Archive for ‘Money Management’

38 items.

CREATOR RIGHTS LINKS: Getting Paid, Getting Robbed

by Colleen Doran on October 11th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

I’m a bad blogger for not updating more frequently, so here’s a linkpalooza of cool things to read.

Boy do I need to clean out my bookmarks.

At the New York Times, “Begging for Your Pay”.

He waited on $31,000 through November 2009; by February, the company still owed him $20,000. Wisdom, who said he had had a perfect credit score until then, racked up over $20,000 in credit card debt, and his bank raised his interest rates to 30 percent. He was paying more than $500 a month in credit card interest, and withdrew from his retirement accounts to make ends meet.

I feel your pain, dude. It’s been over a year, and a producer still hasn’t forked over the dough.

China and Intellectual Property.

Bootleg copies of the “Dark Knight” and Shenzen sweatshops churning out fake Louis Vuitton bags are only part of the problem. Last March, the United States International Trade Commission banned imports of cast steel railway wheels made by the Chinese group Tianrui. Tianrui had hired nine employees from the Chinese licensee of Amsted Industries of Chicago, a maker of railway parts. They came with an armful of trade secrets that allowed Tianrui to muscle into the business.

What really happened to htmlcomics. You may recall I had a run-in with this scary dude, a convicted felon pirating comics, some time ago. He followed up my post several times with some vaguely threatening emails, odd complaints I had lied about his kindly cooperation with my request he stop pirating my work (read the link and decide for yourself,) and demands to remove anything I had ever said about him online, all of which I ignored. I did not publish any of his later emails, especially after learning what he did to this cop who pissed him off. That’s so not normal. I just handed the letters to my attorney.

He also made the odd claim that he had been released from “all charges”. Whatever charges he thinks they were, the real story is that he was sued by the federal government and had his servers and websites permanently shut down and forfeited. You can read all about it at Copyhype.

Copyhype’s article also lays to rest some of the online cheering from people who claim they had the dude shut down via their blog posts or something. The investigation began in 2009.

The case of htmlComics.com is, as far as I know, the first time a domain name has been forfeited under 18 USC § 2323(a) as property “used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of” criminal copyright infringement.

And while my bottom line has gone up considerably since I first wrote about the perils of digital book filching, I’m chalking that up to the many thousands I spent on advertising, having the website redone, and other rather expensive incentives, not to mention my ubiquitous web presence.

I’m also working with Image Comics to create A Distant Soil digital books. The first 14 issues of A Distant Soil were not published by Image, and they are undergoing a major cleanup operation. They also require new covers and will have some new content. They should be available soon, but this art is more than 20 years old, and digital files did not exist back in the day. We’re doing major restoration here.

I also hope you enjoy the online comic experience at my official website. It’s been fun bringing it to you.

Jaron Lanier declares “Web 2.0 is utterly pathetic.”

“Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine,” says Lanier, “but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.”

At Plagiarism Today: “Why I don’t Fear Chilling Effects.” Chilling Effects sometimes posts the personal information of people who file takedown notices for copyright infringement online. I think that’s kind of creepy. Here’s another take on the matter.

First, the name Chilling Effects, to many copyright holders, sounds very accusatory. Though Chilling Effects “aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats” it does so by being an impartial database of notices. Not every notice in Chilling Effects is “chilling” free speech in any way, in fact, the vast majority are not.

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Lies, Damned Lies, And Royalty Statements. WOW! My Sales Figures! I know you want to look.

by Colleen Doran on April 21st, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

About a year-and-a-half ago, I found a discrepancy in the accounting on one of my book royalty statements which showed the publisher had not calculated my income correctly on a major book.

I reported the discrepancy, and it took the client over six months to forward the shortage, which was about $2,000. EDIT: Yes, it was an HONEST mistake. They agreed with me within ONE hour of my pointing it out. I don’t believe they were trying to rip me off. However…

Since then, royalty statements at the company have been revised. It is no longer possible to find the mistake I found with the new accounting system the company uses.

