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The results of the annual Webcomics.com Poll on income sources were jaw-dropping — and they reflect a sea change in the webcomics business model. The majority of respondents — 54% —reported crowdfunding newcomer Patreon as one of their primary sources of webcomics-related income.
We’ll talk about what this means and compare it to previous polls that asked the same question…
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For the past year I’ve been helping to beta-test a new app that helps you protect your copyright over downloadable content. Blasty is simple, easy-to-use, and effective in stopping unapproved downloading of your work.
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Recently, I saw a webcartoonist asking for advice on convention banners. Here’s my advice:
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This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
Merry Christmas — and Happy New Year!
Set down the sunblock, and step away from the pool. It’s time to start planning for December and January.
I know it’s hard to get into the spirit, but this is the time to start working on merchandise for the holiday shopping season. In recent years, webcartoonists have offered an increasing compliment of holiday goodies that have ranged from specialty T-shirts and mugs to holiday-themed greeting cards. And let’s not forget to add calendars to that list. Those will start appearing in stores by November — at the latest!
So, let’s take a closer look at some of those specialty products, and how we can start working now to be ready to compete when the snow falls.
I’ve been pretty dour on calendars as merchandise in the past, and, truth be told, I’m still not a huge proponent of the practice. As I’ve stated before, calendars have a very limited shelf life. Few people buy them after January. That means you either have to have a very strong, dedicated readership to pitch to or you have to go Print-on-Demand (POD) which brings the unit profit way down.
I am a fan of the calendar-creation tool at Lulu.com, and Redbubble.com seems to have a pretty snazzy set-up for calendars, as well. So, as long as I don’t invest too much time on it, I can usually justify putting out a POD calendar.
Lulu gives you a choice between two sizes: a large-format calendar that measures 13.5 x 19 inches and a standard-sized one at 11 x 17 inches. The Redbubble calendars are 11.7 x 16.5 inches.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of Lulu’s calendar-creation tool, read this archive post.
The large-format calendar (like the sample on the right) has a spiral-bound spine at the top, holding sheets of 13.5 x 19 -inch stock.
Dates: Are you confirmed on any convention appearances for next year? Semi-confirmed? Put it on the calendar! (Just make sure to be clear if any of these are tentative dates.) Other dates to note:
Pricing: Lulu allows you to set your own royalty, but try to keep the final price as close to $20 as possible (for the standard size). $30-range for the larger version.
Of course, you could buy a larger number of calendars for yourself, driving the unit cost down, and then try to sell them for a larger profit on your own site. You can do this through your POD vendor or you could invest in an offset print run. However, you risk buying too many and then being stuck with them in January when sales dwindle.
Of course, you can always use them as a loss leader to drive sales to your store later in the month.
When I released my 2010 calendar, it was November. And, truthfully, I figured this was plenty of time. One of my readers was very upset with me for releasing it so late.
I was perplexed. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to purchase a calendar before November, and yet, there was clearly a segment of my readership who had already completed their calendar-shopping for the year — and given the choice, they would have chosen my offering if it had been available.
So, this year, I offered my calendar in early-October. And my sales have been brisk.
But my new recommendation is to release your calendars at the beginning of September! I’ll get into why in a moment.
I realize that this advice is coming to you too late for this year, but you can put it in the back for your head for next year. (I’ll try to have a Friday Archive Dive on this post next year to remind you!)
But there’s an even better reason for having your calendar out early: Conventions!
How did I overlook that?!
I brought 20 calendars to New York Comic con this year, and I was sold out either Saturday night or early Sunday. They flew off the table.
Calendars have an edge on the convention table:
If I had those calendars on my table in Baltimore the month before, I’m convinced that I would have made a killing.
About midway through the convention in New York, one guy who was buying a calendar asked for a sketch inside it — the way I do with books.
How did I overlook that?!?
Thinking on my feet, I asked him what month his birthday fell in. He said “April,” and I flipped the calendar open to that month and did a special sketch, with one of my characters delivering birthday wishes.
Every calendar after that had a special sketch on purchaser’s requested month.
Even if you’re not planning to attend conventions in September, October or November, you should still plan to have your calendars prepped and available by September because if you do, you can order yourself a small stack and offer them on your Web site as Artist Editions.
