Quote:
Originally Posted by Silver Spoon
The idea of something like a "season pass" for a fetish comic is perhaps the most insane pay comic concept I've heard for in the near 12 years I've been on this forum.
It's hard for me to also get excited for pay comics involving characters you don't own the copyright of.
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Fully agree on the former, it's like the only marketing strategy Mercomix uses are ones handed down from mainstream large-scale crowd-funding and video games that do this to bypass traditional financing barriers or build hype. These and other tactics from Mercomix are totally mismatched to the audience.
You have to have a brand people trust too. Mercomix has a lack of self-awareness about how much trust was lost and how their brand has been poisoned from the Sailor Moon series of comics; the creator made core elements out of their personal, hyper-niche kinks (diapers, scat) and exacting fantasy of shrinking characters from a notable 1980s manga/anime property and babying these characters rather than sticking to size differences and the interesting dynamics that can play out there when you aren't preoccupied with infantilizing. Something very rigid about their obsession. To their credit, at least Mercomix is not obsessed with something like Ranma.
Need to push back a little on the latter. Fair use allows the sale of those images. What pornographers don't do is slap a label on their product implying it is a branded product endorsed by the property owners, which Mercomix initially did.
Also, most people have moved on to more contemporary properties and characters like Overwatch or other video games for Western audiences and more recent anime characters (stopped paying attention years ago to what the zeitgeist is) or generic anime girls in Asian garb rendered in an Eastern art style for the rest. They stay on top of what's new. Sailor Moon has been dead near-on a decade.
I plan to buy the first comic based on the shrinking process alone; any excitement I might have is purely benefit of the doubt, but there is an element that is thankful that it isn't Yet Another Sailor Moon Comic (#YASMC). The recent preview showing hints of the shrinking cemented that decision, though I won't preorder. I will absolutely not get Chapter II or any subsequent chapter, but I could see myself commissioning the artist.
So, here's some constructive criticism, because I know Mercomix isn't going to stop: I would drop the preorder gimmicks and just release the damn comic when its done. If you release quality products, people will buy it and you don't have to work so hard to convince us with the money that what you have to offer is worth what you're charging. If you want to let people know ahead of time, fine, but months in advance isn't the way to go. A week tops. You aren't a pay site who has to cultivate a sense of the subscription website as a going concern and worry about subscriber retention.
Focus on the fundamentals and leave the advanced tactics to the experts who are trying to capture sales from demographics on gigantic marketing platforms that have more than a couple hundred people in it.