Olaf's comics blog

When I read on Twitter (thanks, @rkarolius) that someone were saying “Forget the Chat Roulette piano mashup, this is the best YouTube video of the week”, I was skeptical.

I was also wrong. This is the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in a very long time.

Dorling Kindersley Books has made this awesome video about the future of publishing. It is a must-see for everybody who’s interested in documentation, publishing (yes, that includes comics publishing), modern technology (yes, that includes webcomics), books or just awesome videos.

Watch it. That’s an order.

Today’s exercise for all of you webcomic creators out there: Open a new tab in your browser, and go to your comic’s homepage. Yes, the website you update every day.

Now, imagine that you are a new reader, and that you have never seen this comic before.

Would you stay?

I get the impression that many webcomics, especially story-based comics (it’s not that big a problem in gag-a-day comics) tend to scare away new readers. They come, they’re overwhelmed, they leave. While I personally like use of in medias res in stories, I would never open up a novel on page 54 and read it from there. If you make a webcomic in graphic novel format and the first thing you present to me is page 54, you’re not really giving me a choice, and I probably wouldn’t understand what the comic was about.

The first fix to this problem is the standard “link to first strip”. Giving the reader the opportunity to read everything from the beginning is a must-have for story-based comics. But many comics have this link featured only as a small text link under the current page.¹ That’s not really optimal for a link you want all your new readers to see. How about making an image link, a little bigger (say, the size of a half-banner? That’s 234×60 pixels, I think²), and putting this above the current comic? Yes, above: If you want people to read from the beginning, they shouldn’t have to scroll through page 54 and accidentally discover that amazing revelation you didn’t reveal until page 52.

Of course, you could also avoid the whole problem by making a splash page with links to a) the first page, b) the first page of the current chapter and c) the current page. Dr. McNinja is the champion of this. Just remember to add a fancy cover or something — splash pages are way too often boring to look at, and that makes them feel really useless (though in this case one could argue they’re not).

So then, the question is: What can you do to keep on to those of your readers who want to give your comic a chance, but don’t have time to read fifteen hundred pages to catch up on what is going on?

Here’s my suggestion. The first part is easy to do with a bit of coding, the second part requires perhaps rethinking the way you write comics:

1. Add a link to the beginning of the current chapter on the frontpage. Remember that whenever you start a new chapter, you must change this link, unless you get a script to do it for you automatically.
2. When writing comics, make sure that whenever something is introduced that hasn’t been mentioned before in this chapter, it is explained. I believe the word I’m looking for is “recap”. An example: If the entire purpose of this chapter is that your character, which is a hobbit, has to throw a magical ring he got in chapter one into a volcano, let him talk to his friends about it: “Gee, I can see the volcano now — I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to get rid of this magical ring!”. If the effects of the ring matter, let one of his friends ask him about it. “Seriously, what really happened when you put on the ring?” Don’t overdo it, just make sure that everything that happens in this chapter makes sense to new readers, and you’ve come very, very far. Actually, Henrik Ibsen was a master of this: How many of his plays open with a new character arriving, and someone who’s stayed there for a while sits down to explain the new guy everything that’s happened for the past couple of years? That way, Ibsen managed to squeeze years or decades of events into two minutes of play time. You can sum up the most important events of your past chapters in the same way.
3. Optionally, if you don’t think you can manage to squeeze this information into your comics, there’s another way: Make recap pages. Yes — a page or two where you explain for new readers what the story so far is about. Of course, it’s okay to re-use existing art for this purpose.

Don’t worry about your readers missing the chapters you spent so much time working on and you’re really satisfied with. If they like the comic, they will at one point go back to the beginning and read it from there. Or, even better: They’ll read those chapters when you make them available in a book, and they’ll happily pay you for it. But right now, they just want to get started on reading your comic.

There’s no reason to scare them away with a thick plot there is absolutely no way of getting into without reading five hundred pages.

1. Yes, I’m fully aware that this is also the case on the webcomics portal I’m webmaster of. It will be improved in the next version. [back]
2. Just don’t make it look too much like an ad, then people will ignore it! [back]

How do you market your webcomic? Do you use Project Wonderful to advertise on other webcomic pages? Good! Have you linked to your webcomic from various webcomic forums and bulletin boards? Cool. Do you go to conventions and promote your comic there? All right! Now there’s not really that much more you can do to promote your comic, right?

Wrong.

As much as I love comics, I think we should all agree on one thing: Comics is just a medium. We shouldn’t market the medium alone; we should market the contents of it.

By that, I mean: It’s great that you try to get your comic popular among webcomics readers. But don’t forget that your comic has content, a story you want to tell, and in most cases, there will be people interested in that content regardless of what the medium is. If you reach out to them, you will notice it in your visitor numbers.