Just sayin’.

Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch has an excellent working writer blog, and there are two posts you must read about some major discrepancies she found in her ebook sales statements. This is very important information.

Part I

How many e-books did the traditional publisher say I sold? 30. That’s right. 30.

When the novellas, which had worse sales rankings from Amazon, sold 300 each.

That 30 number didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I talked with other writers who have books in the same genre with the same company. The writers I talked with also had some e-book savvy.

Part II

These writers compared the sales of their self-published e-book titles to the sales of their traditionally published e-book titles, and found startling discrepancies. Even adjusting for price differences (Big Six e-books were priced higher than the self-published books), these writers discovered that their Big Six publishers reported e-book sales of one-tenth to one-one-hundredth of their indie-published titles.

FYI: Amazon doesn’t tell what your sales are. They only show your sales ranking in relation to how you sold on Amazon on that particular day.

You can get into the top 100,000 by just selling 2 or 3 books in a single day on Amazon, and you can be bumped down to the 1,000,000 mark by only selling one book on Amazon that week. You may be selling lots of books elsewhere, but on Amazon, that won’t show.

When I wrote an article about book piracy some months ago, a few folks rushed to Amazon to see the sales rankings on my books, stopped at A Distant Soil rankings, and looked no further. Why, who’d pirate her book! Her work doesn’t sell anyway! Look at her Amazon ranking!

I have about 2 dozen books on my backlist from which I derive royalty income. Looking at the Amazon sales ranking of only one of my books as some kind of objective measure of my entire backlist is dumb. Assuming only one of my books (this one) gets pirated is dumber. Since the majority of my sales via libraries and comic book shops wouldn’t show up on Amazon anyway, making much ado about my sales ranking on one of those books (a book which has sold $3,000,000 at retail, BTW) by noting the Amazon ranking as the sole measure, is amateur night analysis.

Yesterday’s Amazon rank for A Distant Soil Volume I was 335,000. The Amazon rank for Spider-man: Back in Black was 379,000. Therefore, A Distant Soil sells better than Spider-Man.

See how dumb that is?

More FYI: Bookscan is a service which tracks sales, but only covers about 50-75% of those sales. It covers NO digital sales, no mail order, no sales of books which don’t subscribe to the service. I track my Bookscan sales every single week. EDIT: FYI, these are book sales, not periodical sales. So, these are graphic novel numbers, not pamphlet comics.

It may surprise you to hear that one of my most solid backlist titles is Girl To Grrrl Manga. It certainly surprised me.

Here is an honest to gosharootie screen shot of eight weeks of my Bookscan backlist, with combined totals for my royalty-producing titles.

No, I will not give you any more specifics than this. I don’t think that would be fair to my clients.

As you can see from this graph, little me, the lowly creator of A Distant Soil who clearly doesn’t sell anything because I am such a loser for whining about illegal downloads, actually moves between 350 and 450 books EVERY SINGLE WEEK, via Bookscan alone. If you add in that extra lot that Bookscan doesn’t cover (25-50% more via other resources,) that’s a whole lotta books. EDIT: I haven’t had a new, original graphic novel out in years BTW. Very much looking forward to seeing what happens when my new GN’s are released, starting this fall.

Naturally, I do not get as big a cut from every sale as I do when I sell direct here on my website. Some of these books pay a pittance. Some of them have yet to earn out the advance. Others pay more than a pittance.

One creator who got a load of chirpy publicity from pirate – I mean, tech – websites, went on to rave about the big blip in his sales, which, it turned out, were only a couple dozen copies. If your baseline is zero, then any increase is a huge blip, I guess.

After literally millions of page views on articles about the “huge blip,” he went on to sell 150 copies on his website.

As you can see, 150 copies is, for me, a really bad week. More economy of scale reality check for you. Not to knock anyone else, or how they toot their horn, but what other people consider a step up is, in my universe, sinking into a black hole of suck. JK Rowling would probably weep buckets if her sales ever got to my level. Other people would think they died and went to heaven.

