Content exchange: Cross-promotion made simple

Content exchange: Cross-promotion made simple

With social media on a steep decline, many of us are scrambling to find ways to replace its benefits. One...
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Incorporating an oddly shaped panel into a vertical-scroll comic

Incorporating an oddly shaped panel into a vertical-scroll comic

Building an audience on the web means adapting to the vertical scroll. But that doesn't mean giving up innovative page...
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Webcomics Confidential: Draw larger

Webcomics Confidential: Draw larger

I took a question on Twitter recently: "Would it be wrong to draw my comics on A4 paper? I find...
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November To-Do List

November To-Do List

It's time to get started on (*choke*) the penultimate month of 2024.If you plan to offer new merchandise for the...
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ComicLab Ep 359 — Should your readers be your writers?

ComicLab Ep 359 — Should your readers be your writers?

BlueSky is beginning to feel like Twitter did ten years ago! Engagement is up, conversations are genuine, and follower counts...
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Understanding social media

Understanding social media

Social media is among an independent artist's most frustrating elements. We struggle for engagement, wage constant battles with "The Algorithm,"...
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Writing humor

Writing humor

Writing comedy is a challenge that is made even more daunting by the fact that humor itself is completely subjective...
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CMYK vs RGB

CMYK vs RGB

If you're saving your comics in RGB mode, you may be making a potentially expensive mistake. The content you are...
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ComicLab Ep 358 — “Help! I’m not funny anymore!”

ComicLab Ep 358 — “Help! I’m not funny anymore!”

Cartoonists Dave and Brad share some thoughts with a young humor writer trying to find their Funny. Also: Is BlueSky...
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ISBN — a beginner’s guide

ISBN — a beginner’s guide

An ISBN is a 10- or 13-digit number used to identify a book from a specific publisher. Once your book...
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Hot Seat critique

Book Cover Hot Seat

It’s time to launch a new Hot Seat critique series, and I want to circle around to book covers again. We did a book-cover Hot Seat in 2012, and it was a really interesting experience, but we didn’t have a lot of participants. This is probably due to the nature of the topic, of course. After all — if you’re not currently working on a book, you don’t have a cover to workshop, right? But I wanted to give it another go-round in hopes of catching a few participants I may have missed before.

In the comments, please give me the following:

• Name

• Comic’s URL

• JPEG of your book cover — front and back in one image, please. And, please, no PDFs. Image files, only.

by on August 20, 2014
Posted In: Uncategorized
5 Comments

WordPress: My Scheduled Post Won’t Post!

Here’s a little WordPress troubleshooting advice to put in your back pocket. Every once in a while, I’ll schedule a post on my site — and then find out much later in the day that the post hadn’t updated! It’s super-frustrating.

Worse yet, you can re-adjust the scheduled time and date, but the darned thing won’t budge!

And, for some reason, once you’ve assigned a post as “Scheduled,” you lose the option to simply hit “Publish.”

It’s still there, if you go to Posts -> All Posts and select Quick Edit for the post. You toggle “Status” to “Published.” But… no dice. That’s not working either.

Don’t sweat it. The answer is simple. You can solve this in a few easy steps.

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by on August 19, 2014
Posted In: Web site
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KDP: Pre-order

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has announced a new feature: Pre-ordering.

From their press release:

We’re excited to announce that you can now make your new books available for pre-order in Kindle Stores worldwide. With a few quick and easy steps you can create a pre-order page up to 90 days in advance of your book’s release date – your pre-order product page will be created within 24 hours. When you make your book available for pre-order, customers can order the book anytime leading up to the release date you set. We will deliver it to them on that date.

One advantage of using pre-order is that you can start promoting your Kindle book pre-order page on Author Central, Goodreads, your personal website, and other places ahead of its release to help build excitement for your book. Also, pre-orders will contribute toward sales rank and other Kindle Store merchandising ahead of release, which can help more readers discover your book.

Visit your KDP Bookshelf to set up your new book for pre-order.

Here are a few details:

Setting it up

Go through the process of uploading your book to KDP as you normally would. When you get to Step 4, you’ll see an option to set up a pre-release date.

KDP preorder prerelease

Your ebook will appear in the Kindle Store in about 24 hours, as usual, but it will be identified as a pre-order. Customers can pre-oder the book up until the release date — and they may cancel at any time before the book is released.

Once the book is released, the customer will be able to download their book.

Upfront upload

You need to upload a final version of the ebook at least 10 days before the book goes live.

 

For more information on Kindle Direct Publishing, please check out these archive posts.

 

by on August 18, 2014
Posted In: Digital publishing
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Twitter: Use the Mute

So it happened to me last week. I got trolled on Twitter and I lost my temper.

Here’s how it went down. I was promoting my Patreon, like so:

And I received a message that said:

“What about us? We’re your backers too, before you needed backers…“

Now, the smart money is on “ignore,” but instead I fired back. This wasn’t the first time this particular reader was calling me out on something like this. When it wasn’t Patreon, it was a subscription fee. So I saw red.

“What about you? You get a free comic strip every day. For the last fourteen years. Want more? It’s one. dollar. a. month.”

“One of these days,” came the reply, “I’m going to stop poking you with a stick on Twitter.”

He didn’t know it, but that day had already come.

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by on August 14, 2014
Posted In: Marketing / Social Media
5 Comments

Webcomics.com Poll

(I’m experimenting with a new way of presenting the Webcomics.com poll. If the “Vote” button doesn’t work, please use the poll that can be found in the sidebar to the right.)

Before I retire this poll and launch the new one, I wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to participate. If you haven’t responded yet, please consider doing so. The results are always incredibly useful!

Webcomics.com Poll

The majority of my webcomics income comes from (choose up to two):

View Results

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I’ll be preparing a post on the results, and launching a new poll soon.

by on August 13, 2014
Posted In: Site News
3 Comments

Gumroad offers Streaming… Books?

I’ve endorsed Gumroad in the past as an excellent tool for delivering digital goods to customers.

Yesterday they announced a new functionality in their system that I find intriguing: Streaming Books.

They’re calling it “Library Card,” which I think is going to lead to confusion (more on that later), but the idea itself is pretty cool.

It works like this:

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by on August 13, 2014
Posted In: Digital publishing
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Square for an online store?

I love Square. They single-handedly revolutionized the way small businesses handled credit-card transactions — for the better. Want proof? Read this archive post about how merchant services used to be handled before Square. Huge percentages off the top for the merchant-service provider, expensive equipment, disuse fees, multi-year commitments and monthly fees.

It was horrible.

Square came along with a free dongle, reasonable per-transaction rates, no monthly fees, no commitments and no disuse fees.

And suddenly, folks like us were swiping credit cards at conventions and seeing increased sales as a result.

So it pains me — real pain — to give one of their initiatives a negative review. But I must.

If you’re a Square user, you probably got an e-mail a few days ago announcing Square’s new push to enter the online storefront arena.

I checked it out, and for me, it’s a non-starter. Here’s why.

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by on August 12, 2014
Posted In: Merchandise
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Convention Flier Hot Seat: Writhe and Shine

Unless someone wants to sneak into the Convention Flier Hot Seat in the next 24 hours or so, this will be the last in the series. I will announce another Hot Seat series in a couple days. As usual, the standard Hot Seat procedure applies. I’ll start out by discussing the subject in depth, and then open the subject up to the membership at large. Please feel free to offer constructive criticism, advise, new perspectives, etc.

Writhe and Shine / Overcast With a Chance of Doom

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by on August 11, 2014
Posted In: Conventions, Hot Seat critiques, Marketing / Social Media
6 Comments