TWCL

[Bengo]

...what do you think will be the biggest business challenges you will face?

The question is meant for cartoonists who would like to make a full or part-time living from their webcomic, independently, but all are welcome.

I am working on a chapter on this topic and I would benefit from hearing what's on people's minds.

Anyone prefering privacy can use the spacious form on [url]PsychedelicTreehouse.com[/url]

I've received awesome input from here before. I hope you're up for it again.

[KEZ]

I think the biggest challenge for ANY webcomic creator is expanding the viewing audience. A larger audience obviously leads to increased funding (either through selling of merchandise or ad space), but the webcomic audience is notoriously...err, "in-bred?" I don't mean genetically, obviously. It's just incredibly hard to market a webcomic to people who don't know what what a webcomic is, on or off-line. Instead of getting new readers who have never read a webcomic before, we all share the same audience.

"Oh! I found your webcomic from a link on *insert comic here*"

Sound familiar? WHERE do we get new readers? HOW do we? Ever tried a PW ad on non-webcomic site? FAIL. And I don't mean to bash PW at all. PW is one of the best things to happen to webcomics since free comic hosts appeared.

Recycling the same readers means less money to go around for all of us. No average reader is going to buy items from more than 1 or 2 comics, no matter how much merchandise is offered. Webcomic sites peak out a certain visitor number, because there just aren't enough readers. I think we use PA as the standard? Yeah, well, with only that many visitors to go around, only a very few of all webcomics, regardless of how good they are, can fully support the artist.

We need more people, and getting them will be the [costly] problem for the professional.
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[Bengo]

An absolutely brilliant post.

A few minor remarks inspired by your words: The audience does seem to be growing. The number of people in the US who read webcomic online seems, from shaky data, to be growing perhaps 7-10% year. This is great, but what about when it stops?

Don't give up on off comic ads. I have one now, a blog by a fellow who has lost a huge amount of weight and is still going, that performs. We have to keep experimenting and trying to reach out.

Europe is exploding. Granted, my comic Lil Nyet is set in Europe but the country figures I checked out for it the other day blew my mind. Huge readerships in Finland? Estonia? Slovakia? As bandwidth comes down in price, we'll find readers there, but they are used to the best and expect it.

South America is also catching up. It may pay to translate certain comics into Spanish.

Alright, KEZ has us off to a stellar start. Someone say something mild and modest to ease the pressure on the rest of us.

[tpiro]

1. Writing a good comic. Man, if only I could do this consistently!

2. Reaching people outside of the webcomic community. KEZ summarized this issue pretty well. I'll just add that it's just so prohibitively expensive to do un-targeted advertising (if you don't have a specific niche for your comic). I've tried using ADSDAQ to do advertising, and the hit rate was ridiculously low compared to how much value I can get through PW.

On top of this, even if you have a niche comic, it can be hard. For example, if you have a fantasy comic and you try to advertise to fantasy fans, those people will only frequent your site if you are of the highest quality. If you're just beginning or are not professional in your presentation, these people will not have patience for you. They are not part of the webcomic community and do not appreciate the growing pains it takes to mature as a comic artist. You're no longer competing with just other fantasy comics, but instead all the books, movies, and other junk that those fantasy fans enjoy.
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[Dutch]

First off, it would be gaining a readership that would make the move workable. If there was a special plan or guide to work through to find it, it hasn't been written yet.

I agree with KEZ. The general audience here is so insular all most of us are really doing is taking the odd reader from someone else's back pocket without really reaching out and finding new sources. It's probably the one area that has consistently frustrated me in this regard. I don't mind saying openly that my strip deserves a wider audience than it's getting, but I'm also aware that what I provide doesn't cater for the wider webcomic audience in its current incarnation. It's a fact I've had to accept and live with because I know I'm not going to change what I'm doing to gather in those other general webcomic readers. The moment I do that, my strip is no longer going in the direction I think it should.

At the same time though, finding that new source of readers is another issue.
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[vulpeslibertas]

Time. I have no time. It takes way too long to make a decent comic and that uber-billion page script is never going to get posted as a fully finished comic. Think twice before starting out on some epic, then think twice again. Life can change a lot quicker than your comic updates. Any comic that's going to take more than 3 years to finish off is bound to see a few lifestyle/job/school/I don't give a shit about comics anymore phases.
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[Lord Pandar]

Well, the only webcomics I've ever heard mentioned in casual conversation off of the internet (not that I've ever brought the topic up myself) are Penny Arcade, Cyanide & Happiness, Dinosaur Comics, & Savage Chickens. I've never read into the history of comics to see how they became successful, but there may possibly be a connection between them (beside that they're all super-huge & have humour that appeals to a sizable sector of the population)
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S*P*Q*R

[katastrophe]

One thing (beyond those mentioned above) that may help expand the audience is the growing popularity of web-novels. I've mentioned elsewhere that I've had good luck advertising on places like Tales of Mu; it's a niche market, with only a few major players at the moment, but it's an up-and-coming, powerful one.

