Title pretty much says it all. The Rice Boy comic ad pops up time and again over on our left sidebar. Jeff raved about it and gave me permission to tell all of you how he raved. So, you should go and click on the Rice Boy ad and have an experience. NO, I do not get paid if you click on his ad.
Jeff and I engaged in many phone laffalots over the similarities between the whole webcomics thang and the whole self publishing thang.
The web comics people don’t know much about print and the print people don’t know much about web. So, starting A Distant Soil as a webcomic is like starting over from scratch in many ways. I now have more readers than I have had in more than a decade. Whether or not those throngs will follow up by buying books is anyone’s guess.
I am deeply appreciative of the art sales and donations. That has been very heartening.
Also, I can now say with absolute certainty that pirating never did anything for my circulation or sales. The webcomic, however, is another matter.
Anyway, Jeff said he’d stumbled across a webcomics blog where someone was surprised to find that back in the day, people had done this whole self publishing thang just like they do with webcomics – only in analog. WOW!
We found that screamingly funny.
“THEY DID IT IN ANALOG!” must go on a t-shirt.
If you are interested in learning more about the history of that analog self publishing thang, you can find a long series of essays by the participants – including me – over here at the Boneville blog.
For another look at the history of self publishing – and Bone in particular – tune in to your local PBS station and watch for The Cartoonist, a documentary about Jeff Smith and his work, which begins airing on select stations tonight. Click here for more information.
I’m in it, and I appreciate the fact that I got decent lighting.
This week’s talk with Jeff was very productive, but I need to preserve my hand for drawing. So, I will break these observations up into posts over the next few days.
I spent a lot of time going over my traffic trends, and until last month, traffic showed a gradual increase. Then it quadrupled.
With so many webcomics out there the huge competition for attention means that good stuff is getting buried. It’s hard to make a name for yourself.
While cartoonists no longer need to dump huge sums of money into print and warehousing costs, it’s highly unlikely that anyone but the most motivated creators are going to be able to stick it out on the web long enough to make money at it.
Scott Christian Sava told me it would take a year to begin to find an audience. I spoke to other creators who had been at it for several years before they saw any money.
This might be the kind of thing someone in school can handle, or someone with a nice paying day job can handle, but if it weren’t for the fact that I have a lot of inventory on A Distant Soil, I doubt I could stick it out for a couple of years without income.
And then I remember: I already did that. In ANALOG!
It’s amazing what some people will do for their comics.
