It's Better to Overcommunicate

Reading up on the Platinum Studios disaster from DJ Coffman, creator of "Hero By Night" raised an interesting point near the end made by business expert Jack Walsh - it's better to overcommunicate with investors and clients or your creative staff than it is to stay silent for months at a time.

The reason I bring it up is because it's an important point not only on the basic level of investors and creators, but also between creator and audience. Recently, a creator I talked to at FallCon mentioned that it was discouraged by a company to talk to fans about a project they had hoped to do.

What sort of logic is that? If you get people interested in it, they might actually want to READ it and BUY it. This is why people read interviews that promote upcoming books. They WANT to get interested in something and want to see if there's something they'd like to add to their pull lists. If you don't say anything, then you don't hear about it and it goes under the radar until the book is canceled. Why do you think I'm trying to promote Revolution of the Mask as often as possible?

But then again, that communication shouldn't necessarily be BAD communication. During DC's weekly series Countdown, after every issue there'd be an intereview with the editor for the book and it was a DISASTER. Newsarama would ask serious, logical questions and they'd be shot down with "just keep reading" or frat boy responses that were supposed to be funny but ended up looking like they just weren't interested in making a good book.

It's especially frustrating when we get mixed signals from companies. They purportedly claim that they don't pay attention to the internet because it's only a small percentage of the comic-reading population, yet it's the fastest way of getting feedback. And while I personally don't believe in political polling (1500 people somehow being reflective of 350,000,000?), it might be a good idea to see what a good sample of the reading populace buys, especially since they don't get sales figures for the comics for awhile. The internet provides quick and direct feedback to a title, so why not utilize it to the best advantage?

Bottom line - communication with your audience is important, because it makes the reader feel like that the creator actually cares about their work and what the people who buy the work think.