Keenspot Kerfluffle UPDATED
on December 20th, 2009FYI: I know none of these people, and have no personal involvement in this issue. Just pointing you to the info, in part, to show that publishing problems aren’t limited to print.
Keenspot is a webcomics portal that bills itself as “…the largest publisher of exclusive webcomics!” They came to my attention recently when a Keenspot member suggested I try signing on. I decided to stay independent long ago, but thanks.
Today, the Keenspot website posted the following notice:
ANNOUNCEMENT:Keenspot no longer accepting new webcomic submissions.
Posted By Chris Crosby at 12/19/2009 12:21:00 PM
Please note that Keenspot is no longer accepting new webcomic submissions, and has no plans to invite new members to Keenspot. Thank you for your interest.
Two days ago, the Keenspot creator of Sorcery 101 was fired. She posted the following notice:
Why did they fire me? I asked that question as well and got the response “We have multiple reasons.” None of which they will tell me. It happened right after Scott Kurtz’s ustream where I talked said Keenspot was only good for the newsboxes (which is true and I’m not the only person on Keenspot who’s said that) and I’d leave once the newsboxes stopped being useful. Because they are EXTREMELY unprofessional.
Keenspot is a small company with no staff to speak of outside of the owners (i.e. no accountant on staff), and because of that it generally takes us longer than we would like to produce exact revenue calculations, whether they be from book distributors or the many ad networks and advertisers we work with daily. However, we have always offered Keenspot members an advance payment. and have never refused an advance to a Keenspot member who asks, whether they’re owed money or not.
A somewhat less measured response:
Almost everything that Kell, Kurtz and Straub said were lies, and Kurtz almost certainly wrote most of what Kell said for her. And when they’re not lying, they’re insinuating other lies, like that Keenspot would conceivably take down her site out of spite, when they’ve never once done that to the dozens of other Keenspot members who were fired or left, most of which left under far worse terms than this situation.
Oh, dear.
If you are interested in webcomics as a publishing vehicle and revenue stream, you might want to take the time to go through these posts and the accompanying comment threads.
UPDATE: Very interesting overview with lots of additional information at FLEEN.
eh, I dunno. Too many anonycomments makes it look like “sockpuppets for the defense”. There’s more to this than OMG!Publisheroppressorz. Seems more like grudgewank to me. Or a fox/grapes thing. *shrug*
(disclaimer: not involved either, except I read a couple of the comics, some apparently by the parties involved, but since I just discovered this, it’s not something I have an emotional investment in.)
My primary interest in posting this is to show that all is not gumdrops and sugar cookies on the web. Too many people romanticize it as the great opportunity for the disenfranchised, folks kept out of print by The Gatekeepers.
OK, there is a lot to be said for that viewpoint. But there are also many creators who went flouncity flounce away from print publishing, announced big webcomics plans, and woke up one day to realize they could not give their work away. The low traffic on the sites of some very well-known people gave me a fright when I decided to go web. Those folks can’t be making any money. At all. I had NO CLUE when I started that I would be able to attract enough readers to make it worth while.
It’s not rocket science to dash over to site ranking services and see who is getting the traffic and who is not. It’s kind of shocking.
The fact that my book – which has been around for ages and pirated to death – is able to bring in traffic is kind of a miracle.
I really appreciate that people get the idea that coming directly to my site helps finance my future work. No financing, no future work. It’s that simple.
OK, I just made this all about me. Sorry, I ramble.
Hey, it’s your blog! Ramble=okay
I get your purpose now; I was getting the impression this was going into the “bad publisher” file. I thought that was jumping the gun a little. But it’s not about that, so, moot point
As I research the web comic situation for when I get my own factory up and running, I’m still debating/waffling the someone else hosting vs self hosting. It depends on what I want to accomplish with it, I guess.
It is interesting to watch this situation unfold, from my POV, only from the perspective that Keenspot is no longer accepting submissions. It could just be that they’re overstretched and need to grow their current group before they expand anymore. Or it could be something else. And it might be interesting to see what other hosts do this next year.
Yeah, if I was absolutely sure what was going on, I’d pop this under the Very Bad Publishers Tab. But I am too far removed from it to know the particulars. People can read and make up their own minds.
That said: fired right before Christmas. Ow.
I’ll probably give it a more thorough read later.
Then again, with our internet connection woes, maybe not. Had to scrape snow off the satellite this morning.
Well, the hosted versus self-hosting question ends up running parallel to (in print) company versus self publishing and distribution.
