adults. I have no doubt at all that it will be successful.

Listen to feedback

Provide instant response to a market change, then let people know you heard them.

Nozomi/Right Stuf announced this crazy idea. They were going to license a completely, utterly, shoujo title. It had no ninjas, or robots, or magical girls or…well…anything really. It was about a bunch of girls who go to a private school, where nothing really happens. (OMG. Lillian is The Talking Heads’ “Heaven!”) You may have heard of the series. lol

But Right Stuf knew that this particular fandom was built by a few key entities who actually encouraged purchase, so they took the risk and licensed Maria-sama ga Miteru. Now here’s the thing. They did a subtitles-only release, because it seemed obvious that the majority of the consumers wanted that over a dub. But when word of the subtitling started to spread, fans expressed concerns about the specific handling of honorifics and titles used in the story. RS was deluged with requests and entreaties for a non-tranlslated handling of the titles. And, they listened. Think about that. They changed the way they did their releases because fans asked politely for a different option. And they let the fans know – immediately. They didn’t keep fans guessing, they jumped right on it and responded with “We heard you! We’ll do it!” I can think of a number of issues that have *not* been addressed after waves of fan mail, but this is the first time I’ve seen an almost instant response of this magnitude.

Reward engagement

Everyone wants to be a hero. I claim my own Okazu blog as best of breed in this. I love the fact that you, my readers, are so engaged. I started the Wish List as a result of *your* emails and comments, asking if you could help support Okazu. And I know that people want to be heros. Well – you are my heros. And so I created the “Okazu Hero” roll and sent you badges to let you and anyone who drops by this blog, that I consider you all my heros.

The result? I can’t keep items on my freaking wishlist! You all are so crazy generous, I have 4 piles of things to read and watch and review here, and 5th building. I didn’t give you a free car – but I let you know you are my heros. And honestly, that’s all anyone ever wants.

Go with your gut

Recently on LinkedIn, I answered a question. The person asked what he should do now that the result of a market feasibility study had proved that his concept wasn’t going to work. In short, I told him that consumers rarely know what they want until after it exists. (Quick, summarize your favorite series, and synopsize it. Now tell someone about it. Would you have wanted it with that description? Probably not.) So, he had two choices – to rethink everything based on a market feasbility study, or to go with his gut. Both would be equally as risky, but only one would make him happy.

ALC Publishing is a boutique publisher, which focuses on bringing doujinshi Yuri artists to the view of the reading audience. We’re not trying to license Strawberry Panic. My gut tells me that when other companies are long gone, we’ll still be around, because we don’t do alot – but we do what *I* love and many people have come to love it as well. That’s all we ever wanted, so…I’m going with my gut.

(And speaking of ALC Publishing – Yuri Monogatari 6 is on sale now on Amazon and the Yuricon Shop!)

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So, there you have it 5 ways that niche companies do the right thing, for the right reasons with the right results.

This essay is once again brought to you by Yurikon LLC – Intelligent Business Promotion.

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One last thing – this was just me having a little fun this AM. Looking for a little Social Marketing humor? Get the Social Marketing is…People! T-shirt from Yurikon. It’s the hottest, newest word in Social Marketing Fashion! :-)





5 Things Niche Companies Do Wrong

January 18th, 2009

Here’s the newest essay in the series on Microniche Marketing.

5 Things Niche Companies Do Wrong

Don’t Plan

You have a great idea and it’s all going well. You’ve got your first product on the shelves, or a nice list of clients for your service. Everything’s working beautifully. But, in business there’s only two directions – growth or entropy. Most companies plain for neither.

If a small business is successful, then growth is decent, new challenges pop up faster than they are resolved and it takes more time to deal with than you have in a day, so things like planning for the future take a back seat to dealing with the now.

It’s important to stop and think about failure and success. What will you do if this next series is a huge hit – do you have resources to handle the fulfillment? What if your eBay store takes off – can you give it time, or is it always falling to the bottom of the list – how will you restock your shelves if the new store is a success?

