The State of Colleen’s Industry From Print to Web: It’s working, and I didn’t need a gag strip to make it pay
on October 13th, 2011Been doing a lot of behind the scenes conferencing with some webcomickers, and crunching my numbers for A Distant Soil. The news is all very good, and while I don’t have as much time to do deeper analysis as I’d like, my bottom line is up significantly, and my online audience is ten times higher than when I started the five day a week online serialization of A Distant Soil 2.5 years ago.
Here’s a look at an earlier post with graphs of my traffic.
Most of the advice I got about making webcomics pay has not only not worked for me, but seems to stem from what I call “snapshot thinking”. For example, one blogger scolded me for not doing things like social networking and posting info about my Facebook page and whatnot on my site. Absurd. Not only have I been ubiquitous on blogs, message boards and the like for years, but the social networking buttons are right there on my home page almost every single day to the point of spamminess. Sometimes I remove them for a day or two because readers tend to gloss over things they see every day. I know I do. Moving things about or removing them periodically makes people notice changes. I can move the widgets around any time I like.
Another example: a blogger scolded me for not monetizing my work, what with my not having a working bookshop and all. But…we’ve almost always had a working bookshop. If I’m on tour, we take it down. If we have problems with the shopping cart, we take it down. I’m in Australia, we take it down. But he didn’t see a working bookshop that day he popped in! I’ve had bookshop sales on this site since somewhere around 2003.
Snapshot thinking: what he sees that day is all there is.
Of course, what a new reader sees that day is all there is too, and you want to grab the new reader. But I also need to balance that with holding on to my old readers and making the experience good for them. So sometimes things will go up, get changed, come down.
Another suggestion was to watermark all the online pages or to put the website address on them to curb pirating. Oddly, I got this suggestion from someone who said they could not find any pirated files of my work online. If he can’t find any pirated files, what good is his advice to curb pirating?
It took me about 3 minutes to find one popular website with my stuff, and as of right now, there are 23 seeders and 2 leechers. Over the last week, I believed they’ve had about 60 leechers in total. Maybe these people will never buy my books, some of them did, but want digital copies. Regardless, it bums me out when I don’t get the traffic here, but what can you do? Currently, I’m working with Image Comics to do digital restoration on ALL the A Distant Soil art and to create new covers for legal digital books. The official release will be significant improvement over what you get online from unofficial sources. Since I have well over 1000 pages of art to archive, as you may imagine, this is a time consuming task.
I repeat: the work is decades old, and there were no scanning services available. All the tones are BY HAND. These need to be cleaned up and restored. We’re not just dragging our feet to frustrate the anxious digital reader. We want to give you a good book that will last, in a package we can be proud of.
Also, pirating isn’t coming from the daily postings, it comes from the scanned books. Every single page posted on this website has already appeared in print first. I have had many conversations with people who have absolutely no idea that all this work wasn’t drawn yesterday.
No one’s not going to pirate my work because of an online watermark.
But thanks for the attempt to help.
I think the problem I have dealing with some of the You Should Just People is that they are all coming at it from a webcomics perspective as if that is the only perspective. It isn’t. Much of their advice not only doesn’t apply to me, when I’ve tried to implement it, it did not work for me at all.
One extremely strident critic of print cartoonists went on and on about how our print work is just soooo boring and not art and yadda yadda, and how we need to do short gag strips to make it big online. One wonders about people who sob about the artistic merit of print comics pushing the idea that it’s gag strips that make the world go round. I want a webcomic market in which success isn’t limited to stick figures and geek jokes. (EDIT: Yes, we know webcomics are about more than geek jokes, but the most financially successful do tend to be gag strips, just like the most successful print comics tend to be superheroes. And the advice I’ve gotten about web success has been “Do a gag strip!” which is on par with print comic advice along the lines of “Learn to draw superheroes.”)
Since I don’t do geek jokes, people like me need to find an audience that not only enjoys what we do, but is willing to pay. Since it is unlikely we’ll go for the low hanging geek joke fruit, we need to be able to make more money with a smaller audience.
