The “Hitch It / Ditch It” Hot Seat is one of the more popular of the critique series, so let’s kick off a round this month.
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I want to suggest a new site feature: Inside the Cartoonist’s Studio.
Here are the details.
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Now, more than ever, it’s easy to see what a subscription to Webcomics.com will get you.
Every Friday, you can read the entire Archive Dive post without a subscription. This is a post from the site’s archive that I pull out front again because it still has relevant information you can use today. This is especially nice for newer subscribers (or anyone else) who may have missed it when it originally ran.
Plus, at the beginning of every month, I do a wrap-up that highlights some of the best posts — from the site as well as the private forum — from the preceding month.
If you’re curious about joining, we’ve made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.
Please note: The links below will lead you to content that is “subscription-only” content. Why do I do this? Simple. If you see something that intrigues you and decide to subscribe, you can come back here and use this post to jump right to the post that caught your attention. And once you do that, use the other Best Of posts to drill even deeper into the site!
Best of the siteExclusive Member Benefit: Get the first year of iDrive at $14.88 — including 1 TB of back-up space. After the first year, an annual subscription to iDrive is still less expensive than the comparable plan at Dropbox.
Philly-area workshops announced: I’ll be doing two 3-day workshops in the Philadelphia area — one on running a business as a creative professional and the other on creating comics and sequential art. Members get the skinny on how to sign up to receive a free copy of The Webcomics Handbook when they register.
Humor writing — one step at a time: I did a writing exercise with my Sequential Arts class at Hussian School of Art that opened my eyes to an interesting strategy for improving humor writing.
Google Sitemap Generator: Use this simple tip to improve your site’s SEO.
Manga Studio — The Photoshop ex-pat’s guide: If you’re like me, you learned Photoshop long before you attempted Manga Studio. This guide is to help you make that transition more smoothly.
Character Design Hot Seat: This month’s critique opportunity was focused on character design. Members were able to get helpful feedback on this aspect of their cartooning.
Idiom management: Using idioms correctly is a big step in polishing your writing. If you’re chomping at the bit, you’re doing it wrong.
Dropbox to Instagram: Instagram has some of the strongest participation numbers in social media. But getting an image to display on the app isn’t always easy. Use this snappy trick to upload your images from Dropbox.
Comics-only RSS feed: This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to offer a special RSS feed to your readers that excludes everything but the comic.
Jetpack adds protection against brute force attacks: Here’s how to implement it.
FTP tutorial: If you’ve ever been daunted by accessing your Web site via FTP, this handy primer will get you going in no time.
Sherpa Safari: In an ongoing discussion of online-comics-service Comic Sherpa, member Jules Faulkner looks at some of the alternatives.
10 ways to use Facebook smarter: You use it every day, but are you accessing its full potential to promote your comic?
Instagram for Dummies: Here’s a quick guide to using the app to promote your comic.
Wizard World Pittsburgh: Who’s going / who wants to meet up?
Ads that open App Store, Google Play on mobile devices: Have you noticed this? Is there a way to stop it?
How useful are Facebook Pages? Are they the promotional powerhouses many of us assume them to be?
Letterer won’t share original files: “I hired a letterer to letter a … short comic story I wrote. He lettered it and provided a layered “print ready” PDF and high-resolution tiffs.
When I asked for the indesign files and illustrator files he said he would not provide it. … what do people here think about this practice in general?”
How do I fire a colorist? She’s not meeting her deadlines, and he needs to let her go. But how?
Pricing illustrations for a book proposal: “A writer … asked me to do illustrations for a book she’s putting together. … She’s still putting together a proposal, though, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to approach negotiation at this stage. I assume I charge her for each illustration before the submission to the publisher, and then the publisher pays me for illustrations if the book is picked up?”
Patreon help: “I’m in the process of setting up a Patreon site for [my comic]. One of my thoughts for a reward would be access to the old [2,100-strip] archives [which aren’t available online elsewhere], but I can’t figure out a good way to do this, readability-wise. One thought would be setting up a separate WordPress site with just the old strips on it that could only be accessed by Patrons. Not sure how I’d restrict access, however.”
Advice on prints: “I was just invited to attend my local comic shops Free Comic Book Day event. This is the first time I will actually be behind on that side of the table so I was looking to get some promotional items for my webcomic like prints made up. My main question is does anyone have advice on which printing services are generally used by artists for prints and if you have any advice for a first timer I would really appreciate it.”
