As we’re heading into another tax-preparation season, I wanted to share some relevant changes in the tax code.
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Webcomics.com has long advocated the use of Project Wonderful — and, when the time is right, using Project Wonderful as part of an ad chain.
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Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It’s time to do a little webcomics planning.
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I’ve been dealing a lot with criticism over the past few weeks. The storyline I’ve been working on in “Evil Inc” hits a few nerves — particularly with subjects like marital infidelity — and as a result, I’ve gotten more communication than I’ve ever gotten for any one storyline or strip.
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As we’ve been discussing tablet-based self-publishing opportunities, a lot of the discussion has been centered on iPad and Kindle, but there’s a considerable marketshare being staked-out by the Nook that is hard to overlook.
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Writing humor is something many of us grapple with. In the past, I’ve discussed a method that I advocate called Fermentation. And in many critiques and discussions, I’ve found myself advising writers to push or push further or push to the Funny. And every time I write those words, it occurs to me that the phrase is somewhat ambiguous and my advice may be missing the mark.
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As we closed out the year, we discussed several ideas for Hot Seat critiques for 2012, and among the popular topics (another “Hitch it / Ditch It”, banner advertising, and composition), it seemed as if there was a lot of steam behind the idea of an elevator-pitch critique.
So, here’s the format. If you’d like to participate, comment below with:
We’ll be discussing whether your elevator pitch:
An “elevator pitch” is just that — it’s a couple of phrases that you’d use to describe your comic to an important person who you’d just met in an elevator. He or she is getting off on the next floor. What do you say?
You use your elevator pitch all the time.
I think the key to a good con pitch is to think like a reader — not like a creator.
For example, when we talk about comics we use words like the following:
Not surprisingly, these words don’t carry the same weight with our intended audience as they do among us. We use those words and phrases to communicate thoughts on a certain level, but our readers… they just want to be entertained.
No reader describes himself as a devotee of slice-of-life family comedies.
To write a good elevator pitch, you have to first understand whom your audience (intended and/or actual audience) is.
Getting into the mindset of your readers allows you to use the words that have special meaning to that community.
And one of those words might be one of the words listed above for your audience.
But it’s probably not.
Two sentences. Tops. The best pitch is one sentence. And a short one at that.
Editing a pitch means being absolutely brutal. Every word that doesn’t help deliver significant meaning is actually blocking the meaning.
“It’s like the ‘Addams Family’ meets ‘Lost in Space.'”
We hear these kinds of pitches used all the time when people describe selling ideas for movies and television. And, to be sure, if the mash-up is chosen accurately, you can build off the concepts carried by each component to communicate your idea.
But beware, every once in a while, you’ll meet someone who didn’t like “Lost in Space.” Or the connoations from one or both of the mashed-up elements seeps into your work. In the above example, both of the elements had an element of campiness to them. It would not be an adequate description of a serious drama.
Use active, expressive words. You’re trying to generate a little interest here. Your vocabulary should reflect that.
Once you’ve honed your pitch on paper, start repeating it. Memorize it. Rehearse it. The more you say it, the more you’re going to erode the corners off it, wearing away exterraneous words and phrases. It’s also a great way to lock it into your subconscious, where your brain can continue to work to improve it.
Q.: I’d be interested on your thoughts about Tumblr, specifically the problem Kris has talked about regarding people removing author attribution. Should cartoonists be making their info harder to remove (example, the Something Awful watermark: )?
Furthermore, could Tumblr be a good way to host a webcomic? I’ve been wondering if the de-attribution problem might be alleviated a bit if the user could just share to their “tumblog” right on your site, rather than having to download the image like they do now. A good example of a tumblr hosted comic is Paul Southworth’s “Isaac Splode” (isaacsplode.tumblr.com), although I have no idea how successful it’s been for him.
A.: Kris Straub has written a perceptive piece on the phenomenon of Tumblr swiping that makes for excellent background reading.
The issue is this: Some people are swiping content from Web sites and posting them on their own Tumblr pages — and in some cases they’re removing the copyright notation.
My personal opinion is that it’s annoying and irritating, but I’m not sure it rises to a very high level of urgency. The exception to this would be if the person’s Tumblr page were swiping every one of your comics, every day, in an attempt to masquerade as the creator of the content. In a situation such as that, the Tumblr owner becomes the same as a comic swiper, and I would recommend the same approach — a firm-but-friendly email to the person asking him or her to stop.
Amazingly, I’ve had a 100% success rate with this approach.