My audience is now ten times higher than it was when I started online. (see linked graph above)
More precisely, I’ve been online since 1999, but my earlier efforts tanked. I hired DC McQueen as a consultant and designer in 2009. It took about a year for traffic to rise, and it took another year for a significant increase in income. If I were starting from scratch, this would have been misery, but I’ve got a huge inventory of pages, which is an advantage most people simply don’t have. This is a MASSIVE advantage, print people (consider doing as I did: breaking whole print pages into pieces. They’re easier to read online.) We need to realize and exploit our innate advantages, and praise the creator rights that allow us to pick up something we did 20 years ago and find a whole new market for it.
Don’t worry about being dated. I get people coming to this site all the time who have no idea when this art was done. It’s always new to somebody.
If you are print to web like me and don’t do geek jokes, the vast majority of the webcomics community is not going to have much to do with you. Stuart Immonen and other print artists really didn’t get much buzz when he took his work online (it’s down now.) Quality was not the issue. Immonen’s work is brilliant.
We are not going to reach the same audience as most webcomics, and many of our print readers are not into webcomics. It’s simply a different culture. While there is crossover, people who read Penny Arcade are not going to come here and decide this site is just The Best Thing Ever.
I love this: Dorothy Gambrell creator of the webcomic Cat and Girl, regularly posts updates about the financing of her project. Here is a graph of her income. So far this year, she has made $12,847.53 on her webcomic and freelance work. I believe she is a full time creator, and has been posting her comic online since 1999.
She appears to have traffic comparable to mine. Almost all of her money comes from t-shirts and donations. Almost none of mine does.
I’m not going to post my entire income here, because that’s a little more transparency than I would like. But if I limit my income entirely to online income, then last year Cat and Girl did significantly better than I did, but this year I did significantly better.
I have freelance income and royalty income that Ms Gambrell doesn’t have. So I make more money anyway based on my publishing income alone. But I wanted to see how I would do with just online income, especially since a large portion of financing A Distant Soil’s finale will depend on that income.
Between July and now, I have made more money online than Ms Gambrell has made all year. Almost all of that income is from original art sales and book sales. I had a limited edition book sale earlier this year that went very well, and will pay for two entire issue of A Distant Soil from Image Comics next year. In fact, my web sales this year were shockingly good. I had almost given up on this whole thing, and we’ve come back like a champ.
I can’t sell t-shirts or coffee mugs to save my life. Guess what? That’s not my audience. I don’t do slogans. The t-shirts and coffee mug financing of comics does NOT work for people like me. Here’s what we do have, and most of our sales are on journals and cards.
Original art and limited edition books make our money. My art sales are significantly better than they have been in years. Many webcomic artists have very little, if any, art to sell.
I can also sell and market many things from projects for other publishers here, as well as A Distant Soil. A webcomics artist does not usually have that advantage. Until this year, I saw no serious benefit from this. My mainstream work was not selling here any better than A Distant Soil was. We just weren’t getting the traffic. I’d get a bump once in awhile from a link and go “YAY! We’re SAVED!” but it didn’t last. Now our daily traffic is better than our old big bumps. But you don’t see me cheering unless I’ve been watching a trend for at least six months.
Sales of A Distant Soil books are up. Not a huge amount of money, but the difference is clear. My royalty check this period was up by a full third.
Putting my work on the web alone did not yield results, and neither did chatting on FB: money did. I spent thousands of dollars on advertising, countless hours pushing my work. More precisely, I skipped San Diego Comic Con, and invested that money in the site. San Diego regularly costs at least $8000 to attend and get a booth. Staying home and putting my work on the web has brought me a far higher return on that investment than going to San Diego. If I go to San Diego, it is highly unlikely I’ll pick up thousands of readers at one show. I picked up thousands of readers on the site and got to stay home and avoid convention crud. More importantly, I more than doubled that $8000 investment. If I go to San Diego, there’s a good chance I won’t get my $8000 back.
This doesn’t mean you should not go to conventions. I intend to go to San Diego next year. However, I think being online is a new form of convention. And it costs less. If you can manage your time, keep from getting into foolish internet dramas, then you may realize some serious benefits from your online presence. It has taken me a whopping 12 years to make it work.
