3. Who Am I? Igor Goldkind From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Born April 20, 1960 (1960-04-20) (age 48) Lansing, Michigan Nationality American Area(s) Writer, Technologist Igor Goldkind (born April 20, 1960) was a marketing consultant who worked for a number of publishers, before moving into writing comics. He currently works in semantic web development and web-based marketing. Igor Goldkind worked first for Titan Books in the 1980's and then for Egmont Fleetway in the 1990's as a marketing consultant and became well known for marketing the graphic novel publishing format within the book trade and mainstream press. Igor Goldkind was the marketing consultant who worked at Titan and moved to the IPC Youth Group and is generally credited with popularizing the term "graphic novel" as a way to help sell the trade paperbacks they were publishing. He admits that he "stole the term outright from Will Eisner" and his contribution was to "take the badge (today it's called a 'brand') and explain it, contextualise it and sell it convincingly enough so that bookshop keepers, book distributors and the book trade would accept a new category of 'spine-fiction' on their bookshelves." Goldkind left mainstream comics industry to set up on of the first digital media companies in the UK, Artemis Communications developing some of the early publishing websites for Oxford University Press and Usborne Books, among others.
