ABSTRACT

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.

Centred 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