Having wrapped up his 16th Kickstarter, cartoonist Dave Kellett shares some insights about setting realistic expectations, avoiding paid advertising, and...
Social media has gotten more sophisticated, and video has become a large part of that growth. Instagram, which started as a place to post static photography, has built out several video-based posting formats like Reels, Stories, Instagram TV, etc. And the biggest growth sector in social media, TikTok, is all video! Your social-media strategy needs to adapt.
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As we mentioned earlier, this year’s holiday-shopping season might hold some surprising opportunities for independent artists. Here’s guide to help you prepare for success.
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It happens every month. You get to the end of the month and breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve made it through another month, and you’ve earned a certain amount of money on Patreon.
And then, on the first few days of the following month, a significant number of patrons cancel their pledges! Is it the beginning of a long, steady decline?
Probably not. More likely, it’s part of a very normal pattern of patron behavior. So let’s take a closer look at what’s happening…
The Patreon dip
We can see a very typical first-of-the-month Patreon dip in the chart to the right. Some are smaller than others, but they all occur on the first day(s) of each month.
We discussed the Patreon dip in this September 20, 2018, episode of ComicLab (08:36) — linked below.
False assumptions
First of all, this is a good opportunity to address a wider false assumption many creators have in regards to their Patreon campaigns — a pledge is newer assumed to be ongoing. You can never assume a commitment of more than one month from any given pledge.
This is an especially important point to understand if some of your Patreon rewards are meant to be given after a number of consecutive pledges. In other words, offering a reward after a patron has been pledging for a year isn’t a very good idea. Your patron may not be intending to pledge that long.
In fact, you should be approaching Patreon with a completely different mindset. You should be asking yourself — every month — if you’re doing enough to keep those patrons for one more month!
Ongoing pledges? Ongoing rewards!
In other words, if you want ongoing pledges, you have to be willing to post ongoing content and ongoing rewards. Exclusive content posted regularly, for example, will keep those patrons in place for another month. They’re going to want to see what’s next. Moreover — they’re going to feel as if they’re getting their money’s worth for this month’s pledge!
Rewards, too, should be ongoing. By that, I mean, reward should be monthly. Regular reinforcement for a regular pledge. Rewards that take several months’ pledges to earn should be reserved for high-value items. For example, I offer original art in return for three consecutive $20 pledges. That’s because offering originals as a reward for a single $60/month pledge is too great a commitment on the part of the patron. (Not to mention me… that’s a lot of physical shipping!)
But in general, if you want a monthly patron, you’d better be prepared to offer a monthly reward.
End-of-the-month fluctuations
Part of the dip you see at the first of every month is actually due to the closing days of the preceding month. If you check you Patreon numbers of the first of the month, you’ll see wild fluctuations throughout the day. This can be very stressful — until you understand the mechanics behind it.
You see, as Patreon processes your backers’ credit/debit cards, some of those charges are being declined. This happens for a wide range of reasons, but the most frequent is simply that the card that the use enter has expired. They need to go in and manually update their information. And until they do that, they will be removed from your Patreon totals (both poledges and patron count).
Don’t delete declined pledges!
Don’t make the same mistake I made with patrons with declined pledges: I deleted them.
A little later, my contact at Patreon got in touch to see how things were going, and I brought the issue up with her. Her response was that Patreon has made it so any patron who has a declined pledge will not be able to access members-only content. So as soon as their card is declined, their access to protected content is disabled. And that remains the case until they update their payment information. Once they successfully do that, they regain their access — and Patreon attempts to recover any pending charges from the past.
So, deleting those patrons — especially the ones whose payments had cleared in the past — was a big mistake that may have cost me hundreds of dollars over time.
Bottom line: Don’t delete a patron whose payment has been declined. His or her access is blocked, and if you delete them, you’ll never have the opportunity to reclaim that lost money.
From Patreon:
Will Declined Patrons Still Get Access To My Content?
Not any longer! We’ve listened to your feedback and have been taking steps to protect your content from patrons whose pledges decline.
If one of your patron’s payment declines, they will stop receiving email notifications about your new posts until their payment goes through. Additionally, if they try to view content while logged into Patreon, they will instead see a page reminding them to update their payment method.
As soon as their payment method goes through, they’ll be able to view your posts as well as receive email notifications about them.
