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!

5 Stupid Blogging Mistakes That Even The "Experts" Do

This probably belongs under the auspices of my earlier article about Entrecard, but let's face it, there's only so freaking much you can say about widgets before you just have to come out and say it:

Some people just have bad blogs.

If you're reading this, don't think you're immune to it either. Not everyone's a interface genius, and there's a lot you could be doing to make things easier on your reader's eyes that you don't do already because you insist on having ads in this spot and columns wherever they can stick them. Because so many people insist on having the "Above the Fold" space as valuable as possible, they overlook the fact that people's eyes can't POSSIBLY process all that information at once! So even if your content is top-notch, your website's design could be scaring away timid readers.

Stupid Blog Mistakes could be the subject of its own blog in and of itself, but let's just stick to the first five major mistakes that I noticed before they make me want to crawl into bed from the headache they give me:

• Subverting Standardized Icons, Especially for RSS. Come on, people, it's a standardized icon for a reason. When I see that RSS Feed Icon, I know EXACTLY what is behind it and what I expect to find. If you change the icon, I have to think more than I should be.
  
• Having Giant Fonts! Your eyes can only parse a certain amount of 'focused space' at a time; ergo, if you want people to read at a certain distance, you adjust the size, otherwise you force reader's eyes to have to adjust their focus before they can continue reading, especially if you change sizes a lot. Simply put... hm, how should I put this...
  LARGE FONTS TAKE LONGER TO READ!
• Cluttering your pages! We get it, ads make money online. You also make more money for having fewer larger ads (ala project wonderful) versus having lots of little ones. That means you should consolidate what you've got so it takes up as little space as possible.
  
• Monetizing too much. You know what "Your Ad Here" REALLY says? "I want money and nobody's willing to pay me what I think I'm worth, so you get to look at this ugly thing instead!" It makes you look desperate, in other words.
  
• Monetizing too little. Money left on the table doesn't really help you... Okay, so it may cause people to demand what they can't have and so eventually when you cave in you make more, but in the meantime you're selling yourself short.

If you don't spot what you're (probably) doing wrong yet, don't worry... it probably just belongs in the next article. In the meantime, how about leaving a comment and confessing to a few mistakes for me to include in the next article? I'd love to be able to point to some examples...

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!

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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.

A Painful Lesson in Hesitation

Yesterday I signed onto the Anime Weekend Atlanta Website to discover that tables in Artist's Alley had all filled up. I'd only found out about them opening on the 10th, so at some point between the three days it took me to decide to go for it, they'd sold out; a rather gut-wrenching reality check about how dangerous doubt actually is.

'Doubt' is fear. Fear causes good ideas to get tempered down into mediocre, presumably more palatable ones, and in the process changes the idea and turns it into garbage. Fear is what people go for in trying to hit a 'good' market, in second guessing themselves, in trying to listen to everyone when they tell you "Nobody likes [your genre], get a new one".

In short, I'm sick of fear.