Promotional Information

Budget: A portion of $4,300.00 marketing and publicity budget. Galleys: PDF galleys are available. National Advertising: Prominent, year-round advertising in The Comics Reporter, one of the most visited comics-focused websites. National Print/Online Media Campaign: We work tirelessly to market and promote our titles; we have a large media and opinion maker contact list, to which we send our press releases and select review copies. We also have a smaller selection of reviewers who receive hard copies of our titles. This has resulted in reviews, interviews and coverage in a variety of media outlets including Avoid the Future, Boing Boing, The Chicago Tribune, Comic Book Resources, The Comics Beat, The Comics Journal, The Comics Reporter, The Globe and Mail, Newsarama, Paste Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Quill and Quire, The National Post, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, VICE Magazine, The Washington Post and many more. Online/Social Media Campaign: We have a strong presence on the Internet with our recently redesigned website (koyamapress.com with over 4,000 unique visits per month), Facebook (facebook.com/KoyamaPress with over 5,810 likes), Twitter (@AnnieKoyama with over 10,500 followers), Flickr (flickr.com/photos/koyamapress), and Tumblr (koyamapress.tumblr.com with over 16,178 followers) pages. Promotion on the Author's Website: GG has established a strong following online. This is demonstrated by their website (ohgigue.com), their Tumblr (blog.ohgigue.com) and their Twitter (@ohgigue). General Tour Info: Koyama Press and GG will be launching I'm Not Here a at Small Press Expo (SPX) in September 2017. SPX was created in 1994 to promote artists and publishers who produce independent comics. The book will also have a presence at Tokyo International Comics Festival, Japan's preeminent independent comics festival. Publicity and Promotion in Conjunction with the Author's Speaking Engagements: Koyama Press has a number of branded items including tote bags, notebooks, buttons, postcards, stickers, and activity books that accompany artists at shows and events. These include items utilizing the art from the book itself.

About the Author

GG lives and works in the small Canadian prairie city where she grew up during the 1980s. In this pre-Internet era, isolated geographically and culturally, drawing and making up stories was the means to connect to something more. It was romantic and lonely. In 2016 she was included in The Best American Comics edited by Roz Chast.

Reviews

"GG's I'm Not Here is an atmospheric, intimate graphic novel that takes a turn for the surreal as it follows an unnamed young woman at a personal crossroads." -- Oliver Sava, A.V. Club

"The novel is one of the richest and gently disturbing I've read in recent years." -- Chris Gavaler, PopMatters "The immediacy of I'm Not Here is undeniably pertinent-almost like we are going to the source of it all or something. The pain depicted in this book feels real as opposed to metaphorical or situational to me." -- Caleb Orecchio, Comics Workbook "The only way to engage with I'm Not Here is to take it as it comes, to sit with it, to listen to it speak. Giving yourself so totally over to a text may seem difficult, but it's also commensurably rewarding." -- Shea Hennum, The A.V. Club "Our protagonist's indecision, her feeling of being trapped, the dream-logic of her escape; I'm Not Here is a book that represents the current state of family in the 21st century and the power relationships that convolute it." -- Alex Hoffman, Sequential State "I'm Not Here is probably my favourite work by GG so far and in elevating ambiguity and mood over a more conventional narrative approach, it is her boldest." -- Kawai Shen, Cute Juice Comics "Art and story pair perfectly in this dreamily illustrated exploration of love, responsibility, and disappointment as they're applied to our families and ourselves." -- Annie Bostrom, Booklist "I'm Not Here is a haunting tale of the loneliness and isolation that comes with family responsibility. A quiet, powerful book." -- Michael Melgaard, The National Post "GG's beautiful illustrations underscore the quiet narrator's deep sadness and hope, as she contemplates elder care, Other-ness and art." -- CBC Books "GG's book is quiet, sad and often still, but not devoid of hope." -- Tom Baker, Broken Frontier "Small-town anomie has rarely been as haunting as in this spooky mediation on loneliness and surveillance by Canadian artist GG." -- Publishers Weekly, 20 December 2017 "Compositionally, I'm Not Here is a masterpiece. Every panel is a stunning image in its own right, and gg's expert knowledge of the human figure gives every character weight and life. Students of storytelling would do well to study this book, and the careful choices gg's made on every page." -- Carta Monir, The Comics Journal "I'm Not Here, rendered in an opaque visual style that looks almost rotoscoped, is an attempt to grasp the world before it fades." -- Hayden Bennett, Art in America "The atmospheric comics of Canadian cartoonist GG have long rung the Twin Peaks/Lynchian dreamscape bell that hangs in my heart." -- Suzette Smith, The Portland Mercury "[I'm Not Here] shows [GG's] deft hand at combining a spare, straightforward narrative with nuanced drawings, enveloping her readers in a beguiling atmosphere of understated yearning and melancholy." -- Roby Kirby, PEN America "This is the kind of book that reveals itself to the reader slowly, and over multiple attempts; but once it does, it is a treasure trove of ideas related to family, identity, duty and ethics." -- Rob Clough, High-Low "I'm Not Here is a starkly beautiful graphic novel about yearning, home, and escape." -- Lauren Kirshner, Room, issue 41.2 "GG has a signature style utterly unique, at least in Canadian indie comics: highly cinematic and influenced by graphic design's attention to the placement of shapes and use of negative space and shadows within each frame, such that the images become at once minimal and hyper-realistic." -- Candida Rifkind, Sequential