The State of Colleen’s Industry Part II
on January 22nd, 2011The birdies are tweeting at me. It is a very nice day.
Barry Lyga and my publisher went over the art for the GN and I have a (thankfully) easy list of little changes to make. The book is being lettered by Tom Orzechowski and Lois Buhalis, which is a great relief. Houghton Mifflin made the very wise decision to go with known comic book industry quantities for the nuts and bolts of this book. Many mainstream book industry graphic novels skimp on the basics. I’m unable to read some of these GN’s without cringing.
This month has been my most productive since 2006. I am much more confident about my drawing, and have learned a great deal about digital art. While Gone to Amerikay and Stealth Tribes are analog works, I plan to keep in practice with digital art over the next few months. I forget digital tricks easily.
As I mentioned before, I went through a dry period for several years, due to a health-related issue and serious personal matters. I also entertained the idea of chucking art for a living and made the rounds of academia to scope out the possibility of getting a degree in Asian studies or law. The $150,000 bill was a bit daunting. Even though I was able to get accepted into some very good schools, I decided I’d better stick with art as vocation and went to digital design school instead. So, most of the latter part of 2006-2007 saw me back in the classroom.
Which kind of sucked except for being introduced to Lynda.com, a terrific online resource for digital art classes that made art school redundant. And it’s a lot cheaper than art school.
The bad thing about taking yourself off the pro market for a year is getting back on the art job circuit is tricky as hell. You have to plan gigs months in advance, and I got a string of low-paying, low satisfaction gigs. For months and months. Combined with the weird cognitive problems I experienced (I called it the Grey Fog, which turned out to be due to a minor chemical imbalance easily fixed with an over-the-counter nutritional supplement) I had a series of bummer professional years, both financially and creatively.
Fortunately, things started to turn around in 2009, and by 2010 I was back in the saddle.
My work output, which had dropped to a meager 120 pages or so per year for several years in a row, shot to over 200 pages in 2010.
Since a lot of my work from 2006-2008 includes things like trading card art and conceptual design, it’s hard to make an exact comparison with comic book page output. But I track my work output on a calendar, and I saw months there where I routinely produced less than ten pages of art per month. I knew I was sick, but nothing illustrates the difference between being sick in the body and sick in the head like my work output. Even though I fought off a nasty respiratory infection over the last month, I sat up in bed and produced more finished art in a week than I did over the entirety of September 2007.
I don’t know if there is any useful takeaway from this for all you kids out there, except to say if you feel down for a protracted period of time, don’t hesitate to see a doctor. I hesitated and languished like Camille. And didn’t produce much art. I had considerable savings, which drained away. When I found out the bulk of the problem was a minor issue it made me want to kick myself. Of course, when you have no motivation, you don’t even feel motivated to go to a doctor to find out why you have no motivation. So, vicious cycle.
In 2009, I produced 128 pages of finished art. I did not parse that to show pencils, inks, paintings and the like.
Last year, I produced 162 pages of pencils/layouts, 148 pages of inks, and 18 paintings (analog and digital). I also did character design work and, of course, spent a lot of time on creator rights activism activities. As some of you may know, I considered taking a full-time job in Washington DC but decided against it.
This year, I will finish another 110 pages of inks, most of them between now and May. Also, about 30 pages of pencils. I will paint a 64 page graphic novel, and write the adaptation from the original short story. And I will produce more A Distant Soil comics for Image, and some original paintings for the website.
I will also spend a month out of the country at the end of the year.
I will have completed four original graphic novels this year, and I have enough money in the kitty to finance those two A Distant Soil comics.
Here is a look at my web traffic. And here’s hoping this improvement continues.
So I was reading this post and noticed (over on the right under “Our Fine Sponsors”) that you’re sponsoring yourself. The left ad is for the Girl Genius novel and the right is for A Distant Soil. Is it supposed to be like that? I’ve never done that ad thing, either on my blog to make money or as an advertiser to draw visitors, but it seems a bit counterproductive for you to have an ad for your own site on your site. Is that a glitch? Hopefully you’re not paying for it if so. :/
Angie
Thanks for asking, Angie.
No, I am not paying for my own ads on my own site.
When one of my own ads appears, that means there is no bid for my minimum price. My own ad is a placeholder.
heh I was thinking the same thing, “hey that’s D’mer!” but that makes sense. Rather than let the space go blank.
It’s anybody’s guess why we get bids and why we don’t. For example, that space was earning a couple of days ago when we had half as much traffic. And today, no good bid.
Lots of people only bid during the week, but some of my highest traffic is on weekends.
Maybe they’ve set a 5 day workweek for themselves?
I set aside a small advertising budget for this year (as opposed to no budget last year) and your site was one of the pages I was considering as the demographic might be about right.
Well, you can set up your Project Wonderful ad campaigns to run at any time you like. You can have them run on only certain days of the week. You do not have to monitor the ads once you have your system set up. It’s automatic.
Lots of people read webcomics on the sly during work hours. I think that is one of the reasons most of the successful webcomics are gags. People can get their fix quick and run off.
But my book can’t be read and enjoyed as a snippet. You have to have the time and energy to sit down and read.
So, not only do I buy ads on weekends, but when I do, I get a major uptick in the page views. What happens is, the new readers sit down and read 50 or more pages at a time when they have the leisure to do so. And the best time for that is in the comfort of their home on weekends.
Since most websites experience a major drop in their traffic on weekends, I can get inexpensive ads and reach more new people.
Wow! Thanks for the tip regarding Lynda.com! I’ve been looking to take classes for Web Design but could stomach the $5,000 – $7,500 I’d have to pay for it.
With Lynda.com, there’s no need. I learned more from that website in a hours than I did in six months at digital design school. Lots of pros use it. Jimmy Palmiotti, for one.
In fact, the digital design school perk was you got Lynda.com classes for free!
Except you get all your real training at lynda.com, so what the heck is the school for?
You as a lawyer? I think you would have been killer in a courtroom. But I’m glad you decided to stick with the art — wonderful stuff you do, so wonderful I want to see more.
My father teaches at a major university, so I guess that is what inspired me to go back and get a degree. My brother graduated from another major university magna cum laude at age 40.
But I just didn’t see it working out. I think I was more interested in getting the law background for activism than I was in actually being a lawyer.
At this point, I think I’ve got a good working knowledge of art and entertainment law for my purposes. And I don’t see myself doing much by way of activism this year. Way too busy.
I probably spent six months out of the last two years just running about doing creator rights stuff. Whew.