Online exposure does not necessarily translate to fame or sales. Just ask Huffpo bloggers.

As musician Rick Carnes once said, “People die of exposure.”

Here’s what works for me:

The combo of website sales, and big publisher support – the digital and traditional publishing combo, with authorized online publication of my work so people come directly to my site. That’s the ticket.

And it’s working better and better, thanks to the great readers who support the artist. YOU! Thanks to YOU, I grow flowers and make books, and make pictures! Whee!

A few years ago, the horizon looked bleak. Now, it’s shiny and sparkly. I think I see a unicorn!

Something else to think about: many of these self publishing services are de facto publishers. Don’t assume a major traditional publisher will rip you off on your sales accounting, and a Print on Demand service won’t.

Just sayin’.

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Too Stupid to Know You’re Stupid, and Other Fun Comics Links UPDATED

by Colleen Doran on April 7th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

Rob Granito is back (my first post is here). He wants money for an interview. Go read this at Bleeding Cool, in case you have any lingering doubt this dude is a con artist. A person who denies she’s his wife astonishes us by having the exact same name as his wife and has written a press release with grammatical skills only marginally better than her spouse. I mean, client.

She’s his agent! SMACK!

She’s his wife! SMACK!

She’s his agent! SMACK!

She’s his wife! SMACK!

She’s his agent AND his wife!

This is so lame, the bad taste is smothered in lame sauce.

I pray to God everyone who reads this sad, pathetic saga will now take the gossip of goofy people who have Big Terrible Stories About Awful Pros with a grain of salt from now on, even if these people have a few creds. Because no matter what problem I have ever had with a fan, they pale against any problem I have had with these avaricious bottom feeders.

I hope someone has contacted the police at this point, seriously.

BTW: the frauds claim that all the thousands of hits they’ve generated are worth the interview bucks.

No, they’re not.

For every thousand hits a website gets, a site earns about 50 cents. So, if the fraud thinks an interview with him is worth $150, an article would have to generate hundreds of thousands of hits just to pay for it. And that’s not going to happen.

Schmuck.

I need chocolate now. The best in the world is from Cocoabella.

Go read this at The Village Voice, a venue which does not pay its cartoonists. A sad article about how poorly cartoonists are paid. Some comic art luminaries pop in to the comments thread for a spin.

I had a candid conversation yesterday with a webcomics notable. I told him how much I was now making on my site, and he said that was REALLY good money for a webcomic. I consider the income modest, but respectable, and well within the income range I hoped would finance the rest of my series. Not good enough for full time support, but very good sideline money.

Not too long ago, a webcomics artist I never heard of whose principle activity seems to be trolling for fun, went on a public rampage, claiming A Distant Soil would never go anywhere online, had never been popular in the first place, and I’d never made any money on it. I took a look at his site. He gets about 5 page views a day. Clearly, he’s an unimpeachable source for how to be a pro. I suspect the motivation for his rampage was to get people to look at his work. Well, I looked. What was that I wrote about avaricious bottom feeders? Yeah, that.

A Distant Soil had $3,000,000 in lifetime retail sales. That’s solid money for an independent comic. Very solid money. In personal income, that averages out to $30,000 per year for ten years of full time work, after taxes and all expenses, including retailer and distributor cuts.

Income was uneven, and I worked on it part time for many years, but as a page rate average, it’s good. The problem is the long tail of income as the project waned, making it harder to justify the investment of time and effort to finish off my epic. I didn’t make $30,000 per year every year, I made more like $40,000 one year, $20,000 the next, $45,000 one year, and $5,000 for the next three! Try budgeting on that!

My webcomic guru associate confided that most webcomics make no money at all, or extremely modest money. Artists fudge their numbers to make themselves appear more popular than they are. A webcomicker who swears they bought a house and supports a family actually has a job at Starbucks. OK, whatever.

