Your Comic's Survival Depends on This Book!

You may be a damn good artist, but in the end if you expect to keep a webcomic going for a certain number of years you have to find some way to make money off it -- if not to support yourself, then at least to support your habit. This is where The Economics of Web Comics (2007) comes in, because while it may not look like much, it's one of the few books that actually helps you figure out how you're going to see a profit from your work along with avoiding the common business pitfalls of other comics.

Production Values: This book is a self-published job and makes no attempt to hide it. The cover is luridly red, there's pixelation on the back cover, and I played "Name that Font" with this piece. There's no pictures in the book - tables of facts, yes, but not pictures. For a webcomics book, this is unheard of. The best guess I can give is that the author did a research paper for a college course, slapped a cover on it, and called it a book without any further thought.

. . . Which, given that we're talking about largely self-published works to begin with, is ironically appropriate. Still, the book has "great personality".

Content: You won't find a thinner volume on actually turning webcomics into a business, which is just as well because it means he gets to the point within only a few pages of introducing a topic. What IS said is stated quite clearly, has plenty of numbers to back it up and satisfy the skeptic in you, and demonstrates effectively:

• Why micropayments failed.
  
• Why the print comics industry isn't offering its works online (or at least, in Marvel's current case, isn't offering current comics online).
• How webcomics demonstrate a lasting demand for older titles in a series compared to the "Month-by-Month" cycle of most print comics.
• How advertising, merchandising, and other common revenue streams for webcomics work.
  

Breeze-ability: You can't just pick up this book and digest it piecemeal; you can look at specific chapters, you can read the bold "Business Takeaways" and get the drift, but ultimately, this book is meant to be read through. The good news is that it doesn't matter because you can read this book pretty quickly anyway -- just keep in mind that it reads like a college paper.

Resourcefulness: As stated before, this book backs up its statements. It'll make you smarter, and it might even give you a clue what to do for your own comic, but you're not going to be consulting this book on a regular basis unless you're pretty much flailing your arms about how to justify spending as long as you do on your comic for so little money. The book doesn't tell you how to make your comic successful or even how to market it, just how to make your money once you've got the market.

The Controversial Factor: The book more or less blames Diamond for building itself into a monopoly in Comic Distribution, to the point that it choked off the entire print comics industry into what it is today. While most other webcomics folk will agree with you on this point (Ask Jeannie Breeden sometime about how much she had to shill her book online just to meet their initial preorder threshold!) just because of how hard Diamond makes it for independent publishers now, you'll earn yourself an earful if you try to tell that to the 'old school' folk.

The Verdict: If you think you're savvy enough to already know the general pitfalls and how-to of making money off webcomics, the book won't tell you much you don't already know. (Then again, if you were that smart you'd be telling the rest of us how to run OUR comics, wise guy.) It's a short read, though a little dry, and it gives you an idea of the state of the comic industry circa 2003 (though the book was written more recently, the available sources for research are a good bit older), which is to say it's close enough that it's still a perfectly valid outlook on the state of comics, online or otherwise. So yes, it's useful. Ugly, but Useful.

The book will warn you itself that the internet changes business quite drastically (and still does!) and so some of its notions might seem outdated (like the whole segue about micropayments), but the research and common sense are solid enough advice for any webcomic artist.

It may not be a book you'll always want on your shelf, but it's definitely a book to pass around.

Like this Review? There'll be more to come in the following weeks, so you'll want to subscribe to this blog to make sure you read the rest!

I'd like to talk about some Damn Useful Books!

I like big books and I cannot lie, you other artists can't deny...

Cheesy misappropriation of Sir Mix-a-Lot aside, if there's is one thing I do huge amounts of, (besides having random spurts of art evolution you folks may have noticed if you try to take the archives in all at once), I read lots of art books.

No. Really.

(And this isn't even all of them -- some of the less useful ones are still packed up with the other college things.)

The point of all this?

1. I read way more books on webcomics, art, character design/development, and other core details than I have any business reading at this stage. Most of these are useful and typically meet some level of minimum competency, though obviously some are better than others.
2. Books are not cheap.
3. Selling books, however, is good business, and if I can make a little back showing you which books are useful enough to be worth your dollar, then by all means!
   

So guess who just decided to become Amazon's puppet in the name of sharing all this lovingly extracted wisdom with you!

Now, no promises on this one -- The comic is already guaranteed to be weekly, but eventually I'll run out of books to talk about, not to mention that not all books are created equal -- The Art of Animal Drawing, for example, is almost all pictures, which almost guarantees that its review will be shorter than anything I could say about Scott McCloud's books.

Disclaimer: A lot of these books have my genre slant in them -- the animal books (for the furry stuff, natch) and the manga books because, well, that's part of my general style. More realistic / "American" style artists might not be interested in some of these. If they don't suit you, they don't suit you, but this is why I may cover certain types of books more than others. I never said I was going to be a one-stop source for these things; these just happen to be the books I think are most useful to me, and hence should at least be of interest to you. Heck, we might even have some MARKETING BOOKS tossed in (Gasp! Shock! Horror!) just because -- guess what? -- they're useful too.

