Gumroad has released a new app that enables you to track your sales.
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Now, more than ever, it’s easy to see what a subscription to Webcomics.com will get you.
Every Friday, you can read the entire Archive Dive post without a subscription. This is a post from the site’s archive that I pull out front again because it still has relevant information you can use today. This is especially nice for newer subscribers (or anyone else) who may have missed it when it originally ran.
Plus, at the beginning of every month, I do a wrap-up that highlights some of the best posts — from the site as well as the private forum — from the preceding month.
If you’re curious about joining, we’ve made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.
Please note: The links below will lead you to content that is “subscription-only” content. Why do I do this? Simple. If you see something that intrigues you and decide to subscribe, you can come back here and use this post to jump right to the post that caught your attention. And once you do that, use the other Best Of posts to drill even deeper into the site!
Patreon’s decline pledges: When Patreon experienced a glitch that resulted in a large number of declined pledges, we alerted you to the situation, and told you what to expect as the problem was being addressed.
Understanding Patreon revenue: A Patreon pledge total is never the amount a creator sees at the end of the month. Even after the (reasonable) amount that gets taken out by Patreon and Swipe (the company that handles the credit-card transactions), there are other variables that affect that final tally.
Convention fan art: Funimation released an official statement in regards to convention fan art. Our analysis reveals what this means for creators exhibiting at cons.
Google Webmaster Tools: Google provides some great tools for better understanding your site and your traffic. We give you a quick start-up tutorial.
Adding a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools: Now that you’ve started using Webmaster Tools, we give you a tutorial on setting up a sitemap.
“On the Spot” Hotseat critique: We finished up the most recent Hot Seat critique series. This one looked at a participant’ site and comic on one, random day.
Gumroad Affiliate links: Gumroad added an affiliate program that you can offer your readers. We give you a head start on implementing it.
Orphan Works Hysteria: A YouTube video and a mass of mailings from some very well-intentioned people spread panic throughout the comics community. Creators were told that legislation in front of Congress was going to change everything about copyright. There was no legislation. And the potential changes being considered are less threatening than we were being told. Katie Lane, a lawyer specializing in creative professionals, took time out from her blog, Work Made for Hire, to give us an educated analysis of the Copyright Office’s planned changes from the perspective of a lawyer.
Studio Tour — Adam Huber: Bug Martini’s Adam Huber give us a guided tour of his studio space.
Webcomics Panels: I’m hosting webcomics panels in Chicago, Columbus (Ohio), and Ft. Lauderdale. If you’d like to participate, please get in touch.
Patreon improvements on the horizon: Patreon has some important improvements planned — and some of them are overdue. We give you an guide to what to expect.
Combatting Patreon’s “ghost pledges”: It’s a big problem or some creators who use Patreon — “ghost pledges” from people who either disappear before their cards get charged or whose cards are declined.
A “Comics Oasis” in Las Vegas? Please: From time to time the rumors about Comic Con International leaving San Diego resurface. One of the often-pitched replacements is Las Vegas. Here’s why that’s never going to happen.
Google, Minus Plus: Google has made some changes in how it pushes Google Plus on users. Many are forecasting this as the death knoll for Google’s “Facebook killer.”
When a “publisher” proves s/he has no grasp on the business model: This site offers continuous warnings about signing contracts with pseudo publishers and cyber “studios.” One of the main reasons is this: It’s easy to set up a Facebook page or a swank Web site, but it’s really difficult to actually run a publishing business. And if you sign on with someone who’s faking it, it’s your business that he or she is going to drag down. This case study is an excellent example of what I’m talking about.
Inside the Cartoonist’s Studio. If you’d like to share a tour of your studio, please follow these instructions.
Should I wait to start a Patreon campaign until I have a bigger readership? (Or can you use Patreon as your audience grows?)
If I can’t update consistently, can I update consistently inconsistent?
We’re well into the second half of the year, believe it or not. Now’s a great time to start planning the rest of your 2015.
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Banner advertising has always been a low-cost/high volume endeavor. (Not counting a blissful period of time before the dot-com bubble burst.) But, as more users access the Web on mobile devices — and, increasingly, through apps — that volume has decreased. (See this NYTimes piece for an excellent analysis of this.)
This has caused online advertisers to launch more and more invasive, aggressive advertising campaigns — video, pop-ups, interstitial ads, and ads that hijack your browser entirely.
And as ads become more of an intrusion, demand for ad-blocking software rises.
Which spurs even more aggressive advertising, and so on.
