Too Stupid to Know You’re Stupid, and Other Fun Comics Links UPDATED
on April 7th, 2011Rob Granito is back (my first post is here). He wants money for an interview. Go read this at Bleeding Cool, in case you have any lingering doubt this dude is a con artist. A person who denies she’s his wife astonishes us by having the exact same name as his wife and has written a press release with grammatical skills only marginally better than her spouse. I mean, client.
She’s his agent! SMACK!
She’s his wife! SMACK!
She’s his agent! SMACK!
She’s his wife! SMACK!
She’s his agent AND his wife!
This is so lame, the bad taste is smothered in lame sauce.
I pray to God everyone who reads this sad, pathetic saga will now take the gossip of goofy people who have Big Terrible Stories About Awful Pros with a grain of salt from now on, even if these people have a few creds. Because no matter what problem I have ever had with a fan, they pale against any problem I have had with these avaricious bottom feeders.
I hope someone has contacted the police at this point, seriously.
BTW: the frauds claim that all the thousands of hits they’ve generated are worth the interview bucks.
No, they’re not.
For every thousand hits a website gets, a site earns about 50 cents. So, if the fraud thinks an interview with him is worth $150, an article would have to generate hundreds of thousands of hits just to pay for it. And that’s not going to happen.
Schmuck.
I need chocolate now. The best in the world is from Cocoabella.
Go read this at The Village Voice, a venue which does not pay its cartoonists. A sad article about how poorly cartoonists are paid. Some comic art luminaries pop in to the comments thread for a spin.
I had a candid conversation yesterday with a webcomics notable. I told him how much I was now making on my site, and he said that was REALLY good money for a webcomic. I consider the income modest, but respectable, and well within the income range I hoped would finance the rest of my series. Not good enough for full time support, but very good sideline money.
Not too long ago, a webcomics artist I never heard of whose principle activity seems to be trolling for fun, went on a public rampage, claiming A Distant Soil would never go anywhere online, had never been popular in the first place, and I’d never made any money on it. I took a look at his site. He gets about 5 page views a day. Clearly, he’s an unimpeachable source for how to be a pro. I suspect the motivation for his rampage was to get people to look at his work. Well, I looked. What was that I wrote about avaricious bottom feeders? Yeah, that.
A Distant Soil had $3,000,000 in lifetime retail sales. That’s solid money for an independent comic. Very solid money. In personal income, that averages out to $30,000 per year for ten years of full time work, after taxes and all expenses, including retailer and distributor cuts.
Income was uneven, and I worked on it part time for many years, but as a page rate average, it’s good. The problem is the long tail of income as the project waned, making it harder to justify the investment of time and effort to finish off my epic. I didn’t make $30,000 per year every year, I made more like $40,000 one year, $20,000 the next, $45,000 one year, and $5,000 for the next three! Try budgeting on that!
My webcomic guru associate confided that most webcomics make no money at all, or extremely modest money. Artists fudge their numbers to make themselves appear more popular than they are. A webcomicker who swears they bought a house and supports a family actually has a job at Starbucks. OK, whatever.
I’m noticing a change in the way lots of artists approach the thorny problem of the perception of the money we make. They’re tired of the illusory exposure canard. Tired of being thought of as rich when we’re not rich. Tired of the mixing of rich and famous. Many creators fear being sprinkled with loser dust that any admission of financial weakness is de facto failure. People who have absolutely no knowledge or qualifications to make any kind of statement about a pro’s life or professionalism will bring out their knives on a blog at the slightest hint a hated pro has a low bank balance.
For my part, even though I had a website since 1999, it wasn’t until August last year that I saw an increase in my income from the site, which used to make only about $2000 per year. I now make good money on my series, more than I made when I last worked full time on it in 1999 – that year I made about $19,000 in royalties from Image.
Of course, I don’t know if my income will continue at this rate, or continue to rise, but I am hopeful. I am still on to finish A Distant Soil in 2013.