Brad Guigar briefly touched on the topic in How to make webcomics, in the chapter on conventions: I believe he said that if you’re making a comic about gardening, you should consider not only going to comic conventions, but also to gardening conventions.

I think this is a very important tip, and that it goes for more than just conventions. If you make a webcomic about collecting and studying stamps, do what you can to make sure every philatelist on the web knows about your comic. An example of someone who did this right is in my opinion Norwegian cartoonist Mads Eriksen — while Mads is a popular guy at comic conventions, very many of his strips are related to him being a big Star Wars geek, and thus he’s also done a great deal to market his comic among Star Wars geeks. An even better example is Gene Ambaum’s and Bill Barnes’s Unshelved, a comic about a library. Ambaum and Barnes have done a great deal to get word of the comic out to librarians and book affectionados. Check the list of appearances on their website — while still attending a couple of big comic conventions, their focus group is libraries and library associations. I first discovered the comic when I started working as a librarian four and a half years ago… because another librarian had printed a strip and taped it up in the elevator. I get the impression that in the US, most librarians know about Unshelved. Another great example is Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher & Deeper. Cham even gives university lectures about the topic of his university-themed comic!

This should be your goal, too. While you may make a great webcomic, I guess it’s not really a comic about webcomics. So why focus solely on webcomic fans when building your readers? Take what your comic is really about and use that to win readers.

People want stories. Some of us prefer these stories as comics, but we’re in it for the stories. People don’t read Dilbert because Adams creates a Botticelli-like masterpiece defining the true meaning of comics. We read them for the funny situations. xkcd isn’t so popular because Munroe’s stick figures is the epitome of webcomics — it’s popular because many of his readers are nerds, and xkcd often focuses on themes nerds like. I doubt that I would have liked xkcd any less if he had chosen to present these ideas as videos or blog posts. I like xkcd, and it just happens to be a webcomic.

So: Go to conventions and hang out with other webcomic creators all you want (seriously, I encourage it), but remember that many of your potential readers are people who would never consider googling the word “webcomic”. To get these readers to notice you, you can’t just be a big star in the webcomics community — you must actively reach outside it and find those readers where they hang out. If you’re making horror comics, make sure to promote them in horror forums, even though all they talk about there at the moment is horror movies. If you’re making comics about accountants, maybe you should consider using “accountant” as a Google Adwords keyword instead of the generic “comics” keyword that only reaches out for those already hooked on webcomics. You get the idea: Don’t make a comic just for webcomics fans. Make a comic for those people who are actually interested in what you’re writing about, and market it towards that audience.

Good luck!

(By the way, I wrote a post about a similar topic last Friday, when I suggested that if your comic touches upon current events, you should use promotional tools available for bloggers.)

Do you make comics that often has a lot to do with current events? Whether it’s celebrities or politics, there may be a lot to win if you start treating your webcomic as if it was a blog.

Of course, a webcomic can rarely be called a blog. Your webcomic is, in most cases, an illustrated story taking place in a fictional story universe. So why should you even consider treating it like a blog?

Because the society has many advantages for blogs that will work just as well for webcomics.

I’m sure all of my Norwegian readers are aware of Twingly. I have no idea if anything like this exists in America, so if you’re one of the many North American readers I got after being linked to from Webcomic Overlook or Journalista in the last couple of days (thanks, by the way!), here’s the short introduction:

Twingly is a blog search which offers blog trackbacks to major news sources. Which means: If I write a blog post where I link to a news article from one of the main online newspapers in Norway/Sweden (and some in eight other countries), I then notify Twingly about it,¹ and that newspaper article will get a link back to my blog. I’ve used this with partial success in this blog — for instance here. Scroll down in this article, and you’ll find a link back to my blog. I don’t do this very often, but when I do I tend to get more readers. And if this had been a celebrity blog or a political blog or a movie blog or a blog about anything vaguely more popular than comics, I would do it a lot more often.

Can’t we do the same with our webcomics?

Seriously. Do your characters often stand around talking about the latest adventures of Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus? Or do they talk a lot about new CDs, or the latest videogames, or what they intend to vote for? And doesn’t the website where you update your comic have a field where you can write a short comment to today’s comic? Write a short comment, and include links to relevant articles in Twingly-associated newspapers. Then, ping your webcomic, and they will give you trackbacks. And you will get new readers. It’s that easy!

Of course, often it takes a long time to make a comic strip. If you use five days to draw a strip in response to a news article, it won’t exactly be hot news any more, and the number of people checking it for blog links won’t be as high any more. Still, even if you need your time to make comics, there will be some articles you can predict pretty easily. For instance, I predict that in the time around 14 September, Norwegian newspapers will write a lot about the election. I predict that around 19 November 2010, they will write a lot about Harry Potter. And, of course: If your comic strip is about “[insert name of political party here] does a lot of stupid things”, you can just finish your strip and then sit back and wait for them to do their next stupid thing. It’s bound to happen.