Now, just because it’s worked well for a year, that does not mean it’s smooth sailing from here.
I’ve seen a number of webcomics whose traffic and income tanked over the last year. The top gets stronger, the long tail is very, very long, and there is a tiny percentage of well off and everyone else is poor.
Last year was a dismal one for us. The year before…not so much. This year…we’re recovering…but…well…let me explain.
When I first started out putting the Dreamland Chronicles online in 2006, I had already created about 150 pages of the comic for print. So it was easy to stay ahead of the 5 pages/week schedule…Almost 2 years later…we can barely get more than 13,000 uniques a day.
Has the webcomic thing crested? Did those with first mover advantage hog the spotlight? Is the market too glutted? Is there hope for a comics middle class?
Dunno.
I’ve done much better for myself this year, but I had money to invest (many people do not) and a huge inventory (many do not) and a loyal print readership, some of whom were persuaded to pursue me here (many have no pre-existing audience).
And, for the heck of it, I almost completely stopped advertising to see what would happen to my traffic. My core audience remained, though I stopped picking up as many new readers (duh). And since my core audience rose, my income went up, even without further advertising investment. (EDIT: to clarify, my core audience in 2011 remained steady from 2010, even though I cut advertising dollars to almost nothing.)
Will these happy trends continue for me and my humble book?
Dunno. Sure hope so.
I welcome your thoughts and suggestions
I read Penny Arcade constantly, but I still love A Distant Soil. They’re really two different worlds, but I enjoy them both the same. I’m one of those readers who read you in print first (still have all my original comics) and didn’t even realize that you had an online presence until I saw your ad on someone else’s site. Possibly Scott Sava’s (I read Dreamland too… it’s quite enjoyable). Now I visit here every day. I come not just for the fabulous comic (which I could read from the print copies) but for news and views from the author herself.
Thanks for the awesome comment! I can’t tell you how many people have very kindly let me know they rediscovered my work from an ad.
I should mention that I had tried advertising before: on comic sites which center on print comics. However, I had very little success with that and spent quite a lot of money. I got much better results advertising on webcomic sites.
Dreamland Chronicles is a very lovely all-age appropriate comic. I’m so glad you read it!
A lot of those ‘monetized’ comic sites penalize those of us who aren’t able to afford their fees, thus losing readers like me because I’m of the view that if you treat me poorly or like a second-class citizen when I have little to nothing, you don’t deserve my money when I have some. But if I’m treated like I’m just as important as all those people with money, when I have some to spare I’ll spend it with the people who treated me well – which is how I feel when I come here.
And I just know one of these days I’ll be able to afford one of those art cards or something! One of these days!
Oh, almost forgot…
I also appreciate that you keep your site simple. I was on dialup for the last 8 years, and couldn’t handle sites like the Dreamland Chronicles – few graphics intensive sites were worth waiting 20 – 30 minutes for with half a dozen reloads. Few. Even now that I have a cable connection, tho, I find I’m just not interested in trying most of them again, so in that way they lost me as a reader, too.
“There is a tiny percentage of well off and everyone else is poor.”
Clearly, government intervention is needed. Where’s my bailout? #OccupyPennyArcade!
@Zhora:
I’m really glad you posted your thoughts. First off, I consider EVERYONE who comes to the official website to be a patron, because this is an advertiser supported site. You come here fair and square, your clicks on my site raise my ad revenue. Granted, the ad revenue here is low, but each month, it pays the site expenses. I don’t begrudge anyone who can’t buy more stuff, because you came to my official site.
The cards are very nice, by the way. I buy quantities to use as thank you notes when someone places an order. The Kovar card is so handsome!
I also have internet speed problems, and am glad this site is accessible for you. I wish I could get it to load even faster!
My only regret is not making the pages bigger. Argh. Too late to change it. If I ever do another webcomic, I will keep that in mind.