While I was tabling at Emerald City Comicon, my neighbor, Tavis Maiden, caught me looking at a recent tweet of mine. I had a large number of “favorites,” but a much smaller number of retweets.
“I don’t want ‘favorites,'” I grumbled, “I want the retweet!”
He said he was recently making the same point with some other webcartoonists. He said that, as webcartoonists and self-publishers, we should be more generous with our social media habits. We should do this primarily out of kindness. But there’s a component to this philosophy that is self-serving, too.
Good social-media habits always come back to bolster your own outreach. Here’s how.
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Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It’s time to do a little webcomics planning.The content you are trying to access is only available to members.
The Harvey Awards are now accepting nominations. Anyone who creates a comic (that’s you) may nominate fellow creators / titles for the different categories. They have an online nomination form available on their site.
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You don’t need a subscription to read today’s Friday Archive Dive!
Even if you’re not a member of the site, you can read the entire post, which originally ran March 20, 2014. 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 sample.
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 $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire.
You may have noticed something over the past few weeks. You’ll see Google Analytics reporting a huge spike in traffic — and then later in the day, you’ll see that your stats have been adjusted to normal levels. What just happened? Did someone “steal” your readers? Were they ever there?! The answer is pretty interesting.
According to the sources I’m finding, this traffic flux is caused by bots. Analytics identifies it as such and adjusts the number to mitigate the effect — and that causes your traffic report to drop back to normal levels.
Open Analytics and go to Audience -> Technology -> Browser & OS Report. Look for Mozilla Compatible Agent.
Mozilla’s not a culprit, but it’s an indicator. If you have an unusually high amount of traffic from this source, it’s a clue that something’s up.
Now open Audience -> Technology -> Network report and apply this advanced segment to show only visits where the Browser contains Mozilla Compatible Agent. (Special thanks for the Advanced Segment to Lunametrics.com).
Once you’ve installed the Custom Segment, go back to the main Google Analytics dashboard — Audience Overview (as seen above) — and click the downward arrow at the upper left. Select The “Include Mozilla” segment, and then click Apply.
(Note: The image above was created after Analytics normalized my traffic spike.)
Now scroll down and click Service Providers (under Systems). Look for the following:
Also… look at the stats. Here are some dead giveaways for bot-traffic:
If what you’re seeing lines up with the above, you’ve got bots!
Filtering these results out of my report is fairly easy. Click on Admin to access the following dashboard.
Set up a filter with the following parameters:
The filter pattern is: ^(microsoft corp(oration)?|inktomi corporation|yahoo! inc\.|google inc\.|stumbleupon inc\.)$|gomez
Your Analytics report will now automatically filter out these bots.
You’re right. The bot-traffic is still there, and it’s causing your traffic report to be sampled — and that’s not particularly good.
The only problem is this — I haven’t been able to dig up a really good solution yet — at least not one that I feel is easily implemented by a garden-variety user. However, I’m going to keep digging, and I’ll report back when I find something that’s useful.
In the meantime — at least for my own curiosity — I’ve solved the Mystery of the Disappearing Traffic Spike. I’ll know better than to get my hopes up next time I wake up to a huge traffic uptick (at least until I can verify that it’s legit). And when it disappears later in the day, I won’t feel quite so cheated.
As I was preparing yesterday’s post on Facebook tips, I kept thinking about one of the facts that I found during my research: Instagram users engage more frequently than users of any other social-media platform. So I decided to check it out for myself.
I was not disappointed.
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Facebook is a major viral-marketing powerhouse. There’s no denying that. According to Social Media Examiner, Facebook dominates sharing activity by a 10-1 margin over its nearest competitor (Pinterest). But how we use Facebook — and how it processes our messages — has changed a lot over the years. So I wanted to take a little time to re-evaluate Facebook, discuss some “best practice” advice, and share a tutorial on tracking your progress. To that end, here are 10 ways to use Facebook smarter.
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I’ll be doing one-on-one comic consultations while I’m exhibiting at Emerald City Comicon this weekend.
Each consultation comes with a complimentary copy of The Webcomics Handbook.
If you’d like to sit down and discuss strategies for improving in 2015, go to this site and book one of the two options. Use the following coupon code for $25 off:
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