Olaf's comics blog

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]

Making comics is not just a matter of writing and drawing the perfect sequential art. If you can’t get people to read your comic, it doesn’t matter if it’s Eisner Award material or garbage. And while there are many really expensive ways of promoting your comic, I strongly suggest that you check out the free ones as well. It may be because of my education, but it seems that a recurring topic on this blog will be recommending the use of social media.

Let’s break it down and look at one big channel at a time. Today: Twitter.

This Friday, I wrote the following tweet:

I should really start to follow more people in my own timezone. All the good tweets occur while I’m sleeping. (Okay, ALMOST all.)

But after writing that, one thing has occured to me: Out of the 46 people I follow, 22 are Norwegian. And I also follow Swedes and Danes. So why do I sometimes get the impression that everybody I follow are Americans?

Well, to be obnoxiously rude and arrogant: Because they are better tweeters. Not just because they tweet more, but they tweet in a way that makes me care. I want to follow them on twitter because it feels as if they have a lot to say. I doubt that their lives and their comics are extremely more interesting than their Norwegian counterparts. But they manage to make me care anyway.

I’m by no means an expert, and this blog post is solely based on what I personally like and dislike. But here are six things you should think about when setting up and using your Twitter account.

Link to your website/webcomic from your profile. It may seem like a trivial tip, but this is very important. Not because you’ll get tons of visits that way (I don’t know if that’s the case), but because it is a great way of letting people get to know you right away. Twitter nicks are often hard to decipher, and if your name is a common one, people will use your homepage link to figure out who you are. And if you put up a link to your webcomic here, your fans will go “HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE JOHN DOE, THE CREATOR OF ‘FRANK DOORKNOB’!”, and people who have never heard about you will have a look at your webcomic to figure out what impression they should have of you.

Tweet frequently. This one is hard, because it involves figuring out which parts of your life is worth tweeting about. Well, check out what the cartoonists you love tweet about. Read the tweets of Scott Kurtz, Jeph Jacques, Kate Beaton, Gabe, Tycho… Check out their Twitter feeds. I don’t know why, but these people manage to tweet frequently without boring me. Most likely, many of the people you follow do the same thing.

Twitter is not RSS. There has been situations where I’ve considered following someone on Twitter, and decided not to because *all* their Twitter updates were information about new blog posts. As I was already subscribing to that person’s (or in this case, institution’s) RSS feed, the tweeting didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know. Don’t let your Twitter account be an exact copy of your RSS feed. And don’t update only when you have a new comic out or a new shirt in the store. You should let your followers know, of course, but let them know what’s going on at other times, too. Check out the tweets of Jeph Jacques — he tweets every time he has a new comic up, but he also lets his followers know about the process that’s leading up to the finished comic. If the comic is late, he’ll tell us why. And when he’s not working on his comic, he’s tweeting about other things he’s doing. Don’t make your Twitter feed an RSS feed.

Twitter is not your personal diary. And by that I don’t just mean that you shouldn’t write your credit card number or post erotic photos there. What I mean, is that you should do your best to keep your tweets interesting. Do you love your girlfriend? That’s sweet. Do you love Jesus Christ? Okay. But I’m not interested in hearing that ten times a day. The people I follow on Twitter rarely mention their spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends, and they never tweet about their religion. Sure, there’s nothing wrong in mentioning how much you love your wife every now and then, but she’ll probably appreciate it more if you tell her to her face.

Follow people. Follow other webcomics creators. Search for your favorite cartoonists on Twitter, or find them through their websites. And try finding not-very-famous webcartoonists, too. I’ve experienced that people have started following me, I have checked out their website, and bookmarked that website because the comic made me laugh (that’s you, @EQComics). I still have no clue how he found me, but he did, and he got himself a new reader that way.

Link to your Twitter account from your website. Twitter has widgets that lets you keep your readers updated on what you tweet about. Get your existing readers to follow you on Twitter by giving them your Twitter link. You’ve put a lot of effort into making each of these readers to find you. By getting them to follow a frequently updated Twitter account, you make sure that they don’t *forget* you.

These aren’t the top six tips to using Twitter. I don’t even know if all of them are that great. But all social media have two rules in common: Use them, and use them right. That goes for Twitter, too. I’m still trying to figure out the hows myself, so I’m not the very best of help here, but I’m trying. And you’re doing yourself a great favour if you do the same thing. Twitter won’t make you famous overnight, but it will help you promote your comics when you learn how to use it.