Equally – what if it’s a failure? what will you do when the last three products don’t make their margins, or the service isn’t drawing clients? What if you have contracts, but not enough money to do the work?

I see this a lot in the anime/manga world – new companies, with great ideas…and not an ounce of contingency planning.

How to Fix This: With every decision you make, take a second to add a line or two of growth and entropy planning. When the idea gets started and is showing signs of either one or the other, you’ll at least have an inkling of what direction to take.

Fear Change

Your business came from your ideas, your blood, sweat and tears. And now it’s taken off and you’ve taken it to the limits of your abilities to succeed. You’re looking to take it to the next step, bring new ideas to fruition and add value to the things you already do.

But to do that – you will need to change your business. Perhaps add a new employee to take up the slack, or change a business practice, or vendor. Or completely rethink something you’re doing that could be done better differently. Change means loss of control, moving away from *your* vision. It’s hard to let go of your original model, even if a new one would be infinitely better. Niche companies get comfortable in their niche and without even realizing it, they start to fear change.

How to Fix This: If what you are doing is working, then don’t change it. But when you look to grow, you’ll need to get over the fear of change. Change is inevitable in any case, so it’s a good idea to build a little change into your plan at every step, so you get used to it in increments. Consider the things are likely change and what change you can tolerate. Remember how it felt to start your company? Take a risk and capture that feeling of endless possibilities once again.

Forget to Communicate

You’re busy. and your business is clear to you. But your clients and customers don’t always know what you’re thinking. It seems crass to send an email to everyone who has ever bought something from you, that you have a new item for sale – but, it’s not. If you don’t tell people about a new offering, they can’t possibly know about it.

How to Fix This: Talk to your customers and clients. Solicit information, provide feedback. Don’t be afraid to tell them what new things you can offer them. Even if you’ve told them before, you aren’t the center of their universe – tell them again. It’s not tacky.

Listen To People

When you launched your business, you had some hits – and some misses. One of the misses has got a lot of free time on his hands and is crisscrossing town, or your online space, expounding his dissatisfaction.

You can’t change that. Someone is always not going to like the way you make coffee, the color of the flowers, the logo design.

How to Fix This: Don’t listen to it. Don’t follow the forum, read the opinion letter in the newspaper or let your friend tell you the story of the rant. It won’t provide you constructive criticism and you’ll lose confidence in yourself and your business. Work to your strengths for a while and solicit positive – and loud – feedback from satisfied customers. After a while the good will drown out the bad.

Don’t Listen to Good Advice

You’ve decided to look for an advertising firm, or to get a new logo, or have your office walls painted. You’ve solicited a few bids and picked the company that you want to work with.

The first thing they tell you, you tell them why you can’t do that. Then you explain to them, very carefully and slowly, why what they do isn’t really what you want at all, you really want something else – only, you don’t want that, either.

If the marketing person says you *don’t* need Twitter, your audience isn’t *on* Twitter, why argue that you want Twitter?

How to Fix This: When you’re planning a project with a new company, think carefully about your goals for the project – then give your expert that information – not what you think you want, but what your goal for the project is. Then listen to their advice. Chances are they know what they are talking about. That’s what you’re paying them for, after all.

The business world is changing rapidly and it’s not always possible to be on the leading edge. Sometimes it’s not even desirable.

As a niche company, you need to decide what your limits are for change. Sometimes the absolutely best thing you can decide is to stick to your original plan. Sometimes you’ll need to look way past your own ideas for the solution. Either way, things are going to be different. Don’t fear change – embrace it.

Fix any one of these five things and you’ll find that your business runs smoother almost instantly.

Microniche Marketing, from Yurikon LLC. Intelligent Business Promotion





Yuri News This Week – January 3, 2009 and Sage Marketing Advice for 2009

January 3rd, 2009

A couple of interesting items to start the year off!