And someone brought it up: yes, I know webcomics aren’t all about stick figures. There are some with really great graphics. Romantically Apocalyptic comes to mind. I already mentioned Dreamland Chronicles. And when it comes o gag strips, Hark, A Vagrant can’t be beat!
But most successful webcomics are simple and cartoony, which is easier to finance.
I really admire the way you have gone about building your audience, Colleen. It’s an education to me. And I’ve come to see that a crucial part of it is your engagement with the visitors to the site. It’s given me plenty to think about as I retweak my own website.
I’m glad you’re finding a consistent and solid audience! I like it when new voices chime in on discussions. You’ve made this a very pleasant place to come in my web-surfing.
I used to think it was just about engagement, but it’s not. Because of the nature of the work I do and the audience that work attracts, we’re not going to get daily installments posted to Reddit, and inspire tons o’ laughs.
Seems to me what we’re really dealing with here is the difference between how long form serials perform, and how gag strips perform. And the gag strip is an easier web sell than the long form serial.
I could chatter for the rest of my life here, and without going outside the readership I already had and spending some ad dough, new readers would never have found me. Engagement keeps them, but it doesn’t bring new people in very often.
Lots of people link and quote articles I write here, but if you run a website, you know that the click through on any link is only about 1-2%. So if some website quotes one of my articles, and that website gets 50,000 pages views a day, only a few hundred of them – if that many – will ever come to my site to read what I wrote on the site.
One tech site which wrote a very dishonest hit piece about me, and my creator rights advocacy work, claims to have a million followers. I would never have known they’d written anything until I tried to find out why I was suddenly getting threats and hacks on the site. There was almost no click through activity from the article to me. If they really have a million followers, their followers don’t follow through to read source material.
So, if anything, I’ve learned engagement is not enough.
I’m glad to know I’m helping out at least a little bit then!
One thing with black and white is that its easier to get a large image with a small filesize, which is quite difficult to do with full color images. I did a color gag fan comic for a few months when I had that dialup connection and found it a hard to wrangle it down to where I could upload it easily, whereas that wasn’t a problem with the large inked or pencilled art I usually did. And doing the strip in black and white was not an option, as multiple characters looked exactly the same without color (which was one of the sort-of in-jokes).
My lowly comics are nowhere near the arena yours is in (I’m happy if I make a hundred or so a month, haha), but I totally get where you’re coming from with the “You Should Just” people. A lot of webcomic peeps seem to rote memorize what Those Big Gag Comics (must…not…mention…the…book ARRGHH) did and then preach to the masses as if the same things will keep working…and if it doesn’t work, well, YOU’RE doing something wrong. Not like the internet or the world has changed at ALL….*eyeroll* Funny comics, more simplistic comics, might do well in the T-shirt arena, but telling people that’s the only way to succeed is downright dumb. You played to your strengths, and that’s the true path to success regardless of the medium. In my completely inexperienced opinion that is, haha. I think I’ll stick with science myself personally.
One thing I’ve always liked about the way you handle your comic business is that you’re versatile, and not in just in a social networking kind of way. I mean, let’s face it, you can link on twitter and FB and Reddit all day long, and the only thing you’re doing is wasting your time. When time=money, that’s a seriously bad thing. But I really love what you’ve done with ADS in the past year or so I’ve been reading. I was against the cropped pages at first, but I’m going to guess getting 5x daily pagevisits from readers has increased ad revenue. Having a social networking presence is really awesome because quite frankly, I don’t see many people who make a committed jump from print to web EVER have a presence. It’s like they’re afraid of networking sites. Never mind even having a navigable site. I have seen so many great comics that I couldn’t even read because that creator was unwilling or unable to hire anyone/get help with the webdesign.
But I’m rambling. All I’m saying is I’m a fan of the comic AND the way you’ve done things online. You’ve done it right. <3
Selling art, even if the art is comics art, is not like selling sparkplugs. If you add 1+1, you don’t necessarily get 2. It’s not a formula, because readers aren’t formulas, they are people, and different types of readers want different things.
What works for one book may not work for the next.
I was on a panel at NYCC with Jimmy Palmiotti, Denny O’Neill and JM Dematteis. O’Neill and DeMatteis found self promotion unseemly. Jimmy and I were all for it.
