Mosaic Tile

People are terrible at predicting hedonistic impact, its true. I concede that point. Well made. But when I was checking stocks of FOWP today, which is slowly but surely selling, I stood back and took note of one particularly pressing example of overoptimistic hedonistic impact.
If you asked any artist, 'would you like to paint one of the tiles in our huge mosaic?' okay they would probably leap at the chance such are the whores known as artists. But would they then estimate that anyone would notice their tile amidst a sea of similar and perhaps even more interesting tiles? They would hopefully concede that people just don't have the physical capacity to notice so much detail amongst detail. They may notice something, but hey, there's pretty much no guaruntee they will notice yours.

Which isn't to say, having one humble zine title amidst a shelf full of humble zine titles is a waste of time, I would point out that fowp is slowly but surely selling, I've seen 5 copies go in a week, and 5 copies take two months to sell.
Books sell, and bookstores exemplify the mosaic dilemma.
The point though is that the sheer audacity to see an overcrowded shelf and yell 'mine too' would indicate that it takes perhaps in most cases a level of self belief not grounded in any reality.

I for example, anticipated selling 50 copies in 2 months, not as it were 5 months... which when I think about it, doesn't sound that bad.
But it does seem painfully slow and painful relative to my expectations that fowp would run out the door.
I could almost, almost, create new comics as fast as I can sell them, instead. Which in a way is good.

I raise all these points though, because it just reminds me of the one, if no other thing I learned from my marketing degree: positioning.

Its all about getting a position, be it on the shelf or in consumers minds. I am ever more acutely aware that sooner or later, you have to show up for the big dance. Having read as many comics now over the past year as I have, I know intuitively I have more talent at least in writing than many of the established writers. Yet they have the position, the opportunity to actually get their stuff out there.

It reaffirms that beyond some initial mysterious impetus (usually hard work) big brands, big names etc. are big because they are big. Success and failure compounds.

Being just another colourful tile in a mosaic often gets lost in the fact that you are colourful. But you want to be the iris stone in the eye on the face because that's what people look at. That in essence is positioning.