The trouble there is that you're attracting highly dedicated readers, who are going to have higher standards for things like character development, worldbuilding, and ability to construct a grammatical sentence. Probably good for us, though.

Essential for both expanding readership and succeeding as a comicker, I think, is variety. An awful lot of the comics I see can be summed up as:

1) Video gamer comics.
2) RPG comics.
3) Fantasy/scifi quest comics (some overlap with #2).
4) "Roommate" comics.
5) Superhero or superpower comics.

Nothing wrong with that, and many of 'em are good, but the thing is that when you're sharing an already niche market with a horde of others, it gets harder and harder to stand out. I've skipped on some very good comics because, hey, I already have enough RPG humor in my life. And I'm more likely to stick with the stuff I've been reading for years, in those cases, than pick up a new comic. I've already invested in the old stuff.

If you can get out of those categories, do. If you can't, make yourself stand out. Do something a bit different than the generic-medieval fantasy setting or Yet Another Damned Vampire.

A final thing -- 'cause I don't think anyone's mentioned it -- is to act like a professional. Update regularly and on-time. Be polite to your readers. Don't get into flame-wars and don't air your dirty laundry in public -- it'll appeal to some, usually the loudest segment of your audience, but the vast majority will be turned off by the never-ending drama and fade quietly away. Keep your site as nice-looking as possible. If you say you're going to do something (from posting voting incentives to monitoring a forum), do it. Act like this is a job.

(For the record -- I really doubt I'll ever make a part, much less full, time living from my comic; but I wouldn't mind making some money some day, and I find it easier to act like a pro from the start than to change my ways mid-arc. I've also been doing this about three months, so my authority is nil. Good intentions and all that....)
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[plughead]

This is a great thread, and it got me thinking... sorry, this post is prolly a bit off-topic...

I wonder, what thoughts do people have on the CHANGING DEMOGRPHIC of readership?

Webcomics have been around for +-10 years... in that time, what's happened to the earliest adopters? Are they still reading webcomics in any capacity? How have their tastes changed, if at all? Do they crave something more substantial, or do they still like the same stuff they did as youths?

The early adopters were prolly teens/college students at the time, and now they're all pursuing careers, buying cars, getting married, having kids and settling down... they have MONEY, but do these people have TIME for webcomics, or were webcomics simply a PHASE they went through?

Webcomics may in fact be an entirely transient youth phenomenon marked by such things as levity, simplicity and teen relationship issues. There really aren't a lot of SERIOUS, truly adult-themed webcomics that appeal to a more mature reader. The most popular webcomics seem to be targeted towards the 16-25-ish crowd, followed closely by all-ages and family-friendly strips.

Beyond that, there's a steep drop-off in terms of both popularity and financial viability for webcomics aimed at mature readers.

My first thought would be that one of webcomicdom's biggest challenges is to evolve and mature to capture the tastes, desires, respect and money of adult audiences, but on second thought, that sounds RIDICULOUS.

Imagine. A "Law and Order" webcomic?

Yeesh.
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Take care

Stef

http://sarahzero.com

[jinxtigr]

Scheduling. That's time but it's also committment. I've been hanging around internet furfandom since 1996, so in my world people make actual money (not necessarily a living) by drawing and selling art, but that doesn't constitute a comic- and I've been writing stories since around then, but that doesn't constitute earning money.

If you want to be drawing a comic and telling a story with it and doing something that makes money, that's a lot of semi-related things all of which have to be done. The comic doesn't actually make you money but without it you drop out of sight. The art that will sell for money doesn't necessarily tell a story but you have to keep your chops up because while there is huge demand for some sorts of art in some audiences, the competition is mind-blowingly brilliant and you'll never be as good as some of it. The story that you want to tell won't necessarily matter to anybody, but your need to be telling it will cause a lot of things artistically to gel and that will color everything...

I used to think I was doing great by coming up with enough gumption to do ambitious things some of the time, and now I have to laugh. It's like any artistic, desirable field- it's Red Queen land, you run as fast as you can to stay in the same place, and run much faster to get anywhere.

If you're talking about business challenges, it's definitely the latter- and it becomes life lessons on having more determination and discipline than the next guy (not talent, because there are lots of great artists who are lazy or blocked by self-doubt). The first order of business is to get to work, lots of it, in lots of different ways.

The PERSONAL challenge in that, if you're the kind of person who will decide to do a crazy thing like that (and you can subsist indefinitely while it fails to catch on), is to thrive on it. You cannot really do great unless you can find joy and gratitude in the simple fact that you get to do this thing. If you have that, it's infectious and it'll help your business just like if you were in a service industry (protip- you are!) and delighted with your customers. If you let the ridiculous amount of work you have to do get you down so you're sullen and resentful, that's infectious too and it'll hurt your ability to entertain.