Most storefront solutions include a way for the purchaser to communicate with the merchant. In PayPal, it’s “NOTE TO MERCHANT.” Advise your readers to indicate the month they want the illustration drawn in — and any birthday messages (if this is a gift for someone else, for instance) — and you’ve got a rock-solid early-Fall merchandise offering.
And your sketches could be simply your characters, or they could deliver birthday wishes, or they could contain references to the person’s astrological sign… the possibilities are endless.
Heck, you could do a very limited number of calendars with sketches on each day and sell it for a premium price.
A few years back, I launched a couple of Christmas cards and the response was so overwhelming, I vowed to start earlier the following year so I could take advantage of this opportunity better.
Designing Christmas cards — and let’s note here that the term “Christmas card” is being used as a catch-all phrase for all of the holiday cards that get purchased during the winter holidays — is a lot like designing T-shirts.
No one is going to buy one with your character(s) on them. No one is going to buy them with your strip re-printed on them (unless maybe it’s a single-panel comic).
What they are going to buy are cards that express your unique sense of humor or your identifiable illustration style. It’s perfectly fair game to swipe a punchline from a strip. And it’s perfectly OK if the card has little-or-nothing to do with your comic.
Take the this good advice about designing great T-shirts and apply it to your Christmas card concept.
Like I said, I produced two that year. Both are posted a little further down. The first one is related directly to the theme of my comic, but had content that had not appeared in the strip (yet). The second one was completely unrelated to the comic. Both sold well, although the one that matched more closely the “Evil Inc” theme sold a little bit better.
When you think about it, designing a greeting card is very similar to creating a two-panel comic. The cover is the first panel and the inside can be the second panel.
In fact, it’s an incredibly effective two-panel comic because it’s impossible to look ahead to the punchline and ruin the build-up. You can build a nice amount of suspense that will charge the pay-off nicely. For example…
Of course, you can also approach it as a single-panel comic — with a nice, themed message on the inside.
The usual online printers are already offering specials for people printing greeting cards for the holidays. PSPrint has offered as much as 60%-off. Overnight Prints has offered 50%-off on holiday-related printing.
Make sure appropriately-sized envelopes come with the order. If not, buy some, and factor that expense in to your final price.
Remember, you’re shipping off someone’s greeting cards. They need to arrive in good shape. I bought these cardboard boxes from Uline last year, and they performed beautifully.
Reader surveys are an excellent way to get a better feel for your audience. Does your comic skew towards female reader? Do they tend to be younger or older? What are their other interests? would they support a Kickstarter for a new book? What rewards would make them Patreon backers?
In fact, we’ve posted a helpful DIY tutorial so you can ask all of the questions you need to ask — without paying for a potentially-expensive service like SurveyMonkey.
But what if you’re not getting a very healthy response from your readers? Should you seek out additional respondents? Advertise for more input? Solicit other cartoonists?
Be very careful, your quest for more information could result in your getting very, very bad information. And that’s downright dangerous. Here’s why…
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I was recently interviewed for the Advance Your Art podcast, hosted by Yuri Cataldo, director of Business of Creative enterprises in the Department of Marketing Communication at Emerson College in Boston. Advance Your Art focuses on arts entrepreneurship, so it was right in the wheelhouse of what I discuss at comic conventions, books and here at Webcomics.com.
Our conversation went deep into a wide range of topics, including…
Why do I introduce myself as a cartoonist? Because I love watching the confusion on people’s faces when I do. My uncle’s reaction to my being a cartoonist a few weeks ago was similar to the reaction you’d get if you told someone you have cancer: “Oh? Well… <shrugs> I’m sure you’ll be OK…”
My introduction to comics. I tell the story about how I got hooked on comics when one of my uncles — a trucker — brought a box of coverless comics from the drugstore on his route. If I had gotten to the coverless Playboys and Penthouseshe had stashed in the bottom of the box, however, I might have never paid much attention to the comics.
Why there’s no such thing as talent. In fact, I think telling a young person that they’re talented is harmful to them. I explain why.
