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!

How to get 75.49% More Readers without Changing (much of) Anything

Finally, Google Analytics shows off its usefulness. Having so much raw data at your fingertips can only be so beneficial if you know how to use it, and whether you average 6 hits a day (like this blog's index page), or 600, it's still fairly obvious when you have a nice 'spike' in your stats.

And of course, if there was a simple, quick fix to getting stats, readers, money, etc., people would have figured it out well before now. There is, however, a pretty simple process to finding quick fixes, because the more things you try to do for a stat boost, the sooner you have to stumble across SOMETHING that works. And yes, it couldn't be much simpler:

1. Experiment. Do something new; it doesn't have to necessarily be something new to the comic. Add some commentary to older pages. Get some new advertising. Go post in a few places you haven't been before.
   
2. Analyze. Using Google Analytics (or whatever other metrics you have), by the next day you can already tell if your brilliant plan is working or not.
   
3. Tinker! If it's working, do it more! If it's not, stop and/or find a new way of doing it.
   

Yes, even your comic has to E.A.T. sometime. Google Analytics couldn't make it easier; because you can tell where your referral links are coming from, it's trivial to trace down which links are being the most effective, or if a source is just sending you a lot of hits that immediately bounce, so you can weed out the ones that just give you a lot of noise from the ones that give you new, genuinely interested fans.

You now have an awesome way to measure the performance of whatever experiments you do, and as long as you're learning something (anything, really) each time you try something new, the better the results get.

And for those wondering: the 75.49% spike is from a well-timed post made to the Furrtive Livejournal Community. You guys are awesome. :)

Project Wonderful, Google Analytics, and Experimenting with the Website

Been busy on a lot of things (not the least of which is end-of-semester prep) along with trying to figure out what else is good to do for the website. Consider this a random-dump post versus anything else.

• Google Analytics is still in the "Well it's interesting, bot how useful is it?" category. It's one thing to know you have X% of a bounce rate, but another to understand how much any given change can reduce that rate. And while Funneling and Goals are nice, on a non-defined page that isn't really selling anything (except perhaps either donations and/or Project Wonderful ads), it's only so useful.
  
• Speaking of Project Wonderful, I'm trying out some new ads by these folk, in order to take a little pressure off of the donation meter. I receive (almost) as big a percentage off of these as I do from donations, even though the current amount is still just pocket change.
• Cast Images are coming soon (while comic pages are still needing to be done, cast images are surprisingly quick to do) ; I intend on posting them in packs of 4 at a time, due to the large number of characters we have so far (there's at least 20 'main' characters right off the bat . . . Not as many of them are visible at any given point, but that's still a huge amount of people compared to most other webcomics). In the meantime, for those looking to get a sneak preview, already-completed images are showing up at DeviantArt before they end up here. They're just the images through; the text to go with these images will arrive when they show up on the website.

Until next time, folks!

Who Else Wants Awesome Readership Statstics? (Hint: It involves Google!)

My Dad influences me than I care to admit. Even when it comes to Last Resort, he ended up getting me to try out blogging on the comic, and so it's no surprise that I'm also trying out Google Analytics now (after much insistance) as well. Granted, I only did it after I decided the stats I was receiving from Xepher already weren't 'good enough', but...

What It Is: Stat tracking. Keeps up with visitors, pageviews, bounce rate (how many people only look at the first page), time spent on the site, where they come from (but not where they go), etc. Try different things on your page to tweak the numbers, and track stuff going on. Did I mention it's a free Google product?

Why You Care: Why DON'T you care? Starting a comic means finding some way to get readers, and this allows you to not only keep track of who visits, but where they go, what they see, how they get there, and (possibly most importantly) when they leave. Granted, certain 'goals' may not be as useful for someone doing comics as it is for a normal online business, but if and when you realize certain pages are bringing in the traffic over others, you take notice.

How It Works: Set up an Analytics account under your normal Google account. Add in a little javascript cookie to the bottom of all the pages on your site (if you're smart and coded in php like a good Lazy Hacker, this should only involve adding it to the footer file). Wait a day or two for your first results. Tweak accordingly.

My Attempts: Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to give a full analysis of the 'benefits' of this until I complete the first comic cycle in a week (in order to give the whole "70% new vistors" thing to calm down a bit) , so I can only glean out bits and pieces of information from working this so far.

• I've got a frickin' high bounce rate. Granted, it's a comic on a page with very little other additional information, so either a lot of people are turning away from the comic on the first go, or there's a lot of people who just read it and then go on.
  
  • My exit rate on the first comic ain't that great either. Probably as time goes on, I'll need to include some more information on it, like commentary and stuff.
    
• I have some . . . interesting results from being able to get more information from referrals than just who came from where. I'm not surprised that I had several other xepher.net sites referring to me; that's just the newsbox. That DeviantArt still brings in good traffic is surprising (considering that I thought nobody went to that account).
  
  • According to the pages-per-visit information, I seem to get 'better' traffic from it too (as opposed to the Belfry, which brings in a lot of traffic, but not much that sticks around for very long) The obvious drawback is that it's all from spots that don't bring in 'much' traffic individually.
    
• A lot of the more 'interesting' search strings have disappeared now; I suspect it's from moving the blog to different hosting. I've started a secondary profile for it, so the results from that should come in soon.
  
• Lots of people are still using lastresort.xepher.net instead of www.lastres0rt.com. And that includes direct traffic.
  
• Whichever one of you came here using their Nintendo Wii: You cracked me up when I saw that stat. You rock!
  

I've not watched the tutorials, gone through the FAQ or anything else at this point, so there're probably a few more tricks up its sleeve, but so far I can already see that Google Analytics is a vast improvement over my previous statistics system; the bounce/exit rate data alone is enough to spur some change. It may seem silly to care 'this' much about your statistics, but if you're gonna try and make changes to your site anyway, why not have a reliable system that can provide tons of depth about your site?

Apparently Google loves a Good Blog as much as the rest of us.

Yes, I watch my statistics obsessively sometimes. When Google starts finding the crazy things people type into search engines and find me by, I can't help but chuckle a little (and wonder which ones are worth the second thought)

A list of search terms people apparently used, in no particular order or significance besides the hell of it:

• Full of Win. I knew my obsessiveness about buffers had to come back sooner or later, though I wonder what the people who found this page thought they were after.
• Wikipedia Notability. Well, since I had been fighting like hell to get the Wikinews article published in the first place, I'm glad some of my karma came back to me. (In case anyone was wondering who "Jigsaw" is in the comments . . . Great disguise, I know :-p)
• Kid Friendly Vampires. Okay, I know my article on Schlock Mercenary and Family-Friendly comics in general gets a little more press than the others, but this one threw me for a loop. Although I suppose a fuzzy, tiny vampire would have some kid's appeal.
• Drawing Tips on Pin Ups. This and several variants (including apparently "Sexy how to use restraints") has been getting search engine life for a while now. Probably a sign I should do another article on that.
• How to Make your Webcomic a Success, and variants thereof. Lots of variants. Tip #1, apparently, is looking like you have a clue.

All things considered... I should really put more energy into this blog than I currently do. Search still works, at least a little.