1st Edition
Entrepreneurial Cosplay Creating Identity, Building Identity, Brand and Business Acumen
Entrepreneurial Cosplay takes a comprehensive and insightful look at the business of cosplay, exploring the ways that artists and fans engage in entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial practices to gain personal and professional success.
Centered around the concept of entrepreneurship and the newly emerging concept of intrapreneurship – using entrepreneurial principles to enhance or further an existing concept, organization or product – the book showcases the ways in which cosplayers create new ideas, new ways of working and new ways of doing things, exploiting their knowledge to create new opportunities. By analyzing the numerous motivations driving cosplay behavior (self-expression, external recognition and financial gain), this volume provides a unique view of current cosplay practice and its relationship to economic activity.
Offering important insight into this emerging area, this book will be of interest to scholars seeking to learn how entrepreneurial and economic models may be used to understand the emerging field of cosplay studies, as well as students and scholars working in the fields of Entrepreneurship, Business, Fan Studies, Visual Art Studies and Gender Studies.
Introduction
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols, Dave Tomczyk and Amy C. Lewis
Part 1: Ideas, Innovation, and Failure
Chapter 1- Entrepreneurial Cosplay: Success Maximization, Business Ownership, and the Entrepreneurial Mentality
Dave Tomczyk
Chapter 2- Third Party Content Creators in eSport
Christopher McCutcheon, Michael Hitchens, Mitchell McEwan
Chapter 3- Entrepreneurial Cosplay: Women and Crossplay in Mexico
Mitzi Ariana Pérez Trejo
Part 2: Intrapraneurship
Chapter 4- Reign in Your Baloney Pony: Managing Sexual Taboo for Success
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
Chapter 5- Nerds and Copyright
Matthew Mangum
Chapter 6- Threat of Familiar Faces: Cosplay Outside of Conventions
Luxx Mishou
Chapter 7- Violence against Women in The Witcher and Game of Thrones
Madison Sears & Mary Ingram-Waters
Chapter 8- Cosplay through a Lens of Family Business
D'Lisa N. McKee
Part 3: (Self)-Branding
Chapter 9- Marketing, Personal Branding, and Positioning: Cosplay: Personal Branding … on Steroids!
Ruby Daniels
Chapter 10- Child Cosplayers: Embodying Potentialities
Sara Austin
Chapter 11- Heroic Returns on Investment: Economic Considerations of Cosplay in the United States
Erin Kenny
Chapter 12-Managing Cosplay Identities: For love or money?
Amy C. Lewis
Biography
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols is a professor of Spanish and gender studies at Drury University. Her research covers international beauty work, cosplay and popular culture. She is a long-time cosplayer and blogs at www.cosplaymom.com.
Amy C. Lewis is a professor of management and associate dean of business at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. Her research interests involve social identity, motivated cognition and stigma. She also enjoys cosplaying, primarily focusing on the Star Trek fandom.
Dave Tomcyzk is an associate professor of entrepreneurship and game design at Quinnipiac University. His research covers unusual businesses, creativity and how to teach entrepreneurship. His first board game, Catharsis, was published by his company Cyber Wizard Games in 2022.
