Olaf's comics blog

This Spring I finished my Master’s Thesis in documentation science, on the social dimension of webcomics. The thesis included a survey of almost 300 webcomic readers, and what I was trying to do, was to find answers to a couple of questions about webcomics from an user’s perspective. Questions like: What kinds of comics are popular, and why are they popular? What is the best way to make money from a webcomic? Are comics made especially for the screen better than the traditional easy-to-print webcomics? I spent a year searching for these answers, and now I can finally share them with all of you.

Here’s a link to the thesis. (Sorry, it’s in Norwegian only.)

As I wrote the thesis in Norwegian, I realize that many of you can’t read it. So here’s my plan: Starting tomorrow, I will translate this thesis to English and publish it in this blog, one chapter a day. I take the weekends off from the blog whenever I can, so that’s five chapters a week. I will also create a WordPress page containing links to all the chapters in the correct order, so that it’s easy to navigate in the thesis. Depending on how I split it up, there could be anything between twenty and forty-five parts to this series, so at the very latest, the entire thesis will be published here in English nine weeks from now. This is the biggest work I’ve ever done, so I want to share it with the world.

But, of course, if you read Norwegian, you can just click the link, download the PDF from the page you come to, and read the entire text right away.

Or you can choose not to. Just because I have a blog doesn’t mean I can make you do whatever I want. The Internet doesn’t work that way.¹

1. Yet. [back]

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]

As I reported last week, one of my Disney comics were printed in Norway this week. This is the first time it’s taken as long as seven years for one of my comics to reach publication, so I was pretty excited to see it. While I have copies of the artwork lying around and I’ve occasionally looked at it, I haven’t read the story in a while, but I remember it as pretty good.

However, when I read the comic, I found it… pretty boring. Sure, I still like the idea, but nothing really happens, or things happen really slowly. The lack of action makes it an uninteresting story… and I used way too much text. And what really amazes me is that this is a story I thought was pretty good seven years ago. I wouldn’t do these mistakes today — some of them I still struggle with, but I’m aware of them, and I’m trying my best to change them. Still — seven years from now, I’ll probably look at the scripts I write today and get the same impression from them.

This is what improvement is all about: Realizing what your greatest weaknesses are, and changing them. If you believe that you are perfect, you will never improve. Everybody has mistakes — you need to find yours if you want to get rid of them.

Do you make a webcomic? If you haven’t done it already, here’s a tip for an exercise I believe will improve your comic:

• Take a look at your archives from a couple of years ago. Read at least a couple of weeks of comics.
• Jot down everything you don’t like about the comics. Writing, art, anything. Do the characters talk as if they’re just reading stuff out loud from a script? Do the characters have abnormally large hands? Anything.
• If you have a list of things you dislike now, congratulations! You’re already improving. These were comics you were satisfied enough with to publish a few years ago. The fact that you find errors in them now means that your standards have risen since then.
• Go through that list and ask yourself how you’re doing today. You’ve probably improved, but can you improve more? If you drew abnormally large hands two years ago, are they good enough today? Can you do something to improve them? Do you still have strange-looking dialogue? Fix it.
• If you didn’t find anything wrong with your old comics at all, there are two possible reasons:
  1. You are Baby Jesus. You never make mistakes.
  2. You are still doing the same mistakes that you did back then, and thus you don’t notice them. If you haven’t improved at all in the last couple of years, you’re probably doing something very, very wrong. Show your webcomic to other neutral parts (that is, not your best friends) and ask them to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

Do this right, and you’ll be able to improve your comic drastically. And your readers will notice.

Good luck!

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]