Don't be fooled; just because it doesn't have "Webcomics" on the cover doesn't mean it still can't be a damn useful book. If you aren't already subscribed to the blog, you'll want to be, just to make sure you don't miss these.

If you have a book in the stack shown above you'd like me to get to before the others, be sure to say so in the comments! (oh, and there are a few books not pictured here, so you may as well ask...)

List of Books Reviewed So Far:

• The Economics of Web Comics (2nd Edition)
• The Art of Animal Drawing
  

One Simple Way to Generate More Money out of Project Wonderful (AKA "Why My Ads Started Getting Better")

Freshman Quad, January 19, 2008. Doesn't really have a whole lot of appeal, does it?

Sure, we kinda know what it is — probably a school space (or near a school space) of some kind, and a date. A fairly recent date. Interesting if we already had a bit of a clue, perhaps... but to the average person, it's still pretty mundane.

Freshman Quad, January 19, 2008 - Rare Snowfall at the Atlanta campus. Now this . . . we're getting somewhere. We know there's snow, in a place that doesn't normally get it. Hell, maybe people in the general area will be interested enough to see, now that they have information they didn't before.

Seem simple? Because it is.

I mention this in regards to Project Wonderful (as opposed to say, search engines like Google) because unlike most search engines / directories, most advertisers on Project Wonderful only see a few stats about your available advertising — what your stats are, what your space usually goes for, and the title of your site. Mebbe also a quick usericon that has a sample of your art, if it's worthwhile. Sure, maybe some advertisers (especially if they plan on dumping potentially hundreds of dollars into your site!) will look more closely, but not all. That makes your title one of the few things you can control regarding how advertisers view your site, and also one of the most important to get right.

The more information you have in there that seems worth having, the more it matters. In my own case, merely changing the visible title for those ad blocks from "Last Resort" to "Last Resort - Science Fiction Furry Comic" made a huge difference; by the very next day, I was seeing bids jump from 1 or 2 cents a day to THIRTY cents. Granted, I had also reduced the number of ads available on the site from two to one, so at least part of that could be due to
tightening up the purse strings, but they've been doing exceptionally well since. Also, on the blog page (which had a similar renaming on PW), prices did a similar jump there as well.

Granted, it assumes you know what you need to say to get people interested, but if you already have the site, why not give it a title that makes sure people know what you're about?

Have a better idea? Think I could possibly add something more appealing to my suggestions? Let me know!

10 Things Every Webcomic Creator Should Know (About Getting Rich)

1. The odds of making money off Webcomic X are against you. Do the math: there's approximately 11,000 webcomics out there, according to thewebcomiclist. Maybe 100 of those are making a decent amount of cash. That's less than 1% of all the comics out there.
2. The good news is, the same odds apply to almost any business field out there, Restaurants, Magazines, Bakeries... almost 90% of businesses fail in the first year, PERIOD. Consider yourself lucky that you're trying in a field that doesn't require significant financial outlays.
   
3. Making a webcomic doesn't have to be expensive, but it's not free either. If nothing else, your time and the money you could be making for that amount of time is the cost involved.
   
4. Don't think you can get away with doing less for your comic and still doing well. Yes, webcomics are a great place for artistic shortcuts, but people STILL give Tim Buckley about how much copypaste he does in Ctrl+Alt+Del.
   
5. The less work you do, the more you should have to show for it. People are far more forgiving if a beautifully done piece of work only shows up once a week. Likewise, if it's stick figures, you ought to have plenty of new material up often (unless you're Xkcd, in which case your writing better be what holds you up)
   
6. Some people will always be attracted to your work. Others won't. Not everyone likes manga, or furry, or superheroes, or hell, naturists. Deal with it and run from there.
   
7. As soon as you find the ones willing to help you out, keep them nearby as long as you can. Everyone needs a couple die-hards, groupies, whatever you want to call 'em, and if they're friends in high places, so much the better.
   
8. Nothing you do will result in a get-rich-quick scheme. This is the internet, after all. If we knew of one, everybody would be doing it.
   
9. A lot of things you do, on the other hand, will each net a little money. THIS is how you support yourself; a little here, a little there, and so on. In my case, we're talking a donations button, some Project Wonderful ads, and (coming soon) a little supplementary income from conventions. It's not even enough to cover tuition at this point, but for what's effectively eight month's worth of work, it ain't bad either.
   
10. The minute you stop looking for new ideas is the minute you start losing money. We're not saying you have to try a new hairbrained scheme each day, but paying attention to what you're doing and tweaking it to get rid of what doesn't work while capitalizing on what DOES work, will net you more in the long run.
    

So . . . if you're reading this, you probably haven't been paying attention to at least one of these details before now. Mind posting a comment to tell me which one? Curious minds want to know!