Yuri Manga

Erin is excited to share the news that a *new* Yuri manga magazine is jumping on the bandwagon. I’m going to quote Erin from the Yuricon Mailing List because not plagiarizing would require work…lol;

“Tsubomi (Bud) is coming out from Houbunsha (the publisher that does Manga Time Kirara). It will be quarterly, and the first issue is due out February 12. The artists include:
Morinaga Milk
Yoshitomi Akihito
Ugawa Hiroki
Ootomo Megane
Oogawa Hidari
Kigi Tatsumi
Kizuki Akira (who did “Needles and Oranges”)
Kuon(?) Aki
Tsurimaki Nodoka
Nawoko
Hattori Mitsuru
Hoshiai Hiro (who did “Shining Mars” in Yuri Tengoku)
Mizutani(?) Fuuka
Miyauchi Yuka
Yoshinari Atsushi

So, some familiar names and some new ones. Yuri na Hibi speculates that Morinaga’s story will be a continuation of the NanaxHitomi series, but I guess we’ll see.”

I’d like to add that Kirara supplies a significant portion of “4-koma comics with Yuri” to the free world, so this isn’t a humongous leap into the unknown for them. :-) Thanks Erin for the great news!

Also an interesting catch from the back of Yuri Hime S, Ichijinsha is reprinting Pure Marionation by Takagi Noboyuki, who is doing Cassiopeia Dolce for YHS, and just finished Magie Paire for Gum. I think this is a wise move. You can take a look at my reviews for Volume 1 and Volume 2 some years ago. Clearly that series was printed before it’s time – now the audience that can appreciate it is a little more consolidated. If you like his service-filled, hyper-cute style, consider getting this title when it comes out again.

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Yuri Anime

The first episode of Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th season aired. If you haven’t watched it already, of course I recommed you do. Because it’s back to TV format, it’s very fast paced – much faster than the novel from which it comes. The OP embodies “whimsical” and the EP shoves the Yuri firmly up our noses. And…get used to Touko. She’s not going away any time soon. :-)

For something *entirely* different, the Queen’s Blade anime trailer can be watched on YouTube. Honestly, set your expectations on “low” then notch them down just a bit and you should be good to enjoy this series! :-) On the positive side, this series does that thing which I thought we’d lost forever – making women look like adults, with adult bodies, rather than infantilizing them. So that’s a bonus.

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Advice to Anime/Manga Companies for 2009

This last thing is someting I’ve been thinking about for a while. In a sense this is advice for companies seeking to enter the “Yuri” market here in the US. Japanese companies are now starting to really take some chances with their Yuri and trying to develop the market. But here, we’re seeing disppointment and retraction of company interest in the Yuri market. Obviously ALC Publishing has always been a boutique publisher. We’re publishing what we want, at our own pace, the way we want it. I can’t afford to – nor do I wish to – compete with companies like Tokyopop or Seven Seas. But where they are all pulling back from forays into Yuri, I have no intention of doing so. That having been said, I think a lot of this advice is relevant to any anime or manga publisher who is considering marketing a niche title to a western audience.

So, here’s my advice for any company seeking to enter a niche manga/anime market in 2009:

“Audience” does not have any relationship to “market.”

If you see 10,000 posts saying “I want series XYZ,” that does not in *any* way translate into sales of 10,000 copies.

I think most fans and probably a lot of the less business intelligence-focused companies have serious cognitive dissonance about this. Fans genuinely believe that the Yuri market is tens of thousands of people strong, when in fact, outside Japan it is tens of dozens strong. A good, strong book sales for a purely niche title is about 2000 copies. (This is based on business intelligence I have gathered from a number of sources.) I can think of several “highly anticipated” releases that did so poorly – less than 500 copies – that the company has killed the series. Which brings me to;

It’s no one’s fault. No matter what the “anti-guy” says.