If you can’t promote yourself in today’s market, you are going to have a REALLY hard time. Publishers actually prefer creators who can push themselves forward.
When I first got started in comics, anyone who did their own promotion – including self publishing – was routinely mocked and criticized. It took me a long time to get over the idea that putting a photo of myself online was not the act of an out of control ego.
I should probably write another article going into more detail, but I’ve gone through five website designers and 7 redesigns in 12 years. The only one that worked for me was DC McQueen, because she came from the webcomics community and understood it.
I’ve spent over $20,000 on design and consultation, and on web maintenance since my first website in 1999. (EDIT: does not include advertising. Which was A LOT.)
I am more than willing to learn from my mistakes and find the right people to do for me what I need done. There is no idea so sacred I won’t throw it under a bus if it does not work for me.
My only measure of success is reaching the readership I need to reach, and giving them what they need so I can continue doing the work I want to do.
I will try anything.
Warning oh man this will be long and I can’t figure out how to shorten it any more and it’s just…really…long. Sorry.
While I am not a webcomics creator, I do read a lot, and I read a wide spectrum, and I’ve read for well over a decade. I read Power Nap, I read Three Panel Soul, I read Penny Arcade and Hark a Vagrant, OGLAF, Menage a 3, Freakangels, everything Dan Kim (Paper Eleven, NNN), Templar AZ, Anders Loves Maria, Gunnerkrigg Court, Johnny Wander, Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell, Girls With Slingshots, Octopus Pie, Pictures for Sad Children, Perfect Stars, Gastro Phobia, Gunshow, Rice Boy, Real Life, Sin Titulo, Kukuburi, The Abominable Charles Christopher, Bad Machinery, Hanna is not a Boy’s Name, xkcd. I still waste my time on Megatokyo due to my initial investment, despite knowing everything about it is bad. There’s so many more I’ve read that I haven’t listed, too…
What I’ve gathered from reading these comics is a few key facts. People want to be engaged in the story personally. A lot of webcomics readers are young adults from what I can tell. What we love are characters and relationships we can sink our teeth into. Hanna, Octopus Pie, GWS, Gunnerkrigg, Anders Loves Maria, bunches of the ones I listed fall into that category. But the key factor to these is that all the characters featured are about the readers’ own age. You could think of the success of these as “the soap opera effect”. People get engaged in the comments and forums, frothing at the mouth over she-said he-said who’s-falling-in-love oh-no-they-didn’t!
Joke-a-day strips like Penny Arcade and xkcd – it’s obvious why they’re popular, really. It’s still worth noting that every single one of these types have a forum. Since they are built around the quirks that come out of culture, they also have to act as the spoon that stirs the culture. The creator doesn’t necessarily have to interact with these guys (they usually drive themselves with moderation) and most creators are vaguely afraid to look in the pot or outright refuse to. Regardless, the forums keep people coming back, sometimes more than the comic itself.
There’s some that spawned a good starter following from people that followed an artist’s earlier work. Three Panel Soul grew directly out of Mac Hall. Bad Machinery out of Scary go Round. Johnny Wander out of everything Yuko and Ananth have ever done. Evan Dahm just makes amazing long form comics one after the other like a maniac. Faith Erin Hicks has Demonology 101 and ICE at her back bringing people in for all her current print comics. The followers have simply become used to and love what these artists do – they’re there for the artists.
Basically, what I take away from all this is A Distant Soil doesn’t necessarily fit into any of the above categories for a lot of people. It doesn’t fall into a soap opera saga that 25 year olds can necessarily identify with, it doesn’t have that specific geeky focus that people can get together on a forum over and debate their opinions on the topic, and being a primarily print-oriented artist in your past gives you no cred for the web in their eyes. You straddle the line of print and web and that is a difficult line to straddle because not many readers cross pollinate with print and webcomics. You just have to forge your own way! And you seem to be doing pretty good at it. Your bonus is a backlog of art you can sell from your earlier print days – web artists have to create with that in mind as a majority work digitally, or feel that their inks would not be profitable if sold seperately.
