Some neat commentary from Tom about his thoughts on Digital Distribution, as well as a few questions about WAW+P from creators in general, prompts us to post a little about our new mission statement. In the top corner of the site you might have seen this appear in the last few days;
We promote the work of small press comic artists and writers in Britain at fairs, festivals, club nights and workshops, alongside our biannual Paper Science anthology.
We’ve wanted to streamline What We’re About for a while now, now least because we’ve all got a lot of other projects on besides WAW+P. We’ve tried a lot of things since relaunching at Thought Bubble last year, lots of which have been very successful, but they haven’t always felt satisfying. We need something specific to measure success by, and we need to accept that if we aren’t promoting new work and/or to new audiences then we probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Firstly, we aren’t really here to make money for our creators. That’s why Paper Science will always be as cheap as we can possibly make it. Equally we’ve done a couple of lucrative corporate gigs, but they haven’t always felt like ‘comics outreach’, and while we’re happy to point people in the right direction of suitable creators, we’re unlikely to be doing much corporate stuff the other side of the summer. We’ve done pretty well at selling other people’s work too, but it’s not something we really feel we can do alongside the (still embargoed) festival appearances we’ll be making, and it takes a fair bit of time to keep on top of all that. It’s not what we want to be doing, so we’re winding that down.
As much as we had a fabulous time at Modern Romance it didn’t do much to promote comic book art. Meanwhile Drop In + Draw beforehand really did, and our DI+D day in Orbital Comics was actually a really fabulous way of combining the social and the promotional.
So, what will we be doing? More events (including a Drop In + Draw or “We Are Words + Pictures presents…” session every other month, rolling guest creators and one-off collaborations together), more events in partnership with other groups, more pitches for next year’s festivals and more Paper Science. That’s pretty much what we’re doing now, but as Newspaper Club would agree, sometimes just writing it down in public feels better.
GJohnson
June 7, 2010
I’ll definitely be looking forward to more WAW+P events, since the DI+D at Orbital was great fun, and meeting people there was interesting.
As for the mission statement, it’s definitely something that needs doing, and the things you have done (such as Paper Science) seem to be working, so all I can say is well done and good luck!