Ever wondered about creating your own comics? Enter attorney, author, and business consultant Gamal Hennessy and his new book, The Business of Freelance Comic Book Publishing, a must-read for anyone in the business of freelance comic creation. The book aims to help its readers develop a business model for their services, leverage the assets they offer to the industry, and transform their skill, time, and creativity into financial gain.

The Business of Freelance Comic Book Publishing is the follow-up to The Business of Independent Comic Book Publishing, a project that exceeded its goal by 600% in 2020. It also contains insights and research generated from the professional online comic book community, Comics Connection, as well as a foreword by Andy Schmidt, a writer, editor, and publisher with twenty-five years of experience in comics. The book is edited by Joseph Illidge, a veteran writer and editor for DC, Heavy Metal, Valiant, and Lion Forge.

Currently crowdfunding, we have an exclusive excerpt from the book you can read now and then go get a copy!

What Do Your Clients Want?

By Gamal Hennessy

This is a modified excerpt from a book I’m working on called The Business of Freelance Comic Book Publishing. It is designed to help you understand the motivation of your potential clients. While this can’t be taken as legal or financial advice, it can help you find the right customer for your services.

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What is Marketing?

Marketing is the business process of creating satisfying relationships with customers. It is talking to the right people, at the right time, with the right message. As a freelance comic creator (FCC) this means that when a potential client decides that they need someone who does what you do, your name should pop into their mind first. This is a subtle activity, but marketing isn’t magic, and it doesn’t need to be deceptive or sleazy. It does, however, need to tap into collective aspects of human consumption if your brand is going to reach the right client.

 What Does Your Potential Client Want?

The most basic thing about marketing is the understanding that your potential client does not want you.

They do not want your services, or your skill, or anything else. This isn’t personal, and it isn’t inherently negative. This is the universal condition for anything we buy or consume. When you reduce human motivation to its philosophical core, you realize that people want the results that their various purchases and products can provide for them. They want the feelings that these intermediate goods and services generate, not the things themselves.

For example, if you are hungry, it is difficult for you to relive that hunger without the intermediate process of eating something. As a meta example, you didn’t click on this post just because you like reading. You want a career in comics. You thought that reading this post might be an intermediate step you need to take to accomplish your goal.

By the same token, your client wants successful comics. Their definition of successful might revolve around their ideals of quality about the product, sales of the book, or critical reception of the story, but no matter what they are looking for, they need to see you as the vehicle that will get them where they want to go if they are going to hire you. 

What is Your Marketing Message?

Once you understand the real motivation of your potential client, you’ll be able to craft the right message for the right people. It will be easier for you to avoid the trap of talking about why a particular gig is important for you or how important and impressive you are. All of those things may be true, but they are irrelevant to your potential client. It is more relevant and more helpful for everyone if your messaging articulates why your work can make your clients successful.

It is important to understand that your marketing message will have two concurrent effects, no matter what your message is or how you convey it. The direct effect will be to attract the right clients for your brand. Your message will express not only the type of work that you do, but the kind of clients you work for and, on a professional level, the things that are important to you from a political and social dimension. This is true to some extent for all marketing messages, but it is particularly significant in creative work due to the political nature of art. Since comics are art and all art is political, your work and your messaging should reflect this reality.

And that reality will alienate the wrong clients. This is the second concurrent effect. It means that in most circumstances they will not hire you regardless of your skill, talent, or professionalism. By definition, this will reduce your pool of potential clients and the amount of hypothetical revenue. But it will also go a long way in filtering out the clients who don’t make sense for you. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll probably wind up appealing to no one. It makes much more sense to figure out where you fit in the market and focus your efforts there.

Have fun with your comic.

Gamal