Like this Post? Lots of other people do, too! You should subscribe to my RSS Feed to make sure you can get more like it, along with all the other great posts on this blog!

Gaming Project Wonderful: Fewer Ads, Bidding Nothing Makes You More Money

When Project Wonderful first came out and approached the webcomic communities, people thought the new "Infinite Auction" model would revolutionize advertising as we know it. Finally, everyone thought, people would get paid what they were worth! Of course, nobody realized what "they were worth" actually meant.

Make no mistake, Project Wonderful is a clever system, and it's certainly more entertaining (and easier) to become an advertiser on there than ever before. The problem is that (like most advertising media), Project Wonderful is working in the Advertiser's favor, so it's up to the publishers to do everything they can to make sure their properties make as much as they can. Fortunately, it's easy to be both, and there's only a few things that need to be done to get the best results possible, to beat Project Wonderful:

1. Comb the Freebies. Sometimes bids go for $0.00 (as in absolutely free), and believe it or not, these things will allow you to use completely free advertising. By bidding on these, you force paying customers to pony up (which does at least a little good for the people offering the space, as even 1 cent of profit is better than making absolutely nothing), and/or you get some free airtime, which drives new traffic to the site and improves your own statistics (see below). Remember, you can only make a zero bid for two days at a time, and even if someone else already had a $0 bid on the slot, that just means that you can either force them to pay, or you'll get the spot once their two days runs out.
   
   The best way to do this is to use Firefox to access PW, search for a specific size ad, and target the ads with a $0.00 current bid and no minimum; then open up a huge number of tabs to bid on those zero-spaces once you've pulled out a good number to bid on. At least 25% of those will likely result in immediate high bids. Even if they're on lousy sites, it's exposure nontheless, and it's also an easy way to test out similar ads against each other (which allows you to E.A.T. on your ads prior to actually laying out some cash!)
   
   
2. Don't Be Picky. Waiting for a publisher to accept your ad is a drag, and likewise, you're missing out on money from each and every ad you do accept, because you get credited every 30 minutes! Even if you like one ad over another, keep in mind that everyone else's bids drive up the price of the one getting the top slot right now, so being picky is in nobody's best interest.
   
   Why? Because EVERY BID BUILDS ON THE OTHERS. Here's a quick demonstration of a typical bidding scenario on a single ad space:
   
   
   • Bidder A is willing to pay $1 on the space, but nobody else wants it. Even though A could pay, it is an unconstested bid, so A gets the slot for free, and the publisher gets no money even though A is willing to pay $1.
     
   • Bidder B comes along with a $0.00 bid, since he's looking for free advertising. Suddenly there are more bidders than spaces available, so bidding begins to come into play. Even though B is freeloading, it's still an active bid, and so A is finally forced to pay (it's only a cent, sure, but that's better than nothing!).
     
   • Bidder C comes along and bids $0.05. Now A has to pay $0.06 in order to keep C from claiming the space.
     
     
   In other words, the only way you get A to actually pay $1 is if someone bids up to $0.90 on the same slot at the same time. This is great for advertisers because it ensures they never pay more than they want to, but the only way publishers (i.e. you) get to see these huge returns is if a bidding war actually starts. Also, it means you shouldn't discourage smaller bidders, because their presence forces bidding wars and gets higher-paying advertisers to shell out more money. Bidders will often pull out when they realize they're being outbid, which is a pain in the ass in and of itself when you're counting on certain bidders to keep your prices high, so don't help the process along unless there's something REALLY wrong with a higher-rated ad than you're comfortable with.
   
   The best way to encourage bidding wars is to keep the number of ads available at any given time down to begin with, and that means showing the largest ads you can for a given space. Larger ads pay better (Note how the Skyscraper ad on the blog tends to outperform the banner ads on Last Resort's front page, even though the blog receives only a fraction of the traffic), and the more spaces you have, the more people you need to even be interested in advertising there to make a single cent (once again, the ads only start paying off when you have more bidders than available slots!).
   
   
3. Expect Logarithmic Returns on Traffic. Put bluntly, there are a lot of sites with very little traffic, and very few sites that get a lot of traffic. As you accrue more traffic, you should receive exponentially higher bids for that traffic because you are now competing with fewer and fewer sites that have the same level of traffic.
   
   This gets back to the initial problem again of furthering your exposure, but it also means that when you start to see an improvement in ads, it also means you're getting more/better traffic as well.

Keep in mind that Project Wonderful should not be your only source of income; while more consistent than donations, it can be incredibly hard to see worthwhile returns when starting out. The good news is that Project Wonderful can run alongside Google Adsense (Google's restrictions apply only to content-based ads; Project Wonderful doesn't care about content!) , and it can provide a new set of statistics for you to keep track of, giving you a better sense of where to put your ads (and also how to further improve your advertising gain!)

And when you realize how easy that can be, it's just wonderful.