The power of exclusive content
This is yet another reason that I remain enthusiastic about posting exclusive content. When patrons with declined cards attempt to access that content, they will be redirected to their payment page, where they can update their information. That money is charged immediately (whether you use Charge Upfront or not), and the patron regains access immediately.
That’s one of the reasons I like to make several posts at the beginning of the month. I like to provide as many opportunities for this interaction as possible.
The bottom line
The bottom line is this: A first-of-the-month dip in your Patreon campaign is normal and natural. Don’t panic. Realize this for what it is — a recognizable pattern of behavior — and plan your crowdfunding approach accordingly.
Today’s show is brought to you by Wacom — makers of the powerful, professional, portable Wacom One! This week, a cartoonist asks about going back to a project they abandoned. Dave shares some strong advice. Brad sings his.
Today’s show is brought to you by Wacom — makers of the powerful, professional, portable Wacom One! We’re going back to Webcomics 101. We’ll be talking about using the Web to build an audience.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about incorporating a circular panel into a page design intended to work well on a printed page — without having a negative impact on the vertical-scroll version of the webcomic. Here’s a step-by-step guide on doing exactly that.
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Q.: There are so many formats to design for! Should I design for the eventual Kickstarter print run (but post as a webcomic), reformat for Webtoons, and then end with a printed book? Or is there another life cycle for webcomics I should consider?
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When webcomics started out, longform creators felt like the ugly ducklings in the crowd. Many of them expressed the same complaint when I’d talk to them. They just didn’t feel as if the Web was the right place to present their work to its full strength. However, I think the Web— and its users — have both improved and matured to a point that longform comics not only can survive — but thrive — on new platforms (such as eComics).
But it kills me — kills me — when I see longform-comics creators continually trying to present their work in the “traditional” webcomic set-up that was heavily geared towards strips and other short-form comic. It’s a classic square peg scenario.
I think longform comics are on the cusp of a real revolution, and the artists who are going to best position themselves to take advantage of this will be the ones who will adapt their publishing approach to a new way of thinking.
Here are a few thoughts on where I think that new way of thinking should go.
Updates, not pages
Pages are the units of a book. Updates are the units of a Web site. The two are not interchangeable.
If you’re posting the pages of your book on the Web, I think you may be making a mistake (unless you’re planning those pages very carefully).
Your Web site itself (and the reading experience on a Web site) is not conducive to book-reading. And if you want your Web site to flourish, you’re going to have to create the best-possible reading experience on that site — not a book-reading experience that you shoe-horn into a Web site.
Make sense.
UPDATE = HALF-PAGE
Now there are a lot of ways to do this. I’m particularly fond of Scott Kurtz’s approach at Table Titans, and I strongly urge you to give it some thought. Every update is a half-page of the book he will later release. And every update has a significant element to it — a punchline, a plot hook, a cliff-hanger, etc. He writes the comic with the site/book polarity in mind. He knows that every update has to be important for the site, and he knows exactly how those updates fit into the overall book (top of page, end of right-hand page, etc.).
And this guides his writing. If he needs another update to make a two-page spread work right in the book, for example, he’ll do that. And he’ll make sure it’s significant for the site — at the same time that it fits into the storytelling of the book.
Challenging? Absolutely.
Impossible? Absolutely not. It’s just a new way of thinking about storytelling.
SLIDING SCALE UPDATE
Here’s another option: You simply release your graphic novel in significant updates. And if that means releasing two panels today and a page-and-a-half on the next scheduled update day, then that’s what it means.
This approach takes less planning in the writing stage — and allows you to keep the storytelling in the book “pure.” But it’s going to put you in a tight spot sooner or later as you run out of finished, significant updates to post.
FILLERS, SKETCHES, GUEST ART, ETC.
This is poison to the Web-reading experience. You fool yourself into believing that you had a post up for your readers that day — and, to an extend you kinda do. But that crap lives forever in your archive, taking readers out of the spell that you’re trying to weave as a storyteller.
Please don’t settle for this in leiu of doing a little planning and time management. You’re hurting yourself.
The Frequent/Consistent/Significant rule will always apply to a comic on the Web. There are no special dispensations for longform comics. Every update has to be updated as frequently as it possibly can be, while maintaining consistency (of quality and schedule) and significance of each, individual update.