Here’s that link to Twingly partners again, in case you missed it.

I don’t know if anything like Twingly exists in North America, if it does I hope one of you will post a link in the comments. But even if it doesn’t: Take a look at your webcomic, and figure out if there is anything at all to gain from treating it as if it was a blog. There are very many possibilities marketed for blogs that are just as available to webcomics if we just think about it.

1. I can do so manually, but it’s also easy to tell WordPress blogs to do it automatically — which I do [back]

I love the fact that many of my favorite webcomics are free of charge. If I had to pay to access them, I would probably read far less of them. But that being said, I don’t necessarily think that all webcomics should be free.

“But webcomics don’t have any expenses, they don’t need to buy paper or print and distribute their comics, so it’s a sin to charge money for them!” No. Webcomic cartoonists need to buy food and pay rent, too. Of course, since webcomics is a market where everybody who wants to can publish their own comics, many of them are very amateurish, and would never make enough money to go around. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I think — only the best comics manage to grow and get tons of readers, and those are the comics who deserve to survive.

Of course, charging readers is not the only way to make money. Most webcomics today use a quite different business model — they have advertisements on their websites, and they often have a store where they sell webcomic-related products (for instance, book collections of the webcomic). And that is clearly the model that works best today (I wrote more about this in my Master’s thesis two months ago… I promise, when the University Library actually gets around to publishing it, I’ll post a link here, but they’re slooooow).

But here’s a thought experiment: If a decent webcomic decided to start charging their readers for reading the comic, how should they do this to make it work?

I think that’s a tough question, but also an interesting one. So, here are my ideas:

• I prefer payment models based on how much you download over time-based subscription models. While I’m a big fan of subscribing to print comics, the difference between print and web is that when your print subscription expires, you get to keep all the comics. If I pay money for a graphic novel, I want to be able to pick it out and read it again in two years, and that goes for digital comics too. So when I pay for something, I should be able to access that specific comic for all eternity or until the website disappears.
• It is more interesting to pay for large chunks of content than small ones. I don’t want to input my credit card number every time a new strip updates, but if I got a package of strips every other month, that would be more interesting. So the product for sale should preferrably be either a collection of strips or a chapter of a longer story, say 20 pages or so. Of course, such a model would favor long-form comics, but it could work for comic strips too.
• The first part of the comic, at least the amount of comics one gets in a common comic book issue (20-24 pages, I think?) should be free of charge. Becuase, seriously, you don’t get any readers if you don’t have anything to tease them with. Give away the first issue for free, and you’ll at least have a chance of getting people to buy the next one. And if you’re running several different comics, you’ll have to give away the first issue of all of them for free.
• And for the upcoming issues: Give away a couple of pages from each of them for free. What, I have already read issue one for free and I still need more? Well, maybe I don’t, but I may be convinced that I don’t need to read more of this comic, and a few pages of the most current chapter could make me change my mind. Not more than a teaser, but still, it would show me exactly why I should buy this issue.¹
• I generally don’t mind reading something on the screen in my browser. But as long as I’m paying for it, if it is possible, I would strongly prefer it if I also had the chance of downloading a high-resolution PDF file of the entire issue (and perhaps a CBR file as well). What I love about the web is the accessibility, not the low image resolution, so I may even want to print the comic and read it on paper.
• All the text in the comic, and textual descriptions of the images, should be searchable. That way I can easily find all the page numbers and issue numbers and storylines where my favorite character appears, or where the characters are talking about the last Batman movie, or anything else I could find through a search. Of course, this would also increase the chance that I bought more issues.
• I have no problem with licences telling me that I shouldn’t publish these comics anywhere. After all, I don’t own any royalties, I just bought an issue. However, if I want to share the comic with a friend, I should be able to do so. Whether said friend is reading it over my shoulder or I’m talking to him on an instant messaging program doesn’t matter. Nobody ever stopped me from lending my print comics to friends, the rules for digital comics shouldn’t be any different.
• The payment process should be easy and trustworthy. Preferrably so easy that I could pay for the comic with my cellphone.

These are of course all just fantasies, I have no idea if this could actually work financially. Probably not. Still, I think that if a webcomic filled these requirements, I would be more interested in paying for it.

What do you think? What would a webcomic have to offer for you to be willing to pay for it?

1. For that same reason, I’ve often thought that it would make a lot more sense if printed comic books skipped the fancy cover and instead showed the first page of comics on the cover (in addition to title, creators’ names and barcode, of course). [back]