For those hoping the web will just make all things sparkles and sprinkles for their art, well, it works for some and not for others, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. At all. I’ve had a website since 1999, and as I wrote before, only began to see decent money in August 2010. Almost all of that money has been from actual sales, not donations or ads.
I have other income from the graphic novels I do for other publishers, including Gone to Amerikay, Stealth Tribes, and my upcoming GN with Dark Horse. The last year has been good: the prior two? Not so much. But as I’ve mentioned before, the economy of scale is different for me, because I’m not a part time pro, and have not made less than $30,000 per year as an artist since, I think, about 1990. I don’t know how these artists pulling $1500 a month get by. I tend to think they don’t.
My minimum standard is not to get by, but to thrive.
c
Just for the sake of adding to the free vs. digital argument, what effect would you say that having your comic up for free on your site has had on your sales? Do you think there is a threshhold of how much you can give away before it begins to have a negative impact? I’m curious on your thoughts.
That’s a very important question: the truth is, I don’t know.
Like I said, I had my first website up in 1999. No effect. OK, not a great design, so let’s try again.
Had the website redone a few years later, added a message board. Traffic went up to about 200 page view a day to 500 page views a day on a big day. No serious effect on sales. Occasional bump in traffic, occasional bump in sales, nothing steady.
Website redesigned again. Minor bump in traffic, went back down. Almost daily activity on message board. No serious increase in traffic or sales.
What am I doing wrong?
2005: Paid someone to come in and do a complete redesign. Took out message board. Added blog. No serious increase in income or traffic.
2007: Began posting one page of out of print A Distant Soil per week for 70 solid weeks. Saw bump in traffic each time page was posted. No steady increase the rest of the week. Saw initial bump in sales, and occasional art sales, but again, NO steady increase in traffic or sales.
2009: Completely redesigned and reformatted entire website. Began posting pages FIVE days a week from the very beginning. After initial bump traffic dropped to WORSE than before, averaging only about 250 page views a day. Not looking good. I’m beginning to think I’ve lost my audience and it’s time to pack it in.
Late 2009: November shows sharp jump in traffic. Over the prior year, donations have increased, but not a serious source of income. Nice to have, but not paying for much.
Some sales increase, especially on art sales. Hm…
Early 2010: Did a major donation incentive drive, and had very good results moving collectibles and other goodies, but it’s not the sort of income I can count on. When the stuff from my closet is gone, will there be any more money coming in?
August 2010: Art sales and book sales show major spike, and so does traffic. Traffic increases from about 300,000 page views per year to as many as 300,000 per month. Sales between August 2010 and March 2011 are very solid and steady.
What does all that prove?
Um…
Here’s what I do know: almost every foreign reader I have will never buy A Distant Soil because there is no place in their country to get the book.
Most of my foreign sales go to English-speaking countries like Australia and New Zealand.
Most of the income on the site is from art sales and limited editions. I now make more money in one month on the site than I do in an entire year of royalties direct from Image. Will that continue? I do not know.
I see NO significant increase in my store sales. The increase on my last royalty check was 18%, but that may be due to Christmas season increase.
The increase in my income is from the website.
A major advantage for A Distant Soil in print versus web is that it is designed to be read in print. It reads much better in print. It looks much better in print. For the total experience, a reader is better off getting the books.
Of course, most readers wouldn’t know that.
I have more monthly readers here than I ever had in print. But like every other webcomic, only a small percentage buy merchandise. There is no serious income from ads or donations.
If I get the impression that the webcomic hurts my sales, the easy thing to do is end the webcomic. I don’t see that it hurts my bottom line right now.
The difference between an official webcomic and a pirated comic is that people come directly to me, interact with me, and are more likely to appreciate me as a human being who works hard and makes a living at this. The reader who comes directly to me is more likely to make a purchase. I saw no increase in my web traffic, no increase in my sales from any pirate activity.
Not all exposure works for the creator.
That includes the exposure the creator creates for themselves. Because for a decade, my website did absolutely nothing for me, even when I had free webcomics on it.
I believe my repeatedly pointing out that coming directly to me will bring you, my good readers, more comics, has had an effect on my page views and bottom line. Many readers did not understand the cause and effect of illegal downloading. I’ve had a number of readers say they won’t do it anymore.
