Monday, August 8, 2011

News: eBay Offerings

During the early days of the d20/STL era, I used to correspond quite often with a fellow named Mike Whithead, who wrote a game called Deathstalkers. He gave me a lot of advice regarding my zine at the time - Scrollworks. One of the things he suggested was to make copies of the zine available on eBay. His theory was that eBay's large audience might expose the zine to a new group of readers - readers who may not normally follow web forums. (At the time Scrollworks was promoted primarily through EN World.)

    Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to list Loviatar on eBay. I was very glad that I did. The first issue that sold was purchased by a reader from the days of Scrollworks. It's great to know that there are fans of that zine still excited about home-made periodicals. I really hope that eBay becomes a source of new zine enthusiasts.

8 comments:

  1. That is exciting stuff. Cool beaners. There's Etsy too. Though I'm not sure if that would work, but it's pretty cheap to post an item for sale.

    Congrats on doing well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Huh, clever idea. Glad it worked out for you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, you two. When it comes to a fanzine, the idea of "selling" and "promoting" is an odd thing for me to engage in. It feels incongruent with the process of creating and sharing. However, the only way to build an active, participatory group of readers is to promote and distribute copies.

    Weird.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Whisk: I see that there are other zines for sale on Etsy. I think I'll give it a shot! :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Awesome! I would never have thought of doing that.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Very cool. I'm glad that's working!

    - Ark

    ReplyDelete