Oh! Also, while I don’t use them personally, RSS feeds appear to be the choice-of-choices for people to follow comic updates (twitter’s good for that too). Power Nap’s barely more than a month old and people are up in arms over there about finding the RSS feed so they remember to come back!
Cool. Thanks!
All webcomics analysis stems from this:
Here are webcomics that are popular. If you do that you will be popular.
No.
What you do is you do the work you want, and then you find an audience that wants it. My experience shows me that that particular group of webcomics, and the appeal it has for that sort of reader is not only not what I want, but I have no incentive to go out of my way for it.
I sell more books and art than a webcomic with ten times my readership. Should I go for the bigger audience that is less likely to buy, or should I simply do the work I want to do, achieve a smaller audience, and then enjoy the fact that my work is worth paying for to a larger percentage of that audience?
I’m going for the latter.
I don’t need webcomics cred. If I have a smaller audience that likes my work and is ten times more likely to put money down to invest in that work, then I am just as well off financially as the webcomic with 100,000 readers.
So, I have no incentive to do soap operas or gags. That’s the takeaway. And once, again, nothing wrong with soap operas or gags, but that’s not what I am doing here. The point is, how do I do want I want to do and get it to bring me a return so I can keep doing it?
Find your strength, play to it. IGNORE the standard webcomics advice.
It’s not my audience.
I hope more print comics artists will come to realize this. You sell 20,000 books and can’t get 500 web readers. Big deal.
They get 100,000 readers, and can’t sell 20,000 books. Who’s better off?
If a print artist goes web, is careful and patient, you can get 20,000 readers, and a significant portion of them are far more likely to buy. But you have to wait, invest some MONEY (no, the web isn’t FREE no matter what anyone says,) and don’t expect to get a link from Penny Arcade.
Print artists have to find a new web reader. The webcomics audience as we know it isn’t it. It is just about as viable a market for us as the print market is for them. Since about every webcomic that has gone print has tanked when sold in direct market stores, I think you see my point.
Not the same audience. Find a new audience.
I thought about this a little more and here’s the distillation:
Comics Books are synonymous with superheroes.
Webcomics are synonymous with geek jokes.
If you’re doing a webcomic that is not synonymous with geek jokes, expect the same reception to your work as you might get for your soap opera comic in a comic shop.
The direct market clique is just a delivery system. The webcomics clique is just another delivery system.
Don’t bother trying to change the hearts and minds of people who really just aren’t that into you.
Use the internet to find a completely new audience. Don’t try to retrofit yourself to the audience that already exists.
Be yourself and find your market elsewhere.
The end.
How many of these people advising how to make money from webcomics have ever actually done a comic, online or off? In my personal experience, zero. Plus it always seems insulting to me how they discount all the work and time that go into comics, even the ones that meet their criteria for ‘success’.
Really just turns out to not be worth the time to listen to them, IMO.
The great thing about webcomics is almost anyone can get published.
Very few of them make any money, and I find the “put it on the web and people will throw money at you!” rhetoric harmful. It gives young creators in particular a completely false impression of what goes on.
If you just want to get published, the web is fine. If you want to be a professional artist, your chances of being self supporting on the web are very slim.
Of course, it’s difficult to get published in a traditional format, too, and the web is a good place to get your feet wet. Reminds me of the old days in fanzines and apazines. Lots of creators got their start there. But few people were pushing the idea that it was the road to riches.
A few fanzine creators and publishers went pro (I did). Most did not.
The ratio of pro to fan creator is even smaller now.
Not trying to discourage anybody, but just getting published is not enough. Getting published well is the goal. Being published well includes being able to make a decent living at the work you want to do.
The most popular webcomic is analogous to one popular comic strip in one print newspaper. 200,000 people get the newspaper, and the strip appears in there, and everybody in that community reads that strip. But how many people actually buy ancillary products related to that comic strip in that one community? Very few.
It seems strange to me that so many people scoff at a print comic that sells 100,000 copies for not being popular enough, but they’ll praise a webcomic that gets 100,000 non-paying readers.
