Organizing Your Printing and Marketing Files

Alright, let’s get through part 3 of this series on Unknown Comic’s proposal for an efficient file structure for managing your comic creating projects (boy is that a mouthful). This article will cover how you should be organizing your printing and marketing files.

In the last two articles, I’ve covered how you should be organizing your ideas and in-progress files. Then I discussed how you should be working back and forth between rough drafts and your editing stages.

This article will focus on how you should use this file structure to manage your printing and/or distribution of your comic. I’ll also touch on how you’re expected to use the marketing folder throughout this entire process.

So, let’s talk about printing and/or distributing your comic creating projects!

Picking up from where we left off in the last article; once all final draft files have been moved into the Final Draft folder create a Rough Draft folder and move all other files and folders except for the Final Draft folder into it.

Once the final draft for your fully illustrated, inked, colored (maybe), and lettered (maybe again) comic is completed you can then move the Project Name folder to the Awaiting Printing folder.

Quick Note: I have named this file Awaiting Printing, but in case you only intend to be providing digital copies of your comic you can feel free to rename the Awaiting Printing folder to something like Awaiting Distribution. Alternatively, if you’re providing both hard and digital copies of your comic to your readers then you may want to rename the folder to Awaiting Printing and Distribution. In order to remain straightforward, I’ll be continuing the rest of this article assuming that we’ll just be printing it.

After moving the Project Name folder to the Awaiting Printing folder you’ll create the Printing folder and add to it 3 folders and 1 file, see below.

You’re officially in the home stretch! You’re now getting ready to send your comic to get printed or distributed but before you do that you need to prep your files for printing.

This process can depend greatly on the printing or digital distribution company/tool that you’re working with. In order to make sure that there are no surprises you’ll have to do some pre-printing work/formatting.

In the Prep-Printing Work folder, you’ll add a copied (copy and paste) version of your comic’s final draft file and rename it in this format [Printing/Distribution Company Name] - [Month and Day that you are scheduled to send the file to print] - Prep Printing File v#.

In order to make this a little easier let’s assume that we’re printing the comic with Diamond Comics. Let’s plan on sending our comic to get printed on January 30th, 2019. We have also revised the file once. In the end, it should look something like this:

Once you have completed all the prep work for sending your comic to get printed and sent it to the printing company you now must move the prep work files and folder to the Sent For Printing folder. Inside this folder, you’ll create a new folder following a similar format as before but with a small change, it goes like this [Printing/Distribution Company Name] - [Month] [Day], [Year] Printing Files.

Using our previous example it would look like this.

Once you have confirmed that everything has been printed and distributed as it should have you can then move (cut and paste) the folder inside the Sent For Printing folder over to the Printed Files folder.

The reason why I recommend you create this document is so that you can track what stage your comic is expected to be in during its printing and distribution process.

Having this document like this is essential if you’re managing multiple projects at once.

You will want to use this same document, or a separate one, to keep track of whom your comics will be sent to (i.e. comic retailers, conventions, book signings, exclusive samples for influencers, etc).

The format you choose for this document is up to you to decide upon.

This is where things step away from the rest of the of the other files.

The Marketing and Distribution folder works both independently and in conjunction with the rest of the other folders you’ve worked with so far. The files and folders you’ll store here can vary greatly on the comic creator or publishing house.

Now, some examples of what you might end up storing in this folder are Analytical Reports (from Google Analytics or Tag Manager, Social Media, etc), Promotional Materials, List of Comic Retailers, List of Comic Readers, List of Influencers, etc.

You may be wondering why I’m even discussing the Marketing and Distribution folder in an article about managing your comic creating projects. Well, this is because in order to make any significant headway in the success of any comic you need to promote your work. The best way to promote your work is to know ahead of time what you want to promote.

You will need a Promotional Materials folder. In this folder, you will organize and prepare promotional materials for your comic creating project at any stage. Even in starting from the Ideas folder (see my article on Marketing Your Comic Before Its Design).

Do you remember the pitches you wrote along the way? You can definitely use them to promote your work via tweets or Facebook posts. You can even add them into a poster and upload them on other social media sites to build up the hype.

Do you remember your preliminary sketches, storyboards, or maybe some cool pictures or videos of you inking your work? You bet you can be using any and all of that to promote your developing project.

One thing you can definitely be taking advantage of in the Marketing and Distribution folder is by creating a promotional material package for individual comic creating projects.

In order to make sure that you remain consistent throughout each and every one of your projects I recommend you develop a checklist for promotional materials. Make sure that these are things that you feel comfortable producing. This checklist can vary between projects. And you should always have at least a minimum amount of promotional materials for any projects. So consider creating a template checklist that you can easily copy and paste for new projects. Feel free to add as many options for promotional materials for the checklist and remove them as necessary for individual projects.

I personally believe that promotional materials for a comic should start getting developed as soon as a decent pitch for an idea has been written up. This way you can get people excited for an idea well before any illustrations are done.

This checklist should be copied over to any and all folders that require marketing material’s developed for them. As an example, if you wanted to make a promotional poster to be developed as soon as a decent pitch has been written up you can copy this checklist over to the Pitches folder. This way, if there are multiple team members (one writing the pitch and one assigned with developing the posters) then individuals would be aware that there needs to be some form of communication.

The individuals responsible for developing promotional materials would then make sure that they go to the Promotional Materials folder and find or create the Developing Projects folder. Inside this folder, they would find or create the Project Name - Promotional Materials folder.

This is where they could store any promotional files related to any project. The project’s promotional material checklists should also be inside this folder. It should be managed by the individual responsible for managing the development of promotional materials.

You will want the checklist included in every folder that will be influential to the promotional material development process because everyone should be aware that they need to do more than produce a comic.

Illustrators may need to set up cameras to take photos of their in-progress work or to take videos. Someone will have to edit those videos to be posted on various websites (i.,e. the publishing house’s or comic’s website, social media, etc).

And there you have it! I have concluded my proposal for an efficient file structure for managing your comic creating process. I’ve even gone as far as to include a quick guide for how to manage the production of promotional materials for comics with this file structure.

What did you think of my proposed file structure? Do you see any holes in it? If you have any feedback please leave a comment below!