Archive for ‘A Distant Soil FAQ’

10 items.

The State of Colleen’s Industry

by Colleen Doran on January 1st, 2011
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog, Colleen's Work

Thank you to all the loyal readers who have helped make A Distant Soil a success online. This graph shows the huge jump in traffic and visitor counts between 2009 and 2010.

I had a website for 10 years with blog and message board for six of those years, posting comic pages regularly for 70 weeks. Yet I saw no significant rise in my traffic or sales between 2003 and 2008.

In January 2009, I hired DC McQueen to redesign and reformat the website, and to make the webcomic the lead feature. The old website was shut down. The old posts could not be imported into the new format and were either scrapped or restored one by one.

The new site and webcomic did not show any increase in traffic or sales for months. In fact, after an enthusiastic, initial blip, traffic plummeted after the new site went online, bottoming out in April 2009 at only 8328 page views for an entire month, down about 15,000 page views per month from the old site.

The number on the left represents page views. The number on the right, unique visitors.

Dead low daily traffic count:

About a month later, traffic began to rise again, and stalled until November of 2009. Then, this happened.

The majority of the traffic for 2009 can be accounted for in the last two months of the year:

Traffic dropped again, then jumped back in August 2010. Traffic then doubled between August 2010 and December 2010.

For those who like to click on the Project Wonderful ads to get a look at other people’s traffic, my PW ads are back up ads and do not show accurate traffic levels for my site. They tend to rank a full third lower than my internal stats. EDIT: Also, keep in mind that PW ads can show very different results depending on where they are placed on a website. They do not reflect the traffic of an entire site, only the page views for the ad.

Note that I make a distinction between page views and hits. Lots of folks like to conflate their popularity by bragging about their hit count. One website which shows an Alexa ranking of about 5 million (which is very low,) claimed 5 million hits in six months. Millions of hits makes the site sound pretty popular, doesn’t it?

Page views account for each pair of eyes on an individual page. Hits are the packets of information sent from the site to the server. Depending on how many bells and whistles a website has, a single page view can account for 5-50 packets of info.

My site sends about 6-7 hits per page to my server. Here is a screen shot of my page views versus my hits for the month of December:

The left hand column shows the page views per day. The right hand column, the hit count.

The second bottom: the daily average. The bottom number, the totals for the month.

So, with 347,673 page views, I got 2,139,472 hits.

A combination of a wide variety of factors can account for the site’s rise in popularity, but I’m not entirely sure what they are, and I welcome your observations.

Most of the traffic on the old website was driven by blog posts. Most of the traffic on the new website is driven by webcomic readers. The more attractive pages later in the series account for much of the site’s appeal. Webcomic readers have short attention spans and are unlikely to stick with a site if the first page they see is unappealing. Earlier ADS pages are less likely to grab new readers and keep them. Later pages show a significant increase in staying power.

Still, A Distant Soil has a lot going against it:

1) Few long form serial dramas do well online. I can count successes on my fingers.

2) I can count the number of successful Western print to web comics on the fingers of one hand.

3) My work is copy heavy, which is garlic to the webcomic vampire.

A Distant Soil will run M-W-F through 2011. The sales on the site are up, the site is self supporting.

GOALS:

1) Triple traffic in 2011.

2) Work part-time on ADS in 2011

3) Full time throughout 2012. It could happen.

4) Jeff Smith plans to finish Rasl in 2013, I plan to finish ADS in 2013. We plan a victory tour together in 2013.

Nice goals. Hope to see you at the finish line.

FOLLOW UP HERE.

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A Distant Soil FAQ’s: How about those graphic novels? Future issues of the comic?

by Colleen Doran on August 28th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, Culture, Comics, Image Comics

For the many people who have inquired about the graphic novel collections.

The Image Comics collections are:

Volume 1: The Gathering (collects A Distant Soil #1-13, 240 pages, Image Comics, June 1999, ISBN 1887279512)

Volume 2: The Ascendant (collects A Distant Soil #13-25, 240 pages, Image Comics, November 1998, ISBN 1582400180)

Volume 3: The Aria (collects A Distant Soil #26-31, 164 pages, Image Comics, July 2001, ISBN 1582402019)

Volume 4: The Coda (collects A Distant Soil #32-38, 184 pages, Image Comics, softcover, March 2006, ISBN 158240478X, hardcover, November 2005, ISBN 1582405255)

The online comic is currently in the middle of issue 25, which ends at Volume II.