Spider-man may only be selling 100,000 copies per new issue, but Spider-man can be identified by millions and millions of people the world over who, even if they don’t buy the comic, have seen the movies, and will buy underoos and other products.
A webcomic sell-through is only about 1-2%. So a webcomic may only be supported by a couple thousand paying customers (and ad views, of course).
My thinking is print comics are not as unpopular as some would have us believe based solely on one month’s sell through, and webcomics are not as financially viable as some would have us believe based on page views.
It’s important to be more critical about how these different ways of presenting our work appeal to readers and inspire them to financially support our work with purchases. Cheerleading and web utopianism isn’t doing very many people any good, any more than scoffing at people who can’t seem to sell much in print does any good.
Every creator needs to figure out what best works for them, and not to let themselves be swayed by anyone else’s interests.
The only thing any creator needs to consider is what works for them and their readers. If whatever they’re doing over at PVP doesn’t work for you, then just move on. There are literally thousands of webcomics which can’t make a decent dollar.
Don’t do what doesn’t work for you. Period.
I always had the impression that most webcomic creators (outside of “Least I Could Do”, a terrible webcomic that nontheless is headed by a creator who knows how to hit a market demographic for profit) just made comics to…well…make comics! The ones that go into it thinking about riches usually get disillusioned quickly and drop out. Most creators seem overwhelmed with the mere idea that people want to buy a book of their comics, or maybe a tshirt, or a bookmark, a print, or what-have-you. I have no idea how much most of these people sell – but apparently enough for the cream of the crop to make a living on what they’ve created. Living well? I couldn’t tell you that either. But I can tell you that for the most part, print and web are different breeds headed by people with different mindsets. Most webcomics are as you say, not professional work. The artist may grow into being a professional later, but the majority definitely started as a hobby. I’ve watched lots of creators bemoan the fact that they never thought they would end up making a book, so the formats of all their early comics were done totally wrong and they spend months fixing everything to be suitable for print.
Anyway, I’m rambling some. Your sentiment of “doing what you love and finding the audience that loves it too” is spot-on. You can’t rely on any supposed “tried and true” methods espoused by anyone else, especially since you’re a mold-breaker as I’ve shown above. I hope for your continued success and the eventuality when I have enough money to buy your books…
and set next to all the other (web)comic books I’ve bought! Haha.
Great comments!
BTW, my first webcomic was over ten years ago: “Super Idol” with Warren Ellis. “Super Idol” was financed by a tech entrepreneur, so my early experience with webcomics was being paid very well for a really cool job!
And I did try an earlier web version of A Distant Soil going back to about 2006 early 2007(?). Just could not figure out how to make it work financially.
That’s why I finally hired DC McQueen to help out.
I am so glad so many people are doing work they love. That’s terrific.
But yeah, print and web are just totally different mindsets. Print must be about profit, or you lose lots of money fast.
There are a few webcomics doing very, very well. But most are hobbyists, which is fine. I’m not a hobbyist, so have to consider my bottom line on my work.
Anyway, I hope some of my print peeps may have gotten something out of my experience.
I’m not adding much to the discussion at this point. I just want to say it’s been very helpful with some of what I want to do next year. So thanks for the advice freely given. If you don’t mind my asking, did Super Idol ever make it to print in any capacity?
I am so happy this post was helpful for you. I am always open to suggestions, of course. If you have any ideas, please share them so we can all learn from them.
I am very sorry to say Super Idol never made it to print. The folks at Artbomb had some kind of hard drive crash and all the high res scans were lost forever. Alas, back then, I had no way to make high res scans, and had no back ups.
For thems as missed it, Super Idol is still online.
http://artbomb.net/comics/superidol.jsp
Was just reminiscing about the high cost of the early web. Turns out I had a web shopping cart even earlier, about 2001. Know what that thing cost? $100 per month for credit card processing. So just to process payments cost $1200 per year, plus 3%.
Now you can just use Paypal buttons. Sheesh.
And it was years before I could get an ad account. Now Project Wonderful is ubiquitous. My Google account, which I ditched years ago, used to bring in almost nothing.