I’m noticing a change in the way lots of artists approach the thorny problem of the perception of the money we make. They’re tired of the illusory exposure canard. Tired of being thought of as rich when we’re not rich. Tired of the mixing of rich and famous. Many creators fear being sprinkled with loser dust that any admission of financial weakness is de facto failure. People who have absolutely no knowledge or qualifications to make any kind of statement about a pro’s life or professionalism will bring out their knives on a blog at the slightest hint a hated pro has a low bank balance.

For my part, even though I had a website since 1999, it wasn’t until August last year that I saw an increase in my income from the site, which used to make only about $2000 per year. I now make good money on my series, more than I made when I last worked full time on it in 1999 – that year I made about $19,000 in royalties from Image.

Of course, I don’t know if my income will continue at this rate, or continue to rise, but I am hopeful. I am still on to finish A Distant Soil in 2013.

For those hoping the web will just make all things sparkles and sprinkles for their art, well, it works for some and not for others, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. At all. I’ve had a website since 1999, and as I wrote before, only began to see decent money in August 2010. Almost all of that money has been from actual sales, not donations or ads.

I have other income from the graphic novels I do for other publishers, including Gone to Amerikay, Stealth Tribes, and my upcoming GN with Dark Horse. The last year has been good: the prior two? Not so much. But as I’ve mentioned before, the economy of scale is different for me, because I’m not a part time pro, and have not made less than $30,000 per year as an artist since, I think, about 1990. I don’t know how these artists pulling $1500 a month get by. I tend to think they don’t.

My minimum standard is not to get by, but to thrive.

c

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I don’t even like Arianna Huffington’s hair anymore

by Colleen Doran on February 16th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

She was way more attractive as a redhead. No, really that great do she had about ten years ago. Totally loved it. I almost did my hair just like that. I admired her. But now she has broken my heart.

Arianna Huffington, the rich lady who created the blog The Huffington Post with a team of investors and $1 million in seed money, said website content provided by a bunch of unpaid volunteer bloggers, has just sold the whole enchilada to AOL for a whopping $315 million.

Say, how’s that “Information Wants to be Free” thing working out for ya?

This is how it works, folks. Tech and freeloader gurus wind you up with pep talks about how they’re going to make you faaaaaaamous, while they get you to do all the labor. Then they make the bucks. And then they laugh at you. Ha ha.

Andrew Sullivan comments:

Ka-ching! For me, the most telling part is that of the $315 million, Arianna and her investors only took $15 million in AOL stock. More an act of cashing out than digging in. But, hey, it’s a model and it’s working. And no-one is forced to write for free. If you can make a fortune off people’s vanity and desire to express themselves, why not?

Ow.

Debra Saunders at SF Gate:

Huffington is an entrepreneurial genius at self-promotion. She fiercely surfed the left’s discontent with mainstream – read: corporate – journalism by promising to keep mainstream – read: paid – news media “honest.”

Then she rode that left-wing discontent all the way to the bank. Now she writes like a corporate flack, lauding the “merger of visions” made possible after business-savvy CEO Eric Hippeau “monetized” the Huffington Post.

I’d write more, but I can’t afford to work for free for Ms Huffington, or even for me.

So, enjoy some LULZ.

Cartoonist Jen Sorensen.

And a little pep talk from Arianna Huffington herself!


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The Barry Lyga Graphic Novel That Dare Not Speak its Name: and conversation with Steve Bissette

by Colleen Doran on January 17th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

Looks something like this:

I finished this up weeks and weeks late. The rest of the creative team is saintly, because I am not dead.

I have corrections on about a dozen pages, none of them major, but should have that all loaded by tomorrow. Remember kids, check your scanner for erasure pills. My pages appear to have acne.

And since the brand new Cintiq seems to have a problem recognizing my pens after a few hours of work, I’ve had a frustrating finale on this book.

It is done but for the pockmarks and one embarrassing page where there is no finger on the trigger of a gun.

I turned in some Gone to Amerikay finished art today as well. So, all good. If I can figure out what is up with the Cintiq, anyway.

To see more work from the Mystery Graphic novel, go to Barry’s blog for a few character shots.