Host it yourself means you have greater control over it, the “space” is all your own to use as you desire. You do have to do all the web-work yourself (or your designated webmaster), of course. But hosted means you don’t have to do the maintainence on site presentation, you just have to get your comic up. And a hosted location *MIGHT* get you more casual attention of passers-by.
You just have to decide what will work for you.
As for this specific situation… I’ll play wait-and-see, as I have no horse in the race.
Good points.
I looked at some of the sites, and there is so much material on them, I don’t know how anything stands out. I’m kind of intimidated by the sheer volume of offerings.
OK, I just made this all about me.
Uhm, not to be disagreeable, but you actually didn’t. You helped put the issues in context using your knowledge and experience. I found your remarks quite illuminating. So what else is new?
By the way, please pardon my ignorance, but is there ever an advantage to let someone else publish your webcomic? With print publishing, the advantages are obvious: a good publisher brings money, marketing resources, publishing expertise, and more to the table. Whereas anyone who can afford a web hosting account can publish a webcomic. Or am I missing something? (That’s not a rhetorical question.)
Contracts differ from company to company.
I am signed on for advertising with Comicspace, but am independently hosted. Comicspace gets to advertise on my site, and they arrange advertising for me, for a percentage of the take. In exchange, they circulate A Distant Soil ads on their network.
I really don’t know what some of the other sites offer, but I do know they have site templates and cover hosting costs.
I pay all of my own expenses, but have more autonomy and can accept other’s ads if I wish. If things went sour with ComicSpace, I could easily walk with no fear of losing the ability to get advertising elsewhere, and they have absolutely no rights to my work. I know where to get ads and how to set up accounts.
But I have no quarrel with ComicSpace and appreciate the ads. They’ve been decent to me.
I would guess the set up costs and need to be a part of a community which would circulate ads to other webcomics readers would be attractive to many people starting out. I really don’t know what other people’s contracts say, but a few have been offered to me, and I was not impressed.
I did a good deal of research before deciding to go this route and narrowly missed making some very bad deals. I smelled a rat at Wowio, for example, and never signed the contract. Shortly thereafter, there was some kind of meltdown there.
I spent a lot of time studying webcomics publishing before I took the plunge. I listened to some gurus, and watched some other creators very carefully.
Several creators who made much of a muchness about going web have not done well at all, even though they signed on with comics hosting companies.
I think some of them assumed that they would put their stuff out there and they would just be so popular immediately that the money would roll in. They’d be able to get subscribers and donations, tra-la.
That’s just not the way it works. It takes a good year of regular posting to get it rolling. Remember how I originally announced I would start posting three times a week? I changed my mind right away and went to five times a week. Lots of material and steady posting is key. If I hadn’t built up a huge inventory in advance, I’d be dead already.
Having someone else cover your up-front costs and give you some advertising would obviously be attractive to some people. I simply don’t know what other carrots these companies offer.
If you are not a name creator and don’t have a way to post a lot of pages on a steady basis, and some bucks for advertising, you’re going to have a VERY hard time building an audience.
Figure anyone not ranking at the 500,000 mark on Alexa is not getting more than a few hundred readers a day. To make money on advertising, you’ve got to get those page hits. The more page views, the more you make on advertising.
If you have 500 regular readers, and the average page views per reader per day is only 2 pages, you are screwed. Some sites you might think must have thousands and thousands of readers simply don’t. One website I looked up which boasts 3500 unique readers PER DAY (this they say right there on their site,) barely has 10% that amount per day. And because they are tied into Project Wonderful (which tends to show higher unique hits counts, though page views are pretty close to the mark,) there’s only so much fibbing they can do about their numbers. They average only about 2,000 views per day, and a core audience of only 2,000 per MONTH. there is no way that site is making any money.
Just for fun, run over to some site ranking websites like Alexa and type in your faves. EDIT: yes, I know Alexa is not 100% accurate. I use several stat ranking sites and Project Wonderful numbers and cross compare several different site rankings. I have been watching trends on some of them for months.
You’d be surprised who is doing well and who isn’t.
I always said self publishing was not for everybody, and so is making a webcomic, which is just another form of self publishing. I’m no web publishing guru and am reluctant to give any advice about it.
But it’s obvious that some people who have self discipline problems are not going to be any better off web publishing themselves. And some people are underfunded, and they simply don’t have the money to go forward, either with print or web. And some people simply don’t have the free time to continue making comics that bring in no revenue. And some people simply produce work that few people want to read, even for free.
I did look up the traffic of a couple of the hosting companies that made me an offer: my site alone has 10% of the traffic of one of those sites, which must host at least 100 comics.
Colleen, thank you for a very thoughtful and educational response.