OK, was at salon all day and had all my hair lopped off. I think it helped me distill this a little better.
Everybody loves gag strips, jokes, romantic comedy dailies. I loved reading them when they were in the newspaper. It follows people would like reading them online.
But just because you enjoy Peanuts, that does not mean you will enjoy Prince Valiant. If you enjoy Rose is Rose, that does not mean you will love Flash Gordon.
And I think (and this includes me) a lot of people confuse distribution method and genre. For the same reason we confuse superheroes and comic books and the Direct Market.
If I advertise on Questionable Content, it’s likely most of the readers of this humorous drama strip will not be favorably disposed to the kind of work I do. Some will, but I’m betting most are looking for more romantic comedies.
The kind of things that did best in newspaper strips also seem to be the kind of things that do the best online. Funny sells best.
I’ve always been the kind of person who preferred Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant and Little Nemo. And I never bought a collection of any comic strip that wasn’t along those lines.
But most people buy Peanuts.
That’s great. But that’s not my audience.
All the webcomics I like best tend to do much lower numbers than the comedy strips. The general public just doesn’t go for the material I like best. If that’s the case, those of us doing this kind of material need to be more savvy about making our online efforts attractive to paying buyers. Because we’re unlikely to get the huge traffic that supports our work with advertising clicks.
I discovered this blog because someone (Heidi? Robot 6?) linked to one of your articles. Of course, I was already familiar with your work, which I first discovered… back around the early ’90s, when Aria was the publisher. How? I think it was either word-of-mouth (GBG) or just seeing something interesting on the shelf, or because WaRP had hooked me with Elfquest and Myth Adventures.
Here’s something I discovered:
It takes a long time (and a lot of hard work) to become an overnight sensation.
Posting a webcomic from scratch, yes, that’s difficult, but eventually, it builds up into something that is collectible into a book. (And it counts towards the 1,000 drawings one must do before they are good.) Since it’s online, it’s also part of the cartoonist’s portfolio, AND shows potential clients how timely and professional the cartoonist might be. Of course, the cartoonist should have a ten-year plan, and make a living.
I don’t draw, I write, but not for a living. My own personal blog has languished, since most of what I do write/type is posted over to Comics Beat, or to Facebook. Those posts do get me noticed (for good or ill), and that helps me network, as well as to get my crazy ideas out there, and to help make the comics industry a better place. (My current crusade: e-books, not to be confused with apps.)
Oh, and I would love to see you do a gag comic. Not a strip, but an actual comic book. Perhaps something similar to ‘Mazing Man in tone. (Hmm… why doesn’t DC serialize their backlist like you do?)
Thanks, Torsten!
The difference between the web and print market struck me when I had long time print readers new to the site who had trouble figuring out how to read the comic online.
Also, while checking out some of my favorite print authors and artists, I was struck by how many top science fiction creators had truly crappy, out of date website designs. And what low traffic they got. I dunno, maybe that’s par for the course: I remember Frank Kelly Freas couldn’t use a computer or a microwave oven. Too much time with imaginary science, not enough practical experience with what-is-right-now.
Also, when you see world famous authors and artists with fifty followers on twitter, something is up. Either their readership isn’t online, or their work isn’t interesting. If that author or artist can sell 100,000 books, then their market interests somebody, but that market is elsewhere.
Some have a ready-made online audience. Boffo. For others, you might as well be starting from scratch.
If you’re an independent author without a lot of support, you have one hell of an uphill battle. Which I found out. I sincerely doubt most authors have the determination or financial resources to pull it off. For awhile there, I was certain I was just throwing money I really couldn’t afford down a well.
Fortunately, things turned around, but I sweated it.
PS: Something else I wanted to mention. There’s been a major change in the way Google and other search engine algorithms rank websites: as I recall, adistantsoil.com was ranked #4 when you searched for A Distant Soil five years ago. No longer the case, obviously. I’m sure that has a lot to do with my pushing my site, providing more and more content, advertising, and increasing traffic. Someone searching for me online now no longer has to dig through a lot of unofficial material.