I’m not a tattoo guy.
Nothing against them, for sure. But I’ve just never had the desire to take a particular symbol, image or phrase and place it permanently on my skin for life.
The closest I came was considering getting a wedding band tattooed on my ring finger… but that was mostly the result of losing my ring at the beach a few times over the years!
But as a publisher, one thing I can tell you is that you KNOW a property has legs when you have a fan base that’s willing to tattoo it on their bodies!
This month, our children’s book brand C is for Cthulhu is celebrating turning 10 years old with a big launch on Kickstarter. Our flagship book, C is for Cthulhu: The Lovecraft Alphabet Book, which was released in 2014, inspired a fan to do this:
It took us a while, but we should have known that if fans were willing to get tattoos of the images in the book, making plush toys of those images would also do quite well.
Likewise, we really knew we had a big hit on our hand with SINK, the crime horror series from John Lees & Alex Cormack, when multiple fans started sharing pics of their SINK tattoos!
Even John was gob smacked to discover his and Alex Cormack’s co-creation was deemed INK worthy! Surveys are coming in for the latest SINK: Monsters campaign, and it should be no surprise that covers with Mr. Dig on them are proving the most popular.
Again, as a publisher, whenever you have a hit, you always think about reverse engineering it so that the next thing you do can be as successful or more. But I don’t know that there’s a formula for coming up with a book that connects with readers in a way that they’re willing to commit it to permanent ink on their bodies.
All I know is that when they DO… that’s a property you should double, triple and quadruple down on for the long haul.