The final Kickstarter-reward episode of Webcomics Weekly. My personal thanks go out to my co-hosts Kris Straub, Dave Kellett, and Scott Kurtz.
Q. How would you convince your readers, who usually reads your webcomic for free, to pay at least $1 to your Patreon?
A: You’re making a pretty common mistake.
Here’s why…
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Today’s Archive Dive is from Dec. 18, 2013, when I talked about a necessary ingredient in humor: cruelty.
A while ago, I read an angry letter to the editor about a syndicated comic strip that drew the ire of a reader (who made the ubiquitous subscription-cancelation threat). The comic was seen to be “insulting and degrading.”
And, like it does every time I see a work of humor attacked for its cruelty, I had to laugh… nervously.
Let me put it in a way that best fits this site: Cruelty is the yellow impurity in the Green Lantern ring of Humor…
It’s time to take what you learned this year and use it to excel next year. Here are some things on my list.
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From Gizmodo: Mysterious Russian Malware Is Infecting 100,000+ WordPress Sites
A Russian malware called SoakSoak has infected over 100,000 WordPress sites since this Sunday, turning blogs into attack platforms. It’s a potential shitshow, and it could’ve been prevented earlier this fall. Google has already blocked 11,000 domains to try to curb the damage.
Here’s what you need to know:
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Q. I have been working on a new comic since the late summer, striving to get things the way I want them. My intention is to make a long-form comic with some humor and adventure. That being said, it will only update twice a week, heavily focusing on an update rather than just doing just doing a page for an update.
Now my question: Since I have a bit of a buffer and I am working on trying to maintain it, do you think it would be a good idea to put the whole chapters up as an eComic for those who want to pay for it — or am I getting to far ahead of myself?
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So the comic was pretty straightforward. The punchline was solid. But the cartoonist felt the need to explain his joke with a little character who made the punchline painfully obvious. And, in so doing, completely ruined any humor that had been created.
On a Web site, Comics I Don’t Understand, the comment ran thusly:
Metatexts, hidden panels, side comments… who started this horrible trend, and how can we make it stop?
I stared at my screen, quite literally gobsmacked.
“Who started this horrible trend“?!
This man who has been updating a site — for more than a decade — with the central purpose of highlighting comics that didn’t hammer you over the head with a punchline… is that the man who just wrote that sentence?!
And before you report me to Blogs I Don’t Understand dot com, please know that I write that with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
However, this highlights a fundamental rule of humor: Nobody wants to get the IDGI [“I Don’t Get It“]. And if you deliver a punchline and your reader/audience responds with an IDGI… well, that’s a missed opportunity — one you can learn from. BUT… if you write every gag under the constant fear of an IDGI… you’ll never write the level of humor you’re capable of.
And I’ll tell you why.
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Today’s Archive Dive is from Dec. 17, 2013, when I discussed a helpful method of setting up and managing custom e-mail addresses using GMail.
Yesterday, I shared my thoughts on free e-mail services (like Yahoo) on Twitter. In short, Yahoo was one of the first e-mail services I signed up for (back in the ancient days of the World Wide Web), and as I moved from city to city (and from ISP to ISP), it was easy for me to simply keep all of my e-mail needs in once place. And, every year I stuck with Yahoo it became more and more difficult for me to move — even though people would give me that look when I’d give them my e-mail address.
But recently, Yahoo’s service has gotten so bad that even “free” was too high a price to pay. I was, frankly, unable to do simple functions such as downloading an attachment. It was time to move.
And if I was going to go through all this trouble, I was going to finally have an “@evil-inc.com” address. But, of course, I wanted to do this as inexpensively as possible.
Chances are, you can get e-mail addresses directly through your Web site’s host. They’re either included in the price you’re paying for hosting or they’re a cheap add-on.
However, if your host is like mine, the e-mail interface for this e-mail address is abysmal.
It’s a perennial question in webcomics: When should I start advertising?
The answer takes a little re-phrasing, because any good webcartoonist is doing a massive amount of activity that could typically be found under the heading of social media. However, the intent of the question isn’t the free marketing access we have through sites like Twitter and Facebook. Rather, the question is really: “When should I start paying for advertising”?
And the answer isn’t “never”.
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This critique series is called the “On The Spot” Hot Seat. I will visit participants’ sites on a random day and talk about how their comic/site/social media is on that day. No archive-diving and no overview. The point is to try to reinforce the importance of making every update significant.
This is the main drawback of a graphic novel on the Web. Nothing really happened in this update.
Nonetheless, I think the site itself does an admirable job of overcoming that daunting challenge. Because, in the moment, as I read the page, I started looking around for entry points. And I found multiple options. I found the ebook solicited at upper right, and I found several access points at the top of the left-hand column. In short, I think a reader who has even a smidgeon of interest in a given update can easily find his or her way into the story — using any one of several methods.
In short, I think this site works really well to address a difficult problem. All it needs now is a way for your readers to share the comic on social media.
Today’s update was good.
However, the aspect of the site that really stood out for me was the artist’s commitment to blogging. We talk about the importance of blogging here pretty often, and it was nice to see someone who had really seemed to commit to the idea. There’s lot of opportunities to share thoughts, grant special access to the comic, make announcements, etc.
Speaking of the site, I was happy to see links to social media below the comic, encouraging readers to share. However, they are useless in their current position on the page.
To get any kind of value whatsoever from them, they need to be as close to the comic as possible. Right now, they only “read” as tools for the blog (to which they’re much more closely positioned).
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