You know the “anti-guy – s/he’s the person who posts and posts and posts all over forums and blogs about how s/he’d buy that book/series “if only” the company did something else/better/different. But in reality, for all the noise s/he makes, at best s/he only buys 1 copy of any given book, and most probably doesn’t buy *any.* Do NOT listen to the anti-guy. In fact, ban the anti-guy from your forums. S/he sows discord and misery and adds nothing at all helpful to the mix. Ignore the anti-guy. Don’t respond to his/her posts, do not follow his/her swath of fantastic claims and unreasonable demands around the Internet. Do not legitimize him/her. (Other bloggers, that goes for you, too. Stop giving people like this legitimacy as “press.”)

The reality is that the buying audience – the “market” – for niche anime and manga is infintesimally small. No, the market for anime and manga overall in the west is infintesimally small, and niche anime and manga is a microniche of that.

So, please, companies, do not expect to make grazillions in Yuri. If you want to grow the market, there’s a big audience out there. But it will take time – you need to work with them, communicate with them, get to understand where they live online and what they are willing to pay for – and how to gauge potential sales correctly. You also need to be willing to support a series that has potential to move outside the niche with some genuine advertising and promotion. (Thanks to Simon from Icarus Publishing for adding that it’s not enough to temper your own sales expectations, but those of the Japanese publisher as well. And that requires a *very* deft touch. which is absolutely crucial as well.)

Which brings me to my next piece of advice.

It’s time to stop thinking “word of mouth” is good enough.

There is a series I like. I’ve written about it a lot here. I write about it everywhere. But I’m only one person. Perhaps my going on and on sold a few more copies of this series. I’ll be absurdly generous and say that directly or indirectly, I may have been responsible for 100 copies sold.

That’s nowhere near enough.

The thing is, there is a reasonably cheap way to advertise this series at point-of-sale. It involves a radical change of thinking about advertising, and an incorporation of some Japanese-style promotion. Comparatively, it’s not expensive and would absolutely get more people to see this book on the shelf.

It won’t ever happen. (Although, Company X, if you want to know what it is, and how it can be done, feel free to contact me and I’ll tell you how. lol)

I’ve commented on this many times here – in Japan, the collected volume of manga or box set of anime is the *end* of a long stream of promotion and distribution. Here in the west, it’s the beginning and the end. Volume comes out, volume gets bought, volume goes away. There are a few magazines that have serialization, and few series get TV releases, but for most Yuri titles – most anime and manga titles – there is no Cartoon Network, no Anime Network, no Yen Plus, no Shoujo Beat. Book comes out, Company ABC relies on fans to talk about it, runs a few contests, sends out some press releases, review copies…and that’s it.

Stop. Please. You’re forcing me, a fan, a reviewer, a person of influence, into browbeating people for *you* so *you* can make a profit. Do your own business intelligence – find out *where* to make announcement, find out *who* to turn into advocates and for god’s sake – look outside the anime/manga world. I can think of half a dozen series off the top of my head that would easily be marketable to any “person who doesn’t read manga or watch anime.” (For example – why the hell doesn’t the Black Lagoon anime advertise on Spike TV? I mean, seriously. There’s a HUGE audience right there. I know, I know…money. But there’s an old business adage “To make money you have to spend money.” Nowhere is this more true than when you are trying to grow an audience into a market.) I market *my* manga to the GLBT audience. Why aren’t you out there markteing yours to children/teens/adults who like similar non-manga/anime stuff?

I don’t expect too many companies to come running, singing paeans of thanks for my advice, but if you happen to be a company and do want to understand what I am saying, I have 20+ years of marketing and business intelligence background I bring to this issue. I’m not blowing smoke – there are answers for all these issues. They just might take time – and possibly a complete rethinking of everything you’re doing right now. :) But, it’s not impossible. Call me.

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So that’s my thoughts for the first week of 2009. Here’s to a terrific, Yuri-ful New Year!





