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
  

Squidoo - One, Two Clicks on You (and that's about it, really)

One of the hardest things you can do when trying to make anything popular - blogs, webcomics, whatever - is promoting it to people who have no clue what your stuff is about. Squidoo (the love child of Seth Godin and . . . his ego, I imagine) claims that by building lenses (single-page websites that are the go-to for whatever it is you want to know) you can not only deliver more traffic to your own pages and sites you love, you can also make money doing it through affiliate programs (ala promoting related books to your topic) and Google ads.

A promising lure, to be sure, or at least it would be if it didn't involve just as much work as trying to promote the blog/webcomic/etc. that you're trying to promote in the first place.

The amazingly ironic thing that needs to be understood is that the idea of inviting folks to build and keep their topic to a single, all-encompassing page is in fact pretty spiffy (and if you're short on ideas for trying to give people reasons to visit your site, it'll certainly help you fluff out whatever your topic is) and the ability to easily make money off the usual avenues certainly doesn't hurt either. The problem isn't that it doesn't deliver as far as allowing you to create a nice one-stop shop goes ('cause, well, if you've got the content, the pages pretty much write themselves), but that all this stuff isn't the great shortcut it's promised to be.

If you're looking for a way to make quick landing pages that do what they're supposed to (i.e. direct traffic to your site), then Squidoo's pretty good. Heck, use the Ever project (a Squidoo sub-section) to help steer you in the right direction and lock in your bragging rights , because if you can claim you've got the Deadliest Webcomic Ever, or even the Cutest Furry Ever, you'll have that much advantage over everything else, and a well-crafted, thoughtful lens is great stumble-bait. If nothing else, you'll have a clue what you need to accentuate and come up with for a page you can actually control the CSS on.

The best way it appears to use Squidoo to your advantage seems to be as follows:

1. Make as many freaking lenses as possible. Don't make them ALL the same topic, but it helps to have at least a few that're related enough to each other that once you have a person lured in with one, they'll visit the rest. Unrelated lenses help show off your general prowess. Making a Lensography (a lens about your lenses) is basically the Bingo Freebie Square of Squidoo lenses.
   
2. Read up on how to make the best lenses - this typically involves all the good things that go into any good website - polls, interactivity, a few book recommendations, and other useful things.
   
3. Use StumbleUpon for Quick Traffic Boosts (and hope it sticks)
   
4. ?????
5. Profit!
   

I can't give a great recommendation one way or the other about Squidoo. If you're just looking for a quick way to make a page that you know is at least good practice, by all means use it and more power to you. If you can go in with a pack of your friends and quickly clobber the system through sheer group effort, it might work out. If you're willing to put in a LOT of effort for a system that may or not pay off, go for it.

I'll say this much though: It's not a magic bullet, it's not that simple to try (no matter how much it claims to be), aside from the possible Newbie Bonus you might get there's typically not enough traffic you'll get there that you couldn't get just from promoting your own site, and there's very little community to speak of.

Try it by all means, but don't bet the farm on it.

Why I use Twitter

Well, if I expect you guys to use Skribit every now and then to ask questions, I ought to answer them. One of the more recent ones (since I totally have no clue about affilate urls) is asking a simple question: Why do I use Twitter?

On the surface, Twitter makes up a lot of things that don't make sense, and yet Twitter is probably the one application I'd use even if I wasn't blogging, webcomicing, or trying to have some other sort of Get-Rich-Scheme going on. Hopefully I'll hit most of the good points as to why.