Also, be sure to check out Steve Bissette’s outstanding blog currently running a 14 part series of letters between Steve and Dave Sim. Part 13: transitioning from print to digital, with comments from ADistantSoil.com

Steve has also found the digital world difficult and largely unrewarding (financially, that is,) despite his lengthy and important contributions on comic creation and self publishing.

While I sold a fair number of Vermont Monster Guide copies when it first came out (100+), those have dwindled to a trickle (one every two-three months), and Blur—all five volumes—barely sell a dozen or so copies per year. The limited availability of the Tales of the Uncanny preview booklet in the spring of 2010 was successful, but again, that meant about 100 copies. Period. Long term, for the books that are always available via mail order at Myrant, Tyrant sales are very occasional; about one set every three months. T-shirts sold not at all, so I abandoned that merchandizing. Taboo sales are, essentially, one or two copies per quarter, one full set per year (at my collectible prices, since I’m the only online source for a partial set—Taboo 6 sold out four years ago—that annual sale pays the mortgage for one month). About a third of all sales, including sketches, are to foreign readers/buyers. But only the sketch sales have proven worth continuing aggressively.

The takeaway is that free thing isn’t working out for almost everyone who tries it, no matter how much you “engage”.

I wonder how much of this is about first mover advantage? Is the blogosphere so glutted with new material that being seen is almost impossible without massive support?

I sent Steve screen shots of the traffic of webcomics and blogs that got big boosts from tech websites touting the “Everything Should be Free Caring is Sharing” model, and without exception, after an initial blip, the traffic plummets. Some drop so far traffic cannot be measured by independent sources. Now, any external traffic graph is going to be dicey, but if Alexa tells me your site ranks 1 million or lower two months after your boost from Boing Boing, you have a problem. Your readers didn’t stick around. And if you have lots more free content than I do, you really, really have a problem.

The entire series of posts between Steve and Mr. Sim should be read by everyone who pursues comics as vocation.

I have done much better with income from the website over the last six months. The site makes a profit, and it is now making more money than the book makes in royalties. The biggest earner is original art, but books move steadily. We need to go back to press with two graphic novels, but I am going to put that off until the fall. I dread the print bill.

I was saddened to see a number of webcomics artists who posted income on their sites of only $15,000-$20,000 per year, after between 5 and 10 years of work and at least 20,000-30,000 daily page views, which is more traffic than I get. Per page view, I actually make more money than they do, probably because original art is higher value than a knick knack. But with 1/2-1/3 the traffic, this site is more profitable. Not dancing in the rain profitable, but enough to finance future work profitable.

A recent discussion with another creator over whether or not most webcomics artists make a living had us trying to pin down the definition of “make a living”. A recent survey claimed a number of webcomics artists “make a living”, but never quantified that. Since we have different standards for what that means, based on what creators have freely posted on their sites, most don’t make a living: they get by.

After business expenses and taxes, what does $15,000 get you?

Here’s my social security statement from the 1980′s.

Adjusted for inflation, the webcomics artist who makes $15,000-$20,000 a year now – before deductions and taxes – makes less than I did in the latter part of the 1980′s.

What cost $9000 in 1988 would cost $16112.50 in 2009.

Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2009 and 1988,
they would cost you $9000 and $4809.84 respectively.

$15,000-$20,000 per year now, before business expenses and taxes, is poorer than I was in 1988 when I had less than $10,000 in taxable income.

Consider that with my very low income, I was still able to get a low income home loan in 1989.


Getting by is not good enough. You don’t get what you want out of life by lowering your standards. The standard should be to thrive, not to get by.

And speaking of creator financing, Tony Harris is on Kickstarter trying to raise $20,000 for his next project. Less than two days to go, and less than half raised. Check it out.

Thanks for coming to the official A Distant Soil website. It helps to keep this comic free and online. If you’d like to help out further, please be sure to allow ad views on your browser when you drop in. We are advertiser supported, and the more our ads are seen, the more support we get from your sponsors. I understand perfectly if you don’t like the ads, but thanks for your consideration.

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