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Foot in the Door
Journeyman99
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey there, I'm looking to hop into the webcomic scene after a long time of telling myself "eh, eventually", and I'm having a few issues I could use some pointers on! For one, I need a way to make a website that I can easily manage. Another thing would be a readerbase, or at least a way to promote my stuff
any advice would be helpful!
any advice would be helpful!
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Promoting is hard, like really hard. I've been running my website (not a webcomic usually) for over a year and the conclusion that I've come to is you either rely on communities you know to spread the word (very slow and always the risk of turning into a spammer) but some places like Reddit tolerate a little bit of it as long as it's not all you post there, or you can pay for advertising which is fairly effective, but costs money. There's also places like Deviantart to get some exposure.
In a year I've gone from having 6-7 unique visitors a day, to 1200 or so a day when something takes off via Reddit usually, to about 30-100 a day at the moment. Thankfully I'm not selling advertising or anything like that, it's just a hobby so there's no pressure, but getting a readerbase is tough!
Nothing kills a readerbase faster than irregular or infrequent updates. You don't have to do daily - you don't even have to do weekly, but whatever you do it has to be regular and predictable so people know when to check in.
I can't tell you how many times I've started reading a webcomic and lost interest when they updated at random. Sometimes it'd be every second day, sometimes they'd go a week between updates. They'd always have a REASON in the newspost attached to each new comic, for why they were late but honestly I'm not interested in the reasons - I don't want to check a webcomic every day for updates. Penny Arcade has done so well in part because they are like clockwork. You can always tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a dose of PA.
1) Get on something like ComicGenesis: http://www.comicgenesis.com/about.html
Essentially this is something of a startup hosting system for those who want to do webcomics, advertise, and grow without really investing a lot of money at the start. If you are just now beginning it's probably a pretty good idea to start here as it can get you an idea of what is required (roughly) to have weekly scheduled comics, the requirements for peer review, a forum for development, etc. Essentially this is comic "training wheels" as it will connect you with peers at the same level of startup as yourself in comics, along with some that are a bit further along. Its a good place to see what people are doing right (but more importantly, what they are doing wrong). It will also get you a base pretty quick as everyone on there is peer-reviewing eachother's comics, and if you are good people will start reading yours regularly.
2) Buy hosting, install the back-end version of Wordpress, and use comicpress to do the same thing. http://comicpress.org/
This costs money, and will be what you need to do (or something similar) when you actually go about getting pro. But until you have 30-50 strips and a small following it probably isn't worth the money. Getting advertising would require something like Project Wonderful or getting savvy with google advertising. Big learning curve and no real promise of pickup in readership. If it does pick up, though, you are more likely to be taken seriously and to get a mainstream audience.
I'd recommend the first, especially if you haven't done comics for long and don't have a huge background in them.
Having said that, just use tumblr. It works quite well for Zak Gorman and Skottie Young and you don't have to mess with it as much.
You could use a plugin called Webcomic instead. I'm using it myself and I love it.
You can get the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/webcomic/
And the theme for it: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/inkblot
The inkblot theme is highly customizable and if you don't know html / css you can still do quite a bit with the built in theme customizer. ( Appearance >> Customize )
At first get yourself a shared hosting plan with dreamhost or something. A lot of hosts offer 1-click Wordpress installs, no html required there either.