For me, what this all means is that my daily routine has to bring me some joy, with or without success. I can't take on stuff that's horrible to do in the hopes that it will succeed. I have to evolve it in such a way that the actual working isn't making me miserable, whether or not the work is great stuff that day, and that means working out my schedule so it's controllable, managing my need to get better so it's not giving me a coronary, taking a minute to pet a cat or have a bagel for breakfast. Even after the daily comic is up, I'm not done- I do a daily watercolor for a special audience and that's become another committment (and probable income source, selling prints at cons) and I do webcomic reviews of which I have three in the backlog needing to be reviewed, and that's both networking and teaching myself how to find what's thriving in my OWN work so I can do it day in day out and not be miserable.

You can't do art entirely with an eraser. Everything's a mistake from some angle. I guess the biggest business tip is to be constructive- you have to keep building stuff, fearlessly, because that's what you do. Nobody's ever going to pay you for having the good taste not to draw a crap drawing, but people pay for crap drawings every day, when there's something in it they like and the artist liked.

You'll never get paid for having been right, only for having done something.
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[ttallan]

@plughead: Let me give you another perspective on the longevity question. When I started, in the mid-90s, all the wanna-be comic creators were self publishing either minicomics or periodical "floppy" comic books. There was a whole big crowd of us, some who'd been around longer than I have, and some who started around the same time, all riding the wave of the Independent Comics are Cool feeling that centred around Jeff Smith and Dave Sim and Colleen Doran and various others. By 2000, small press independent publishing had pretty well imploded, and it was pretty near impossible for anyone who wasn't truly outstanding to try to build a career in floppy comics. Sound familiar?

Many, if not most, of the self-publishers that I knew back then have since moved to the web in some form, though many still publish print books as well, usually graphic novels (Carla Speed MacNeil, and Mark Oakley, for example, are among my contemporaries now found on the web). Others dropped out. I expect the same can be said for the early adopters of webcomics-- those who really enjoy it are still around and will continue to be around no matter what form it takes. For some comics is a phase, but for others it is a lifelong... obsession. The market may evolve, but it won't disappear.

As for your discussion on mature comics, I think the definition of "mature" might need pinning down. A comic like Girl Genius is suitable for the 16-25 age range, but I suspect a lot of the readers are older, 30+. Is that "mature"?

Also, have you seen Paradigm Shift? That's a reasonably successful webcomic that is a pretty decent police procedural, for all that there are werewolves involved. Sort of Law and Order, in an X-Files kind of way.
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[KevinJ1971]

Just started reading this thread and it is surely one to watch I'll chime in when I get a little more time.
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Kevin P. Johnson
Creator of Strange City Heroes
www.strangedrawingsartgallery.com

[Moochava]

When I heard the Penny Arcade guys speak a few years back at PAX, one of the things they emphasized is how much their accountant-guy improved their revenue stream. And accountant-guy confirmed this; PA's advertisements, he said, were pulling in maybe half of what they could be making, or less.

So I think the worst thing for me is that I don't know ANYTHING about business. I mean, I'm a bright guy, and I don't give money to the Nigerian finance minister, but there are all these tricks, these break-even points, these chances to crest the wave of a trend, that I'm simply oblivious to, because I'm not in marketing and I don't have a degree in business. I can write good copy, but I don't know where or even how to sell it. Project Wonderful helps, but that's only one little trick, and I have no idea how many other clever marketing strategies I'm missing.

[KevinJ1971]

I'm with that guy! I don't know how to make money from nothing either.

I do know however that you can get google ads that pay way more than Project Wonderful but the problem there is that you need people to click on the ads to make money quicker. You are not allowed to get people to click on ads a bunch of times for you and you are not allowed to do it yourself. I've got both Project Wonderful and Google Ads on my site and so far I've made nothing. I also know that you need to eventually have a product to sell, shirts, comic books, toys whatever.
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Kevin P. Johnson
Creator of Strange City Heroes
www.strangedrawingsartgallery.com

[KEZ]

Optimization of a one's website is another huge issue for pro or semi-pro websites. Revenue from ads can make you as much--if not more--than merchandise, though for a long-lasting business, generally it's best and healthier for it to be the other way around. I could go on and on about it, since I work with a site on Keenspot.

So many webcomic sites are NOT set up to bring in revenue, only to showcase the comic. If you're not selling the comic, you're selling ad impressions, and you only GET ad impressions when you have the word context to go with them (usually. Some advertisers are not context based.) Since webcomics are a visual medium, it's up to the comic maker to WRITE stuff on the site, stuff pertinent to the comic, using code words like recent movie titles or techbabble to get the ads that pay. If you write nothing, or your set up is not friendly to webcrawlers, you don't get impressions.

This is the reason why Comicpress/wordpress is so popular now. It's set up for maximum SEO, maximum optimization period. More visits, more automation, maximum ad impressions with PHP elements....it's made to make money.

So, basically, another huge obstacle for those going pro is how to set up the blasted website to make money. There should be classes in this, really.
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