In 2007, I was part of a panel at the Birmingham International Comic Show and there was plenty of advice offered on web comics creation, and I figured it was high time I shared some of it on downthetubes. Many comics creators are now creating strips for the web raqther than print, but are there dos and don'ts? Is it worth all the time and trouble? And, most importantly, how do I get people to read it?
First things first. Don't be under any illusion that a web
comic is going to make money immediately! "A
webcomic costs next to nothing, a print anthology costs a bomb," feels
Smallzone publisher and distributor Shane Chebsey, tallking
about web comics on a thread for the Smalzone forum.
"A web comic is on a screen (and it sometimes hurts my head to read them), however,
they can reach lots of people, a print comic is an object to treasure, but will
only reach a few folks. Neither are likely to make you any money," he added cynically,
"so unless you love comics don't do it!"
Daniel
Merlin Goodbrey, a comic creator and new media lecturer based out
of St Albans, England and one of the real web comic experts on the panel
reckoned you needed about 10,000 unique users before you could start to
make money from associated merchandise (t-shirts, print comic sales collecting
the strip etc.) That doesn't, of course, mean you shouldn't start making
merchandise available from Day One. If you want to see samples of his work,
check out the impressive web site e-merl.com.
"Brand Awareness"
The most important thing about web and mobile comic formats
is that you are raising the profile of your creation, what companies call
"raising brand awareness". Several good strips have been picked up for
print collection as a result of web publication.
Cost wise, the only real expense to creating a webcomic is your time and
materials. There are several places you could run a web comic: ComicSpace, DrunkDuck, Web
Comics Nation to
name but a few. Most of these do not charge for storage space. (The same
goes for ROK Comics, which I run,
which is geared to mobile phone delivery, but as you can see from the sample
on the left, you can run the strips on web sites and some blogs, too).
You can also run comics on blogs and in other places for
free without the expense of setting up and paying for web space. I've
started a blog as
well as bought a domain name for a more traditional site for the SF
strip, Ex
Astris,
currently pointing to pages on downthetubes.net, because it means artist
Mike Nicoll can add images as well easily if he wants to, as part of
the promotion purposes.
Promoting Your WebComic
When it comes to promotion, there's nothing more effective initially than telling your friends about your strip by good old e-mail. Consider including a sample of the strip in your email (just make sure the file size isn't too large) as well as links to where your webcomic can be found online. Michael Jantze, who publishes The Norm, mails out his strip daily to subscribers, as do many other webcomic creators.
If you're clever with HTML and stuff, one way of promoting your strip is to create a way for people to add an 'embed' to their own sites which displays the latest episode of the strip and links through to your site(just how Amazon ads work). That way, other web site owners get 'free content' on their site they don't have to worry about updating and you get a higher profile and, hopefully, trackback for your creation.
There are several people out there who have got promotion down to a fine art. Thomas Cochrane, who releases a collection of his strip Fat Man in 2008, tells me he has a slew of places he regularly updates to push the strip, including a Flickr account. All of this helps to raise the strip in terms of search engine profile, which, for Thomas, should pay off in terms of PR when the book is launched.
There are also several comic aggregator sites such
as Online
Comics where you can also promote your strip, as well as via
a MySpace page, a Facebook page -- the possibilities are pretty endless
and growing all the time. Just bear in mind that the more you set up,
the more you have to work on when it comes to keeping them updated!
And keeping them updated is VERY important, the most important thing
being the strip itself. I don't know how often most creators update their
strips but Nick Miller over at Team
Sputnik manages
to add an image or cartoon every day to that site's associated blog
but I think that as long as you can add something once a week, possibly
more (and the big web comic sites manage a daily or bi-weekly publication
schedule!) then that will ensure more 'hits' and a bigger audience...
providing the strip is a good one in the first place of course!
Making Money
As mentioned above, there's no guarantee that creating a webcomic will make you any money but if you get an audience, the chances of just that increase. Most web comic creators will tell you, howver, that they make money from related merchandise (t-shirts, for example) rather than the strip itself. That said, if someone likes your work it can bring you work in terms of commissions, as I've found with editing downthetubes for almsot ten years. The tipping point, as mentioned, would seem to be around 10,000 unique readers.
Other ways to make money would be to include affiliate ads on your site - check out Commission Junction for a range of these, or just sign up for an online book stroe's referral scheme. You can also make money selling banner ads, using services such as Project Wonderful or Google AdSense.
As well as raising the profile of your comic to mobile users, comics-to-mobile service ROK Comics also offers creators a 50-50 revenue share on profits from sales and WAP partner page views for any Pro Comics they create, as well as simply offering the opportunity for creators to just have fun and create free to view strips on web and mobile using the 'freefall' option. Creators who are giving the service a try include Keith Page, Paul Harrison-Davies, David Lloyd, Josh Alves, Rich Diesslin, David Hailwood and others.
And Finally...
While making some money from creating a web comi is a bonus, the main thing about making web comics is, surely, to never lose sight of why you are doing it - to express yourself, to have fun and be creative! Be it in print, web or mobile, there's nothing more satisfying.
Web Links on downthetubes
• Creating Comics for Mobile using ROK Comics
• Online
Comic hubs and some links to British web comic creators
• Online
Comic Creation Tools
• Creating
mobile content,
including mobile comics
External Links
• Creating
WebComics Thread on the Smallzone Ning Forum
• E-Merl.com
• Comic
Book Creator Guide? Where Do I Begin? (By writer Cameron Corniuk)
• Create
Your Own WebComic by Daniel Punch
