Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It’s time to do a little webcomics planning.
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If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
Here’s a nifty trick to get your most best-performing ads — the ones with the highest click-through rates — in front of your readers’ eyes first. According to Google, this has a noticable affect on ad revenue.
For more information on optimizing ad impressions, click here.
With just under two weeks before nomination ballots are due, the Executive Committees of the Harvey Awards and the Baltimore Comic-Con want to ensure all comics professionals have taken the opportunity to submit their recommendations for the final Harvey Awards ballot.
As a webcartoonist, you are eligible to participate in the nomination process:
The Harvey Awards may be voted on exclusively by Comic-Book creators, those who write, draw, ink, color, letter, design, edit, or are otherwise professionally involved in the creative aspect of comics, online or in print.
And, if you are so inclined, you may submit Webcomics.com under Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation (Any Media That Contributes to the Understanding of Comics as an Artform).
We webcartoonists rely heavily on social-media. We use it to promote our comics, our Kickstarters, our Patreons and ourselves. It’s how we talk to current readers, and its how we try to entice new ones. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, or — heaven help us — Google Plus… you’ll find a webcartoonist there telling you about his or her new comic.
And that’s where we go wrong.
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Writing is the bedrock of good comics. Readers will forgive a surprising amount of artistic “defects” if the writing is superb. It rarely works the other way around. So it’s important to identify some common writing pitfalls — and discuss ways to avoid them entirely. In hosting critiques — both here and with my Sequential Art students at Hussian College, I see many of these mistakes committed repeatedly. Here are five most prominent.
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This is the first in a series of critiques that focuses on the creator’s Patreon outreach. Our goal is to try to workshop some best practices and strategies that work. I’m going to open the discussion with my opinions. Then members are welcomed to join in the conversation.
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SumoMe is a plug-in that gets a lot of promotion on WordPress sites. It’s been mentioned on this site once or twice, so I installed it on Evil-Inc.com to test drive it. They promise to improve your site in all sorts of ways — e-mail-list development, traffic, social-sharing, and so forth. Did they deliver? Here’s what I found.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.
You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!
If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
Q: I’m sure this is a bigger question than I think it is, but I started my webcomic in January and I think I’m doing okay with pageviews (I only update twice a week) but is there an easy number to point to to say, “At this point, you are successful?” Another webcomic friend of mine said (he heard) that at 1000 pageviews a day, you can quit your day job. I’m thinking this isn’t true, since that’s about where I’m at now. And no money, not that I’ve tried yet.
That’s because success in comics isn’t only about Web traffic. It’s about Community Building and optimizing revenue streams, merchandising wisely, and a lot of other factors. If it was about simply directing traffic to your site, anybody could be successful. But it’s not. It’s about cultivating a readership that wants to support what you’re doing.
Could a webcartoonist generating 1000 daily pageviews make quit-your-day-job money? Sure, but those readers would have to have an almost religious level of dedication.
Let me put it in perspective for you. I’ve done a six-day-a-week comic since 2000. At last count, I’ve created more than 5,000 strips, panels and comic-pages. I crossed the one-thousand-daily-pageviews benchmark when I was doing Greystone Inn — somewhere around 2001 or 2002.
I quit my day job.
In 2012. Twelve years after I started.
You’ve been doing a once-a-week comic since January. You haven’t even outlasted a hockey season. You shouldn’t be looking for quit-your-day-job benchmarks. You should be trying to figure out how to convert to a three-time a week update schedule and see if you can do that with consistent quality/frequency for a year or so.
Because let me tell you from experience: Quitting your day job isn’t the finish line, it’s the starter’s pistol. Once you make that move, you’ll have to work harder than ever — or you’ll find yourself back at a day job. And it sounds all “yeah, but it’s the work that I love” and all, but that’s small potatoes when your ad revenue takes an unexpected dip, you can’t figure out why, and you were counting on that money to pay the mortgage.
I know. You still want to take your comic to the next level. I get it. OK, here are two things you can do right now to improve your comic’s performance on the Web.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
Read the “How To Make Webcomics” book. Read Dave’s chapter on Community Building. Then read it again. (Seriously.) And then ask yourself who your Community is. And start making plans to make your site a way that this particular Community uses to express their uniqueness to the outside world… the same way gamers flock to Penny Arcade. Right now you have a generic webcomic site. Make it a place that your Community gathers. That means focusing the topics on your blog a little tighter, too. Everything you do on that site has to reinforce your brand.
WEB SITE DESIGN
If you’re using a default Comic Press-for-WordPress set-up, you’re probably in need of some Web design improvement. Here’s a checklist:
TIME MANAGEMENT
And you might as well learn time management now because when you quit your day job, this is going to become crucial. Remove the unimportant things from your life that keep you from your personal goals. Things like your family? That’s Priority One-level stuff. Watching TV probably isn’t. Same for Facebook (except in using its viral-marketing capabilities in self-promotion). Video games? Out (unless you’re doing a Penny-Arcade-style strip, of course). Everything that’s not a top priority gets the ax. The day job? That’s the last thing you get to cut. And if you can’t master that other stuff, it won’t stay cut for long.
In preparing the Hot Seat reviews of participating members’ Patreon campaigns, I’ve seen a common error in which the creator confuses a Kickstarter reward with a Patreon reward. For example, he or she might promise a copy of an upcoming book to Patreon backers once that book is successfully Kickstarted. Not only am I going to argue that it’s not necessary, but it’s downright counterproductive — for three reasons.
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The new Webcomics.com Poll asks — What are your update days?
I like the idea of polling for this information. Obviously everyone is posting their work on the days that they find most advantageous, but what are those days supposed to be? And do we agree on what those days are?
As always, you’re invited to participate in the poll and then hit the Comments to elaborate!
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