I am working on the final volume of A Distant Soil called Requiem. It’s going to take awhile to complete. YES, I will finish the series in print, in comics form, and it will be collected in a graphic novel edition from Image Comics. YES, I will serialize it online as well. I hope those of you who enjoy the book online will support it by also picking up a GN collection. If not, you have my sincere thanks for coming to my official website, and supporting me via my advertisers.

Issue #39 of A Distant Soil will be out from Image Comics early next year. No, really.

I have several major projects for other publishers on my plate right now, including multiple graphic novels for Vertigo, one with Warren Ellis, Gone to Amerikay with Derek McCulloch, and a graphic novel with Barry Lyga for Houghton Mifflin. The Barry Lyga book is due in a little over a month, so I am on lockdown.

Gone to Amerikay is due in March of next year, and then I should be finished with the Warren Ellis GN in June of 2011. I also have some random smaller works in play as well.

This may sound like a lot – and it is – but it is not impossible to fit in time for A Distant Soil in there, particularly after early October.

I announced that I would be going to live and work in Washington DC for several months this fall to pursue some of my creator rights advocate duties, but I’ve bowed out. I’ve sunk so much time and effort into activism, I need to do my own work for awhile. Congress can pass bad laws without me. I’ve probably devoted more than 6 months of full time effort to activism over the last few years, and that is an expensive investment, in more ways than one.

My work output lately has been excellent. I have not been this productive in years. I went through a terrific slump for awhile, which I guess had to do with the excess of advocacy, health issues and stress. But whatever the bad mojo is, it is gone. If I always worked this way, I’d be finished with everything on my plate right now.

I had a discussion with my beloveds about my farming duties, and all agree I need to cut back. WAY back, so my time is not eaten up by digging up grubs when I need to draw. So, next year there will be a lot less farm labor for me. Can’t say as I’m going to weep about that or anything.

My kitchen duties are rescinded: everyone loves my cooking. No one likes the mess I make.

Lots more time for me to draw. Which is fine by everybody.

I am going to step away from the computer and grab more of the Great Drawing Goodness while it is here. And hope it lasts and lasts and lasts.

The Facebook fan page is here.

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Welcome, introduce yourself, and get a Gravatar

by Colleen Doran on August 1st, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog

Welcome to all our new readers.

Registration is open at random times to discourage spam and hacks. I announce open registration a couple of times a week on my Facebook Fan Page.

Once registered, you have posting privileges. We welcome your natter. Goodness knows I dish it out.

When you join up, you are automatically assigned a random image as part of your profile. If you would like to post a custom image, register at Gravatar. There you can upload a picture which will become part of your WordPress profile anywhere on the internet. You can change the image at any time, or customize it for different ID’s.

Thank you for signing up, and we all look forward to hearing from you.

Tell us about yourself. Feel free to promote your work and post links.

c

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Lying about the numbers: Does your comic have “Millions of Fans”?

by Colleen Doran on July 29th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog

Let’s talk about hype.

The A Distant Soil comic went online late January 2009. The current traffic is over ten times higher than our traffic in January of last year. We have approximately 9 times more repeat viewers per day.

That is fact, not hype.

Income has increased, largely due to incentives and donations, which I appreciate very much. It’s early days to see a significant increase in sales. I get royalties on the book. Considering I haven’t had a new book out in awhile, that’s a good sign. I realize my expectation of a sales jump on a webcomic anywhere in the first year was unrealistic. The only webcomics I know of which have done well with sales of physical books have been online for three years or more.

There’s an increase in foreign traffic, but it’s doubtful we’re selling a lot of books in Slovenia. That does not diminish my deep appreciation of Slovenia.

I’ve enjoyed learning how to read stat information, especially how to read independent site meters. Many of them are wildly inaccurate, but my linked stat counter sometimes agrees with the info at 7Zoom.com. It’s in the ballpark of a bad day of page views for me.

I’ve compared my traffic to that of other sites, and some people are Liar! liar! Pants on Fire! If their traffic is that low, one wonders where their “millions of fans” are.