Thanks for the rundown. I suppose the debate continues…but your input helps the rest of us start to figure it out.
Five pageviews a day? At last, someone I can feel superior to!
But seriously, I really appreciate your candor when talking about numbers and dollars and cents. Us fans and wannabes really have no clue about this stuff.
Yeah, his stat ranking was very low: 10,000,000 and less. Still is, months after his tirade. I don’t see it paid off for him, so nice try at being the gadfly of the moment.
Anyone who claims they have The Magic Formula is full of it. I felt the same way about the whole self publishing phenom. There is no one size fits all solution for anyone. Some people who had great mainstream careers bombed self publishing. Some people who do well on the web do crap in print. Some people who do crap on the web do well in print.
Whatever works.
These people who puff themselves up and make themselves out to be gurus with ridiculous stories about big sales and huge money, sheesh! Some are making money getting hired to speak about how you can get rich. Might as well listen to Tony Robbins.
BTW, for several years, some doofus spent a lot of his free time running around the internet trashing Jeff Smith and his work on Bone. Jeff asked if I knew who he was (I didn’t,) so I spent a few minutes doing a quick search, and found out the guy was (you guessed it) a frustrated webcomics artist. He had one of those statcounter buttons right on his home page, and his page view count was 4 pages a day or less. He was about the only person looking at his stuff. My stopping in was probably the highest page count he will ever get.
So I showed Jeff, and we all had a laugh. Some dude with thwarted career ambitions, with Jeff as his personal focii for the hatey hate.
The dude’s webcomic was godawful, it goes without saying, but I said it anyway. I’m not really sure why these people focus on one person and dig in, but they seem to see someone else getting attention, they zero in on something they don’t like about your work, and then use it as an ontological argument for the injustices of the world. Other people succeed because they cheated!
If Jeff Smith succeeds, and you don’t like Bone, there’s no justice in the world for artists like you, by golly!
I can chime in and say that while having the pages up here for free helped get me hooked again (after getting a few scattered issues here and there during the 1990′s), ultimately I picked up the collections because the click and read experience became unsatisfying after I started getting into the story. Plus I kept forgetting where I left off and kept forgetting to bookmark where I left off.
Now I come back to look at the pages as they’re posted to remember favorite parts or see what others think or tell you how much I like a particular lay-out or composition.
Plus your Very Bad Publisher posts and industry info is very helpful and awesome.
Thanks, child of troy. Feedback like this is VERY helpful to me.
On the webcomics I’ve become interested in, if I get around to getting them in print, I tend to stop reading the web version and just wait for the trade. Since my internet is so spotty, reading almost anything on the web is a chore.
I can’t think of any webcomics which also have blogs I read.
I was strongly advised by Phil Foglio not to blog, but I found that to be very bad advice for my site. Not only do I enjoy it, the readers seem to enjoy it, too.
Also, Foglio was openly skeptical this comic would do well on the web, and so was I, but I’m happy we were both wrong. He advised me not to bother with things like t-shirts, but every other webcomicker I know swears by them. He recommended making jewelry and pins instead, which I’d like to try.
What works for one doesn’t work for the other. Everybody has to find their own path.
I like looking at each page as an individual unit. It’s a very different reading experience.
This cockroach just won’t go away!
Some of those that proclaim they bought a house as a result of their work are also sometimes leaving out the fact that they have a spouse with a full-time job and can put them on their health insurance. I’d say that contributes to having a sustainable income.
Online fandom pretty much turned me off to most sites and forums. There are writers and artists that are not particularly liked (there are a few I steer clear of) but the schadenfreude when one falls on hard times is sickening. If you don’t like the work, don’t buy it but don’t shout with glee when one is selling off work to pay their mortgage or medical expenses.
I come here for the blogs, the interaction and lastly the comic. I mean I have all the individual issues and the first two hard cover collections (and soon the other two) so I don’t need to read the comic on the web. But don’t take that to mean the comic is not important – I find reading it one page at a time allows me to pick up on a lot that I missed when I first read the comics.
