A DISTANT SOIL: The Ascendant Chapter 5 Page 9

February 15, 2010 / 5 Comments

Holy cow, it’s a deluge of generosity from Anthony Soderquist

I am deeply grateful for all the moolah, and there is enough dough in the kitty to pay for me to finish next issue. All website costs are covered into next year. I won’t be able to wiggle time for A Distant Soil until I have finished Gone to Amerikay. But my goal this year (and we are well on our way to that goal) is to fill the kitty enough to pay for two issues. We now have one.

And I must confess, I was a little down about being able to finish this thing. I don’t worry about that anymore. This webcomic experience has been absolutely great. It has helped me reach new readers and find new ways to finance the book. The trick is to make sure you don’t spend more time blogging and posting than you can cover with web earnings. I try to keep a time management diary for this task.

I meant to post about this before: Scott Saavedra is keeping a blog of his webcomics experience. You might want to check that out.

I need to gather my thoughts for a more coherent post about the webcomics thing, because while it is putting a smile on my face, it isn’t working out for the vast majority of people who have tried it. If you define “working out” as “making a living or at least a profit” that is. It all reminds me of the self publishing (analog style) movement. Many, many participants, much money, time and effort poured in, many, many abandoned projects, and a tiny little elite at the top. Oh, and a group of disgruntled rebels who were sure they would be oh, so much better off going their own way and singing their own song, only to end up having to get day jobs that killed their dreams.

It’s like high school, and the two years after.

Anyway, I am deeply grateful that all you people have helped me clear my masses of books, statues and whatnot. I still have a lot left, but no more time for this massive packing and shipping chore. And so I am calling it a day.

Since there was no interest whatsoever in the literature category, it’s all going to my parent’s church which sponsors a library in Ghana. They get my Shakespeare volumes, my 1001 Arabian Nights, the old children’s books. It’s a lovely thing to share lovely things.

More work added to ColleenDoran.com, including unpublished art from The Book of Lost Souls. Go see.

Adn for reasons which should be obvious if you have several thousand friends on Facebook, I am shutting down my personal page, and replacing it with a fan page. I get so many apps and request to play Mafia games and whatnot, that I spend half my allotted time deleting things. Here’s hoping a fan page will be more focused. CLICK HERE TO JOIN. If you are among the first 500 people to join, you are automatically entered to win a page of original art.

5 Comments

  • Colleen

    February 15, 2010 at 6:06 pm

    Here are some things that I think need to be emphasized:

    It takes YEARS to gather an online audience. GG is five years on the web. And it premiered first in print, so it had LOTS of inventory to post and a built in audience.

    Many people are going straight to the web with original material, not realizing just how freaking long it takes to build that audience. After not being able to bring in any decent dough (or reader numbers) after a year or three, the love is gone. Creators try to produce enough per week to maintain reader interest. If you are not able to bring at least three pages a week to your site, your readers will get bored and go somewhere else.

    Some webcomics sites I assumed must be terribly popular are getting nice traffic, but not making many bucks. And some which claim to be wildly popular may be getting the page hits, but there are page hits and Absolute Unique Readers, and that number is almost always MUCH lower. I recall one site which claimed to have 250,000 unique readers. I went to multiple stat tracking sources, and found out they actually have about 50,000. More important than even the unique readers are the number of REGULAR readers.

    For example, my stat counter tells me that I have had as many as 50,000 unique readers per month. But when I drill down the info, that comes to about 15,000 REGULAR readers. That is my actual audience. This is significantly higher then one year ago, but not enough YET for me to be fully self-supporting on the web.

    And frankly, some people fib about their numbers. A blog site which some had told me was popular, and which claims right there on its page to have 3500 unique readers PER DAY, has nothing of the kind. It doesn’t even have 3500 page views per day. There’s only so much numbers conflation you can do when you are tied into Project Wonderful, folks.

    That said, it is FAR more readers than I have on the print comic, and a significant increase of readers who now support the book. I consider it a major supplement to my print program.

    So, win-win.

    Anyone can use stat ranking sites to figure out what traffic comics are actually getting. None of these sites are 100% accurate, but cross comparisons will give you an idea.

  • Gemina13

    February 17, 2010 at 1:11 am

    Gee. Niniri seems a tad irked. Wonder why. /snark

    Then again, if I had a revelatory moment interrupted by someone who treated the whole experience as trivial . . . AND I hadn’t slept or had a shower yet . . . I wouldn’t be polite either.

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