On his site, Scott Kurtz has posted an insightful piece on the nature of Creators’ Rights that might be worth discussing here. It starts as follows:
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Well, folks, we’re in November. The election is over, and the holiday advertising season is in full swing. Here are some things that ought to be on your radar.
If you’ve prepped them, now’s the time to start offering them on your site. If you haven’t, you’ve got the weekend and some very good digital printers like NextDayFlyers, OvernightPrints and PSPrint. Get a move on.
Same deal. People are buying their 2013 calendars right now. Now’s the time to start offering yours on your site. And if you can assemble one in the next couple of days, consider using a POD vendor such as Lulu to to make them available quickly.
Don’t gorget, the ad space on your Web site is valuable — even if that value isn’t being realized by advertisers right now. If you’re using Project Woinderful, you can make your default image a house ad. And if not, you can always ad some house ads to your Web site manually. Use that space to get your message out if you want your share of the holiday-shopping money that’s going to be spent in the next eight weeks.
If you’re using other ad services — such as Google AdSense, PulsPoint, Tribal Fusion, etc. — remember that those sites use spiders to determine which ads go on which sites (and how often). Your comic is an image — and that’s not spider-able. That means this is a crucial time to make sure your pages have as many words on them as possible to help those little spiders to categorize your site for advertisers. Redoubling your blogging efforts should pay off in increased ad revenue.
The Hitch It / Ditch it critiques have been one of the most popular hot seats on Webcomics.com. You know the drill. I review participating webcartoonists and list one thing I think they’re doing well and one thing I think needs improvement. Then I open up the topic for discussion among the members. Links to the comics being discussed are in the headers.
Hitch it: David, please forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have this hazy recollection of giving you a pretty dour review of your joke-writing a while back — Mid-Ohio Comic Con, perhaps? Anyway, I want to give you props. The gag-writing I’m seeing on Urban Jungle is a vast improvement over the last time I checked in with the comic. The Count Chocula comic was a stand-out for me, and so was the electric lawnmower. Some of them need stronger editing. This one, for example, had me thinking that the “we” in the second panel was still referring to “smokers.” And many — like the previous example and this one — need to be pushed further. There are some great concepts that could be really funny if they were developed a little more. But overall? There are some darned funny gags happening in the Urban Jungle.
Ditch it: Speaking of dour critiques, I panned the lack of life in your drawings in a previous Book Cover critique. I’d really like to see you carry those comments over to the way you draw the strip itself. In panel after panel, strip after strip, we’re presented with a cast of characters that stand perfectly straight (arms usually at the sides) with little or no changing facial emotions. Look at the strip I sampled above. That sheep has the exact same expression in panel after panel. Same with the guy.
It’s an office full of animals. I need to see a little more wild.
Hitch it: Working the niche. This comic does an excellent job of identifying its niche (board games) and then focusing its content in that area. There are some truly awesome blog posts about board games that could do a great job of beginning to establish this comic as one of the meeting places for this Community. One question perplexes me though. Howcome the blog is separated from the comic? That seems to defeat the purpose, doesn’t it?
Ditch it: There’s no gentle way to put this. That font? It’s horrible. Everything about it is wrong. The serif face sets a formal tone. It’s hard to read. It’s too small. And the leading is too tight. There… there is nothing good about that font.
Hitch it: Some of the gag-writing in this comic is quite good. This one was particularly clever. So was this one. Keep up the good work.
Ditch it: That Web-site design is not doing you any favors. None of your ads appear “above the fold” and that’s going to hurt your revenue-generating potential. Also, the same old comment about wasted space at the top. Do a site search for “Web Design Hot Seat” and read the results. Most of the stuff we talked about in those threads apply to your site.
On his site yesterday, Scott Kurtz shared a rather interesting thought.
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On Friday, I updated the site with a bonus post on the lawsuit in which cartoonist/SCAD professor Michael Jantze has used IndieGoGo to solicit funds to pay legal fees. This case had been the topic of heated discussion earlier in the week, and since the details of the suit (and counter-suit) had been made public, I wanted to get them onto the site so the discussion could become more focused.
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Details have been released.
The suit against Michael Jantze
As you can see by reading through both documents, this case looks a lot more complicated than “I worked for free and now they say I owe them money.” However, to be fair, that phrase seems to accurately sum up the lion’s share of the Jantze’s counter-suit.
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It’s time to get started on the penultimate month of 2012.
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Dropbox has announced a special offer for people attending college.
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Lets use the site to do a little Hurricane Sandy roundup.
Are there any Webcomics that find themselves without servers this morning?
More importantly, were any of our members effected by the storm?
Currently, I am in Texas, trying to make it home to Philadelphia, during what’s being forecast as an incredibly scary hybrid hurricane. The plan now is to try to fly out after the hurricane passes… which will be Tuesday night if I’m lucky.
In the meantime, you may notice that my regularly scheduled posts here may update somewhat later than usual. I apologize for the interruption in service, and I will return to my schedule as soon as possible.
I am currently working on a post which will update later today. And I hope to have something in the queue for tomorrow. But working on Squarespace using an iPad is proving next to impossible.
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