Plus it been years since I read these particular pages and my memory isn’t what it used to be!
Heres to your continued success!
I always love it when you start talking nuts and bolts, Colleen. The mention of the low-hitting gadfly prompted me to go look at my own visitor stats (I don’t check them very often). The stats claim that so far in April, it’s been averaging 331 visits per day. Being pragmatic, I view that skeptically, suspecting that most of them are bots. When I look at the stats for specific pages, the numbers drop down to bare handfuls (which I consider more accurately representing my traffic).
I can laugh at the guy, because I’m not trying very hard right now to get regular traffic (the site itself is not seriously monetized). Since I put up the site, I’ve been more intent on building a body of material for visitors — for the day when I do start getting serious about wanting traffic. I want there to be plenty available to explore.
So I’ll be blatantly upfront with my figures – for the 7 days of April (so far):
115 hits on my reviews page
20 hits on my Works/Bibliography page (which lists my actually published work)
17 hits on my Christmas card gallery
6 hits on my “Winter Night” poem
5 hits on my “Villanelle” poem.
Pathetic, ain’t it?
I really should post more on my blogs. I should post reviews more regularly, so that people actually look for something on a schedule. And I am trying to shape my plans toward that, but I’m in no rush. But I think that’s the big difference between me and a lot of aspiring Would-be Internet Stars. I don’t have any illusions about the work it takes to attract regular heavy traffic. Unfortunately, a lot of Would-bes do have over-extended expectations.
There’s a new consulting industry springing up these days: consulting on how to expand your web-presence and profile. Sites that cater to particular markets, giving them a uniform template. I know of a couple of sites that service writers, offering them a web page with blog, the ability to list their titles for sales (with links to Amazon, of course), what their appearance schedule might be. All with the important feeds to Facebook and Twitter, of course. But for me, these sites have a conformity of presentation that doesn’t accommodate my multiple interests, so they’ve never tempted me. I mean, sure, I’m primarily a writer – but I’m also an artist and have Christmas cards for sale (I really sure learn how to market them better!). Those sites have no way to deal with that sort of side-line.
I’ve babbled about all this stuff because it’s in line with what you said. You’ve had your site since 1999. I set up mine in 2006. It takes a LONG time for a site to get solidly established. I think many people get frustrated with no apparent return after a year or two. And I have to seriously ask just what it was they were expecting?
I set up my site for very specific reasons. Publicly, I call it a “permanent magazine, with occasionally new material added”. But for the personal side of it, it is a professional portfolio for a writer (and occasional artist). And there’s enough substance on it that it gives me at least something of a profile in the mass of writers on the web. And when I’m really ready to rock-n-roll, I’ve got a nice platform to work from. But then, I’m taking the really long view about it, and I don’t encounter that many people who are willing to do it that way. I know a few (like yourself), but not many.
But see? I come here and spend time on YOUR website, because I have fun reading and exchanging comments with you and your readers. *sniff* Very few people comment on my site.
I’m always pointing people to your blog – you have good stuff for people, the real deal. Always worth the visit.
(Yeah, it’s late and I’ve hit babble stage. Heh.)
I found the books years ago in my local library and fell in love with the series, so I bought the first 3 volumes off Amazon and then the 4th when it came out. I had been to the website a very long time ago, but it seemed to have no activity so I stopped going to it… and then randomly I saw a banner ad for ADS on another webcomic I read (I think it was Eerie Cuties) and freaked out. Since then I’ve managed to make quite a few of my friends read the entire archive and all of them have either bought the books or plan to eventually.
Personally I love being able to interact with the artists of comics… it makes everything feel more organic. Being able to read the opinions of a favorite writer outside their work is humanizing to me.
Great input, TigerQueen. I really appreciate it!
Back in the day, my website design was static, and I could not make adjustments myself. So I had to rely on the webmaster to do it. Sometimes I had reliable webmasters, sometimes not. I could go for months without being able to make changes to my site!
DC McQueen, who designed the current site, recommended the blog/webcomics format which is a big improvement.