That’s another challenge — to the writing for sure — and to the comics-creation process overall.
But here’s where I think the payoff is…
Digital downloads
Digital tablets are so widespread as to make them almost an assumed possession among our readers.
And it’s so freaking easy to sell digital downloads — either independently, through sites like SendOwl and Gumroad, or through online distributors such as ComiXology and DriveThruComics — that you literally don’t have an excuse to avoid it any longer.
A longform-comic Web site, therefore, should be set up in such a way that readers (even new ones) instantly understand the following:
This is a longform comic on the Web.
Navigation buttons will allow the reader to jump from update to update — and also from chapter to chapter.
If the reader is intrigued enough by what they’re reading on the Web, they can easily read archival content (and perhaps even the rest of the current chapter) by buying a digital download.
That’s the user experience you have to set up — in the first screen view of your site.
Again, that’s going to take some planning — and some excellent time-management skills. But I think there’s a way that longform creators can make this work.
The longform publishing cycle
What I see as a possibility is a publishing cycle that (a) identifies the time-constraint placed on the callenges I laid out above, and actually (b) builds in the extra time needed to make this happen. Here’s the cycle:
PLANNING
The book is planned, plotted, and outlined. You know where the story is going conceptually, but more importantly, you know how many updates you have (and, on the other side of the coin, how many pages you’ll have for your impending book/digital download). You don’t have to have every last word written, and there’s a little room for wiggle, but you have a strong outline against which you can plan your approach.
And since you have a plan, you can now determine:
Update schedule
Time needed to build a buffer to carry you through the publishing cycle
Soft publication date for your digital download
Soft publication date for your printed book (if that’s in your business plan)
LAUNCH
Once you’re ready, you now launch your longform comic. You make an announcement. You hit inbound social media* as hard as you can. You send preview comics and press-releases out to sites that cover comics news. And you have reader-grabbing updates in place to… well… grab those readers your driving to your site.
* Your Twitter feed, your Facebook page, etc… all sending traffic “inbound” to your Web site.
PUBLISHING
This looks more like “traditional” webcomics publishing. You have ads on the site to generate income. You’re facilitating social-media evangelists through outbound social-media buttons (ones that allow users to share your work with their friends). You’re facilitating comments and other Community Building aspects of webcomics. You’re running a webcomic, except…
PUSH THE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
…where a traditional webcomic would encourage readers to dive through the archives, you’re making sure they know they can read previous chapters (or even previous books, issues or volumes) by purchasing digital downloads. These links are prominent, and your “message” on the site, social media, etc. reinforces this fact.
CONSIDER THE PRE-RELEASE
Of course, if you’re updating on the fly, you’re getting updates finished just in time for publication on your Web site. But if you’ve planned ahead, you can offer interested readers the entire chapter (or book) as a digital download — which includes the stuff that’s already appeared on the site as well as the rest of the content they haven’t seen online, all the way to the end of the chapter/book/etc.
THE FINALE
At the grand finale, we have the completed piece (chapter/book/etc.) available as a digital download. If a printed version of the comic is in your plans, this is when you launch the Kickstarter. You have a product in hand, a dedicated reader base, and a clear path to your product. These are all important ingredients to a successful crowd-sourcing campaign.
DORMANCY
And now you go dormant. Well, not completely dormant, but the activity on your site slows down. You convert it from an active webcomic to a storefront for your digital download(s). Make sure there’s a message explaining when the next live content will begin appearing on the site. And you can even post teasers for the next round with sketches, etc — as long as they’re not included in your comic’s archive.
During the “dormancy” period, you go back to “PLANNING” and start the entire process over again.
You won’t be getting as much ad revenue, but as you’re doing the planning, you should also be focused on selling that chapter/book that you’ve created, and that’s going to be the revenue stream that sustains you during “dormancy.” You’ll be pushing the content out through all of the channels you can, too — ComiXology, DriveThruComics, apps, etc. And, of course, the Kickstarter money for the book — and the subsequent sales of that book. All of this is your revenue during “dormancy.”
Then you do the whole thing over again.
What do you think?
Now, obviously, there is a wide range of longform comics, and this probably won’t apply to some. However, I think there are elements there that could apply to all of them. And there are creative people who will take that framework and run with it.
But that’s my thoughts on running a longform comic on the Web. What are yours?
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