Yurikon LLC presents "Microniche Marketing"

December 18th, 2008

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about some (not all) of the complexities of promoting manga – especially niche manga – to an international audience.

I have been thinking about these problems quite a bit, and have created a brand new, flexible, low-cost, and completely (I think) new way of thinking in order to address these issues.

I call it Microniche MarketingTM.

Microniche MarketingTM is, in a nutshell, a way to create saturation within a very small niche of a niche, with low-cost promotion. It avoids relying on a cumbersome website, creates a very flexible concept of community and allows a company to be where the audience is, rather than requiring the audience to find them.

I am launching Microniche MarketingTM today, offering it on a consultation basis to any and all companies that would like to address a specific fanbase, fans of a genre or any niche within a larger – but still quite small – niche. If you are having trouble getting the word out, Microniche MarketingTM is for you.





The Difficulties of Advertising and Promoting Manga

November 16th, 2008

A few months ago, I wrote a little essay detailing some, but not all, of the many problems faced by publishers and fans when it comes to the process of publishing, selling and distributing manga. One of the themes that came up in the comments was that readers felt that if only companies promoted their manga more, sales would be better. I felt that the misunderstandings driving this issue were worth a whole separate essay.

Let me begin by once again apologizing for being confusing when I mean to clarify and for oversimplifying complex and multipartite issues. Also, this is once again kind of long….

One of the least actionable suggestions on the previous essay about distribution was that companies should not even start to do anything unless they have “enough” money. This is not only very childish, it’s simply not doable. I’m fairly certain that very few fans have the vaguest idea of what it costs to license, translate, edit, retouch, letter, layout, publish and distribute a book. I’m equally certain that very, very few fans have the slightest idea of what would be “enough” money for a comprehensive advertising campaign. With multitrillion dollar companies failing every day, I think it’s safe to say that no one ever has “enough” money.

The core of advertising is saturation. One of the tenets of advertising is that repetition is the key. The ad for XYZ car may annoy the heck out of you, when you see it on TV, hear it on radio, see it in a magazine and on billboards, but chances are, you’d recognize the car if I showed you a picture. Buying *one* ad won’t make a difference. A company has to buy many, many ads to establish in our thick brains that a series is out. :-)

For the moment, let’s set aside the issue of selling manga to a non-comics reading audience. It’s a whole different can of beans.

Let’s just go over the most common forms of promotion in the anime and manga world:

1) Press Releases (which go to news sites and bloggers)
2) Company Forums/Website
3) Social networking
4) Reviews
5) Articles on and off-line
6) Ads on websites
7) Ads in print

As soon as they license a title and can officially announce it, most companies send out a press release. These go to on- and off-line media sources and will likely to be posted on the company’s website. A company might send this to several dozen media outlets, maybe even hundreds. Not all of those will publish the press release. Online sources are usually pretty good about that, and something like ANN will have forum space to comment. Of course, most companies have forums as well, and will gladly encourage discussion about the upcoming title.

People who read those press releases or visit those forums will know about the series. Perhaps a magazine or blogger who aggregates news will mention that the series has been licensed. All of those will expand the news out to a wider audience. There’s also word of mouth and other consumer-generated media such as mailing lists, groups on social networking sites, twitters, etc. Anyone mentioning a license in those spaces will spread the word that much more.

All of this goes for when a series is released, as well – at which time it also has the added advantage of being listed in Previews and books catalogs, which might raise awareness another notch.

And then there’s articles, and reviews. Companies send out review copies as early as possible. Magazines and online sites review their books. Perhaps someone will write an article about the company, the artist, the genre. There’s no guarantee that the review will be positive, however.

The problem with this is that you, a potential reader of this series, have to *be* in one of these spaces. You have to read a newsite, a magazine, a forum, a mailing list, a group, a blog, to hear that news. Which is why most manga companies rely heavily on fan advocates. One blogger with a larger or more targeted following might spread the news faster than a press release to ANN or a review on AoDVD.