But, to Web publishers, the damage reaches even further than ad revenue. Tell me if the following story sounds familiar to you:
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You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!
This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. 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.
Today’s post has been very kindly submitted by Mary Cagle:
Something that drives me crazy about a lot of cel shading is that the artist only lines the edge of their figures with shadow.
As a demonstration, here’s a recent panel of my comic shaded in such a way:
While cel shading is about simplifying forms and quickly adding depth to an image, doing it in this way completely ruins the point of shading.
Shadows should, as a minimum, give an impression of:
The problem with shading “on the edge” is that it completely ignores the latter. Whether an object is a sphere or a pyramid, it’s getting the same treatment. What this tells the eye is that all objects in the image have the same depth and shape, like a carved relief.
To help figure out the best way to use cel shading more powerfully, let’s go back to the basics.
Here are a basic sphere and cylinder, rendered realistically. If you’ve been in any art class, you probably had to do these. When they are shaded like this, you get the impression of the form through a subtle use of gradients and highlights. But we don’t always have this luxury in cel shading. We have to pick a single line along which to shade, and that line needs to define the entire form.
Now here’s two versions of the same shapes, cel shaded this time. The left has that on-the-edge shading, while the right is how I might shade these objects. See how much more round the objects on the right look?
If you work in pure black and white, you may have heard to 70/30 rule: a balanced page is often either 30% black or 70% black, with the rest being negative space. I’ll submit that a similar principle works for cel shading: a balanced shadow on a round figure will take up 30 to 70% of said figure. Going far to either side makes it look like your light source is very bright or very dim.
I think a lot of the reason people end up resorting to minimal cel shading is because they aren’t sure what shapes to make the shadows, if not a thin line. After all, character forms can be complex and hard to visualize for shading purposes.
However, I find that it helps to think of characters in terms of simplified forms, much in the same way you might construct a figure when you’re drawing them.
For instance, if we go back to my chosen panel:
On the simplest level, this character is mostly composed of distorted cylinders and a few spheroids. So while it may be hard to figure out how to shade “a face” it’s not too hard to shade a sphere that happens to have a triangle (the nose) on it and some holes in it!
That in mind, this is what the actual shaded panel ended up like:
Of course, there a number of subtleties when it comes to overlapping forms and artistic license, but I’d encourage anyone who’s hiding their shadows on the edge of their figures to try experimenting with this mindset, and let your shadows help bring depth to your world.
This critique series is called the “On The Spot” Hot Seat. I will visit participants’ sites on a random day and talk about how their comic/site/social media is on that day. No archive-diving and no overview. The point is to try to reinforce the importance of making every update significant.
For those of you who are interested in the craft of comics and cartooning, this is your opportunity to talk about the subject in a Real World setting — “workshopping” one another’s comics, if you will.
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One of the core concepts I’ve posted here is to be very wary of “publishers” who offer to do things that you can (and, perhaps should) do yourself. This next story is an excellent reason why I hold this opinion: Often the pseudo-publisher has little or no understanding of the business he or she is engaging in.
An excellent example just blinked across my Facebook feed. It’s from a publisher who is disgusted that Diamond Distributors has rejected his comic.
It should be titled: “I don’t have an adequate understanding (still) of how print distribution works.”
And here’s why:
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News sites are reporting that Google is finally abandoning Google Plus. According to Slate.com:
The company announced in a blog post Monday that it will no longer force people to use a Google Plus account to log in to other, more popular Google services. That includes YouTube, whose users have been howling for years about the Google Plus requirement. Soon they’ll be able to log in with a plain old Google account.
Google’s official blog is more reserved:
When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes.
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Comics Beat has a think piece that wonders aloud if it’s possible to host a mega-comic-con in Las Vegas. We all understand that there already are comic conventions in Sin City. The question is whether it’s possible to host something on the scale of Comics Con International or New York Comic Con there.
Comics Beat says that it could happen.
Don’t bet on it.
And here is the main reason why:
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In dating, “ghosting” has become the term for a situation in which one partner simply “disappears” from the relationship with no explanation. In Patreon, a “ghost patron” signs up to pledge at a certain level — helping himself or herself to the rewards and exclusive content available at that level — and then removes his or her pledge before the end of the month (when the credit cards are charged).
As I’ve reported here, Patreon is making promises to address this problem in its next update. But we don’t have a timeline for that, and while we wait in joyful hope for it to happen, many of us (particularly the NSFW creators) are getting taken advantage of by these ghosts.
So, in the meantime, let’s talk about a few ways to be proactive on Ghost Pledges.
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