The importance of a college education to a cartoonist — but not the way you think it might be. Also, we talked about some of my favorite formative books on cartooning from my childhood — including How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way and The Complete Book of Cartooning.
How I got started in newspapers — and, later, made the switch to webcomics. It all started with an editorial cartoonist — Bill Day — giving me some life-changing career advice: “Don’t sit around waiting for someone to die.”
The (un)importance of ideas. Here’s another artistic concept I think we get dangerously wrong. We focus on getting an ideainstead of putting our creative energies towards the really important stuff — executing the ideas we do have in a new and innovate way.
Why I don’t talk about new projects.
The early days of webcomics: The “free” comics fallacy and the Print vs Web wars. If you missed the first part of the 2000s in comics, you’ll want to hear this.
The rise of adblockers: The business of webcomics is in flux as we speak. We talk about what’s working and where the industry is going.
How can newspapers survive? I lay out a very simple plan. Really.
The stories behind the creation of Evil Inc, Courting Disaster and Phables.
How the “How to Make Webcomics” book came about — and, later “The Webcomics Handbook.”
The importance of knowing how to run a business is just as important as learning your art.
How to do social media better. Ironically, the thing that makes you great at art also makes you lousy at social media. And if you want to read even more on this topic…
This is the last of the latest series of Hitch It / Ditch It critiques.
The rules are simple: I go to your site and point out something you’re doing well, and something that might stand some improvement. The discussion goes on from there are the members join in with their thoughts.
Today, we’re going to be talking about…
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Patreon’s announcement — in an e-mail to creators — that it will once again be able to offer its users to use Paypal to pledge to NSFW creators is a huge victory for the crowdfunding service. Patreon had to remove Paypal functionality for creators who were offering NSFW content after Paypal threatened to stop all payments to Patreon.
Why’d they do that? It’s not a moral issue. It’s an economic one. From the standpoint of Paypal, an adult-oriented website is problematic due to the high volume of contested charges. What’s a contested charge? Take for example someone whose spouse questions an adult-website charge on the family credit card prompting an immediate defense of “I didn’t do that! There must be some mistake! One of the kids! Identity theft! Wandering bands of marauders!” They file a complaint with their credit-card provider which, of course, sides with its customer. The money is returned to the customer by the adult website — in a process called a “chargeback.” It causes additional transactions, processing time, and record-keeping.
As a result of all of those shenanigans, adult websites face annual fees of upwards of about $500 — as well as higher processing fees — from credit-card processors. They’re considered high-risk merchants. And when Paypal found out there was NSFW content on Patreon, they made the move to classify the crowdfunding service as “high risk.”
From Patreon:
“Unfortunately, this is a common issue in the payments industry, both because payments for adult content are subject to a higher rate of chargebacks, and because of an aversion to the content itself among some payment processors.
After many long discussions we were able to convince PayPal, or more specifically their subsidiary Braintree, that Adult Content creators on Patreon are not a serious risk. Our content policy, and the nature of subscription payments, means that Adult Content creators on Patreon are less risky than most creators making adult content. We also have a very diverse mix of content types, so even if our Adult Content creators are higher risk than other types of creators, Patreon as a whole is less risky.
We are very happy about this victory, but the payment industry does not provide much transparency around payments for adult content. As a company we are not happy with this lack of transparency since it impacts the livelihoods of Adult Content creators. We will continue to work towards more certainty around these issues, but for now we feel that the benefit of allowing PayPal payments for Adult Content creators outweighs any hypothetical risk that it may change in the future.”
Patreon also made the following announcement:
“We have changed the name of our NSFW flag to Adult Content. This change, along with better onboarding and help documentation, is to help creators understand when they have to flag themselves as Adult Content, as well as removing the not-so-loved “NSFW” title. We are also continuing to clarify what content is acceptable when flagged as Adult Content and what content is not allowed on Patreon.”
I’m a proponent of keeping my comic’s Facebook Page separate from my personal Facebook profile. Mostly, it’s a common sense issue — some things that I may want to post on one may not be appropriate for the other (and vice vera).
But with Facebook’s announcement that they will begin downgrading content from Pages (to allow posts from users’ personal profiles to get higher prominence) I’m finding that administering two separate accounts has an unforeseen benefit as well…
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