• On an ideal internet, there would be no wasted / duplicated efforts.
  I have the forum accounts, the blog, the webcomic, Project Wonderful, Entrecard, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, etc. etc. etc... on my ideal internet, all of these various accounts would work together where even if I was only able to keep up with a few, I could still provide everyone else who sees those other alternate accounts a way to tell that I was still putting out fresh content, everything interlinked with everything else (at least to the point that I'd be willing to let it link up), and in doing so I hopefully would be able to lead people towards the parts of my internet experience I take the most pride in (i.e. the stuff I actually put effort into). Twitter is compatible with many different accounts I already use (and with things like TwitterSig, can even be brought into the forums as well), so I can use Twitter for sweet, fresh content across many accounts.
• Twitter lets me keep up with everyone else.
  Dad keeps threatening (jokingly) to get a twitter account of his own just so he can respond, and strangely the idea doesn't spook me like it should. Part of it is 'probably' because I wouldn't mind convincing a few meatspace folks to start using twitter anyway, but also because it allows me to link together more systems. By having only one system that needs updating (Twitter) I can still have new content on the blog, or on facebook, or whatever other systems will let me integrate Twitter in with their stuff, so they know I've not completely abandoned X account.
  
• I don't need to be online to Twitter.
  One of the real things that made twitter take off for me was being able to post from my cell phone. In fact, it was designed with this in mind, so it's no surprise that it's one of Twitter's strengths. I can go to events, parties, and conventions and be able to post about events almost as they happen. This is pretty much what I did with Furry Weekend Atlanta this past week, and as I said before, the further my twitter posts go, the more useful they are.
• Twittering is Trivial.
  Writing blog posts is hard. Drawing Comics is hard. Coming up with utterances of 140 characters or less is easy. Hence why it makes an ideal candidate for being the most updated of the available systems; since it takes almost no time at all, posting lots of stuff in a very small time frame is easy, and likewise, posting only a little bit over lots of time is also pretty simple. Also, nobody really cares if you're being off-topic on Twitter or not, because it's a fleeting medium; anything you say will be overwritten later (even if it IS archived, people have to want to dig back to see it)! Hence...
  
• Twitter has a very loose structure.
  Post whatever sounds good. Post an interesting link, or a witty thought, or a funny thing you overheard. Chances are good people will like it given that they like you enough to follow you, so why not? You don't have to worry about theming, and because there's only 140 characters worth of stuff to say at any given time, you can't hold long dissertations.

Now, some things make this easier than others. Mostly this means one of two methods besides posting from the twitter page:

1. SMS messaging (because it means I don't HAVE to be at my computer to post).
   Note: You want to make sure you have a generous texting plan if you're this serious about this route. It's way too easy to twitter too much when you're on the road with little else to do.
   
2. Twitterbar (A Firefox extenstion that allows me to post from my address bar, so I don't have to go to the webpage to post). This is more "So I don't have to interrupt my train of thought" type twittering.
   

There are lots of extensions/applications/mashups designed for Twitter, so you can pick and choose which one is most useful for your internet experience.

Hopefully this explains what possesses a girl like me to use a system that somehow encourages her to post about strange smells of old ravioli and floating cigarette butts. Even if it doesn't, consider this: Twitter lets me keep up with everyone else's stuff, including things like reminding people to sign up for BarCamp Atlanta. A perfectly good geek gathering would have happened right under my nose if not for someone posting about it on Twitter just in time for me to sign up.

Bloglines - RSS that's Actually Useful

On any given day I can be jumping between one of four different computers, and when you're doing that, RSS feed systems tied to any one computer's browser can seem downright antiquated. And yet I still wanted to use RSS - something which so many freaking articles have been written about how useful it is that I sort of felt stupid (and a little hypocritical) for not hopping onto a few feeds myself.

Since I seemed to do just about everything else online, it made sense to try and find an online RSS reader. Nothing complex, just a way to follow what I want to follow without having to have a special Firefox extension or something equally inconvenient.

Enter Bloglines. The simplest way to put it is that it just works; input the account info, find the feeds you want, and add them. It keeps up with which posts you've already read, so you always come back to new data (if there's any to begin with). The more sites you follow, the easier it is, and the faster you can just go and get what you're after. Less time spent hunting for blogs means more time to get back to work.

And hey, it makes following my blog (and everyone else's) that much easier, right?