My wife makes a good point here – she said, “Up until now, there’s no outlay of money.” She’s wrong, but the fact that she didn’t know that means you might not, as well. The press release is written by and distributed by a person who is being paid for doing that job. And, if the company has hired a professional marketing firm, they may in fact be paying to get the press release out there. Not all PR sites are free. So it’s not a direct buy, but it isn’t free, either. And while the cost of sending out a review copy isn’t back-breaking, you’re still paying per cost of book and the shipping, so it’s not free, either.

Then there’s advertising. There is an entire career one could make doing nothing but buying media space for advertising. It’s not a simple task.

It’s been proven over and over that most people who are at least vaguely familiar with the Internet simply tune ads out when looking at a page. I’m not making it up, trust me. And, like real estate, in advertising everything is location, location, location. If my ad is above the cut, in the reading space, you *might* notice it. Chances are, not unless you see it a dozen times though. If you have an adblocker, are a member of a site which gives you an ad-free view or, like myself, steadfastly refuse to look at ads on a webpage, the money for that impression just went {poof}.

When was the last time an ad popped up on a webpage and you went “Oooh! I wanted that!” and clicked through and bought it? How many times are you paging through a magazine or newspaper, see something for sale and run right out and buy it? You see my point.

Big ads on websites are expensive. Ads in magazines are prohibitively expensive, even though anime/manga magazines are super cheap compared to national print media. (For example, I could very seriously spend more to buy *one* smallish ad in The Advocate than I actually make on a book in a year.)

Little ads placed on the lower portion of websites might never be seen. Cheap, yes. But how *many* impressions do you think XYZ store needs to serve to make one sale? Thousands.

And advertising *still* is predicated upon the simple fact that you read the magazine or website and actually look at the ads there.

Now, given the fact that most companies promote and advertise at least their major, likely-to-sell-alot new series on heavily trafficked spaces online and in print, can you think of any other reasons why you might not have heard of a series before?

I can.

Because you are not *on* those spaces. You hang out at ABC forum, where the ads are either adult to pay the bills, or semi-related, like games or, also likely, has no ads because the space you’re on is private, subsidized, lives by donation and/or talks about illegal activities like warez, scans and subs. Perhaps you hang in irc, or on a private mailing list or group.

Companies have limited dollars and are likely to advertise on, not only the most seen spaces, but the spaces where the readers are most likely to convert their passion for a series into sales. ANN is more popular, but AoDVD readers tend to buy more. If you’re company Z, which site are you throwing your money at? 4chan is undoubtedly a massively popular site. And in some ways, culturally significant. But not in terms of sales. Channers are not an audience likely to buy a series. So, even though an ad buy there might be seen by many people, its another {poof} of money. It’s far better to sink money into a print magazine (already a higher likelihood of buying, because they *buy* the magazine) or a blog or website where the readers are likeliest to convert into buyers.

Now, all that having been said, when I read “companies don’t promote enough” what I actually hear is “companies don’t beam relevant information directly to my brain.” Because it’s not that hard to bookmark the maybe half dozen companies that release material that interest you, or one or two news sources that track relevant information. You can’t expect a company to send press releases to the irc channels you’re in, but you can expect them on the company website – and many companies offer informative forums, lists, and email newsletters with *news* that get beamed directly to your email box, that you will, sadly, still have to read in order to know.

In the comments of my last essay, Seven Seas detailed the multiple ways in which they had promoted a book and the response was, “well I never heard about it.” There is no fix for that. If you are not reading reviews, looking at ads, checking forums or news, following on Twitter, or somehow actully collecting information in some way, there is *no* way the company can reach you. It is next to impossible to inform you about a new series you *might* like, unless you’re paying attention to places where things you like are promoted.

Do companies promote enough? No. There is never *enough* promotion. There will always be some person who just walked in from the rain, who looks around and says, “I never heard of this before,” even after the largest freaking media blitz on the planet.