An Admission

Somewhere in between trying to glean some sort of clue from CopyBlogger, following GapingVoid, combing my stats on Google Analytics and trying to figure out how to make more than a few pennies a day on Project Wonderful, it hits me that I have no clue what I'm doing. This is a little more significant than it sounds, especially considering that I'm admitting it on a blog where I claim to talk about how to make a comic bigger, better, and God forbid, profitable.

The truth is, whether I care to admit it or not, is that if I had a clue what I was doing and wasn't merely just parroting what I've heard several times over from Blog A and Convention B, I might be doing a little better than I am now. The keyword is "might", as I have a better understanding for the amount of time one has to invest in a webcomic before people actually start reading, but at the same time I know this is a certain level of arrogance. It takes time, sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't short-circuits to the process. However naive I may be about my own chances of success, I know that merely "doing it for myself first" and other suicide notes of the starving artist are not enough.

The approach of the blog has been a little different than that of the comic, and perhaps that's a mistake. Reading my random thoughts aimed for someone who knows less than I do isn't interesting to the average reader of Last Resort, and believe me, I can tell. Just because I can figure out how to somehow make my blog read more like something I find on one of those "how to blog" blogs because I somehow think that because I like reading the things, that regurgitating it with a focus on webcomics somehow makes it more special doesn't necessarily mean it WORKS.

Sure, the idea is pretty straightforward — show how to run a webcomic with some of the tricks that bloggers have used for a while, sound halfway intelligent, and get some ancillary karma out of the deal — but the truth is that while I'm still learning a lot of this, anyone who already wants to think like this is either already going to the source or doing it better, and anyone who doesn't know better probably doesn't even know where to find this.

So . . . maybe it's time to change things up a little. I don't think I'll totally hold my tongue about stuff that sounds like good ideas, but I might hold my tongue on some of it, at least until I get the blogger-jargon taste out of my mouth for a couple days first.