I like being able to interact with fans. This is a solitary profession, and having some feedback is good for the brain.
FYI, I need to caveat my earlier comments about having no increase in traffic over the decade prior to starting the current site.
We did have an increase. Percentage wise, a major increase. But when your increase in from 50 page views a day to 100 page views a day two years later, you’re still sucking the suck. Eventually, I steadied out at about 250 page views a day, with jumps to around 500 page views a day (or more, if there was a popular blog post). Then it would crawl back down to 250 page views a day. Stayed that way for about three year’s running.
Of course, now we get a low average of about 9,000 page views a day.
If you’re only getting 250-500 page views a day, you’re not going to make it on the internet. If you’re getting at least 10,000 page views a day, you are not rolling in it, but you have a solid readership.
As others have stated above, I like the interactions and blogs on the site, in addition to the wonderful art of course. While it’d be great if people could just write/draw to their hearts content without worrying about bills, but that’s not the way things are. A good business sense is needed. The posts you have about bad publishers (showing that it’s not just the big ones that will fleece people) are very informative and eye-opening.
Bruce Campbell, in a discussion, mentioned how he’s had first-time filmmakers come up to him with no clue what they’re doing. He asks how it’s being funded and they’ll go how they got funding from different people here and there. He then says that they better hope that they don’t make any money because they aren’t going to have any answers to a lot of questions about who gets what.
Plus, he said that any creative person needs to put on their business hat for at least 5 minutes – to make sure their script is copyrighted, make sure a legal document is drawn up so as to say who owns what, etc.
Let me get the important thing out of the way first… did you buy chocolate with the donation I gave you from your FaceBook posting, or did you spend it on something sensible? (Furthermore, stock up now… with the trouble in the Ivory Coast, prices are rising) (I thought I was evil… then you post that Cocoabella link… $2 a piece for the build-a-box… how can you choose just 20?!)
I discovered ADS back when it was under the Aria imprint, somewhere around the time of the Spirits of Independents tour.
I do read each page, but I know from reading the comics and graphic novels that it reads much better in paper. Still, it’s nice to read other’s comments about certain things I missed, like the leather pants.
I visit once a day (it’s on my Google Chrome homepage as one of the top eight sites), mostly for the blog. When you pull back the curtain and show us “the great and powerful” aren’t wearing any clothes, that’s when I value this site the most.
So, Ms. Doran, thanks for making this such a nice place to visit.
I am deeply grateful to all of you who have taken the time to give me these detailed accounts. I’ve also received several lovely letters.
I’m surprised how many people read the blog. I know there’s a core group who does, but I always assumed most of the readers just drop in to read the comic and ignore the blog.
I have not boughten the chocolates yet, but I fully intend to. I have lost a whopping EIGHT pounds in a little over a month. I’ve been working about 15-20 hours a week outdoors! So, I look forward to a treat.
Got some kind of bug a couple of days ago. Ugh. Could have nothing but boullion for dinner. Very hungry.
First, I wanted to thank you for being open about the business aspects. It’s something I’d been curious about — and while I’m not a comics artist, it might have some bearing on online ventures I might consider.
You raise the question of whether your web comics cannibalize your book sales. I can only tell you I wouldn’t be in the market for the books — but I did go back and read every issue to get caught up, and regularly check for updates.
AND I read the blog.
Oddly enough, this isn’t the sort of thing I’d ordinarily read. I think it must say something pretty good about your art that I’m a dedicated reader anyway!
But I would never have learned of your comic, were it not online.
I’m afraid all I can offer at the moment is an appreciative audience of one. I’m not in a position to donate at the moment — but at least I’m considering doing so in the future.
In the meantime, please accept my encouragement and thanks.
@Bob, you reminded me of another reason I read the blog – the educational aspect.
I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about business – I am an independent consultant,ran my own comic shop for a number of years, have an MBA and was the Business Planning Manager for a number of Production facilities. But the whole economics of freelancing, comics publishing and now ‘webonomics’, I learned from this blog.
So thank you again, Colleen.