They never had ‘em in the first place. Duh.

Anyone can see your book sales, with a little digging. If you run around telling whoppers about how your small press book “sold better than the X-Men”, some gullible blogger may believe you, but the rest of us will wonder where the hell you got those numbers. Especially when we can see that your last graphic novel sold 2,000 copies.

If I had millions of fans one day, and my last book sales dropped to 2,000 copies, I would not be making a public issue of it. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Webcomicker Talking Smack ‘Bout Distant Soil, YO!

by Colleen Doran on May 11th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, FAQ

OK.

Jamie Coville informs me some webcomicker at the Toronto Festival told a room full of people that I had restarted A Distant Soil five times and apparently this is due to some massive insecurity on my part.

For the record:

ADS First Publisher:

The original publishing contract clearly stated that I was to own my own work, but with every couple of issues, the indicia went through a morph, and in the end, the publisher claimed copyright as well as trademark. For themselves. When the lawyer hit the fan, the original publisher also claimed I was just hired to do the art and A Distant Soil was created by the publisher.

Naturally, I was not pleased with this development, and so left the publisher, spent years wrangling for the rights, and got them.

Since the original art was shot (mostly) from pencils, and since I wanted a clean break with the old company, I decided to redo the book from scratch. This would also preclude further claims by this old company to authorship.

ADS Second Publisher:

This is the only time I rewrote and redrew my book from scratch.

I would have been happy and content with this situation, but THIS HAPPENED.

I repeat: this is the only time I redid my book. From the beginning. From scratch. Period.

Three years after I signed on, the publisher closed its trade line, and sold all our contracts. Illegally. Lawsuit ensued. Authors got their rights and a financial settlement.

However, the graphic novel editions were in color and there was no way to recover those color negatives. (EDIT) Original plan was to publish black and white comics and to have these dudes publish color GN reprints. Instead we got a perfect storm of bummer.

What to do? Do I walk away, or do I try to give it another go – which could not possibly have anything to do with two publishers who violated the contracts of a dozen authors! When you take your book to another publisher, you’re showing signs of emotional insecurity, OMG, the horror?

This has nothing to do with wanting to finish your project, economic concerns, or legal rights issues!

I decided to give self publishing a go. I touched up the art to make it more attractive in black and white, added some pages to flesh out a couple of scenes and make chapter breaks, and soldiered on.

That was in 1991.

I went to Image Comics in 1996, and did not restart my book. I picked up the series at Image with issue #15.

I have published a trade paperback edition (which is not restarting the book,) and online (which is not restarting the book. A new edition is not a restart. It’s a reprint.)

There have been more editions of Sandman than there have been of A Distant Soil. More editions of Bone. More editions of Finder.

TWO comic book editions. TWO graphic novel editions. Since 1980. This is excessive?

I am very sorry some people feel vast amounts of inconvenience that I have not finished my book.

I’d love to just sit around and draw whatever I want, but I can’t do that. I have to make a living.

The income on the last issue of A Distant Soil was about $200. Which means I worked on it for two months for $200.

Which means that the money I had to live on for two entire months and to finance any book overhead took about $8,000 out of my savings.

Let me repeat that.

Last issue cost me $8,000. The issue before that cost about $7,000.

I don’t have spare time to work on comics. This is what I do for a living. If a book is not bringing in profit, that money has to come from somewhere else.

While I receive royalty checks on ADS graphic novels, this modest income I chose to use to bring the book online for everyone to read in hopes of creating another income stream to finance further work. It took almost two year’s of ADS GN royalties to pay for a web tech to design and build my sites, deal with the hack back in January, cover online access and registrations, advertising, etc. It took one royalty check to pay for my booth at San Diego. I get two checks a year.

And I am sure this webcomicker person didn’t mean any harm, so I am happy to have the opportunity to clear this up.

I wonder if they will put a tip in my donation box. They haven’t so far.

Seriously, if I had enough money to do nothing but sit down and draw A Distant Soil, I would very happily do nothing else. Not to say my other work isn’t fulfilling and wonderful, but it’s dead annoying to have other people act like they have somehow been harmed by my failure to perform on cue for free. To add injury to injury, a failure to perform while incurring HUGE FREAKING DEBT.

I’m sorry if this is cranky.

Well, not really.

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