Consider this. Perhaps the Tumblr-swiper is removing the copyright notation to try to protect himself from possible repurcussions of posting copyrighted work. In other words, if there’s no copyright on the image, it’s free to post… even if he was the one who removed the copyright.
If this becomes a problem for you, I would strongly recommend a friendly outreach encouraging the sharing — provided the copyright remains intact along with a link to your site. There’s every possibility this perceived foe could become a valuable ally.
Of course, the other possibility is that the Tumblr-swiper doesn’t act as a scraper, but instead posts one, choice selection from your work that goes mega-viral of Tumblr — with no attribution.
If you think that’s a serious threat, I would encourage you to embed the copyright/URL notations into your comic — possibly placing them over part of the image to make them harder to edit out.
Of course, no solution is going to be completely effective. If a Tumblr-swiper is content with erasing a copyright, he’s probably equally content with covering it with a white box.
Finally, according to Tumblr’s own TOS, this sort of issue seems to be covered in two separate sections:
Redundant Content. Tumblr is not intended to be an all-purpose content aggregator. Users who import or aggregate content in a less-than-meaningful way are likely to be suspended.
Copyright. Using copyrighted material does not constitute infringement in all cases. In general, however, users should be careful when using copyrighted content without the permission of those who created it. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).
Reading that, I would assume that a viable option, is all else fails, would be to approach Tumblr itself for assistance.
Overall, however, my general perception of the matter is that it’s not a widespread-enough infraction for most of us to worry about.
I’m afraid I just don’t see the benefits of hosting one’s Web site externally. It doesn’t seem to easily allow for advertising. And I firmly beleive that you’re better off as a webcartoonist when you’re in full control of every aspect of your site. Hosting externally like this goes completely against my grain.
That being said, Tumblr — like Facebook and Twitter — seems to have some pretty strong promotional juice behind it, and tapping into that be sharing an occassional comic — the right way — could have potential.
But the end result should be to generate and direct traffic to your own site — where you can do things like community-building and advertising-delivery that are so impotant to your core business.
As a follow-up to an earlier post about formatting for the Kindle, I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the rest of the process. Using Kindle Direct Publishing, you can upload books to be distributed through Amazon to tablets and other mobile devices. Here is their Terms of Service.
Getting started looks pretty straightforward. But here are a few issues you will want to be aware of.
You have two choices of royalties: 35% and 70%.
The standard royalty for KDP is 35%.
To qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements:
• The list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book.
• Titles must be made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights.
• The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
Here is a comparison of the two royalty structures, side by side.
All Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) titles are enrolled in lending by default. The Kindle Book Lending feature allows users to lend digital books they have purchased through the Kindle Store to their friends and family. For titles in the 35% royalty option, you may choose to opt out of lending by deselecting the checkbox under “Kindle Book Lending,” in the “Rights and Pricing” section of the title upload/edit process, but you may not choose to opt out a title if you have chosen to includ the book in the lending program of another sales or distribution channel.
If you’re enrolled in Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, you can place a link to your Kindle offering on your site. If someone follows the link and completes the purchse, Amazon pays you an “advertising fee” according to their terms and conditions.
Here’s a quick overview of ContextWeb and its pricing system. As you’ll see by all of the links, this is a topic that we’ve covered in several other posts, but it seems to be a good time to put everything in one place.
ContextWeb pays on a Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) basis. The “M” stands for the Roman Numeral 1,000. So, if your ads are selling for $5 CPM, you will get $5 for every 1,000 ads that are served by ContextWeb on your site. That rate is “prorated,” so if you only serve 100 ads during a given time, you will only make fifty cents.
ContextWeb’s AskPrice is the price that you set for serving ads on your site. ContextWeb commits to paying 100% of your AskPrice for all of the ads that they serve to your sitre. But that’s the rub. Set the AskPrice too high and they’ll throttle back on the ads.
Most of your administration will take place in the Manager area. It’s the second tab from the right, once you sign in, and it looks like this (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).
;)
Using the Manager, you can establish variables (such as AskPrice, Performance Price, default ads, etc.) and you can get feedback on how your ads are performing for a given time frame (which is determined by the Date Range fropdown).
That’s up to you, and it’s a decision that has more variables than “what’s everybody else doing?”
My own, personal philosophy is that a 100% fill rate is an indication that I’ve set my AskPrice far too low.
I’ll generally try to keep my fill rate between 25% and 35%.
The screengrab that I’ve provided has fill rates of 8% to 13%, but that’s a fairly typical result of January ad sales (as we’ve dicsussed earlier).
My recommandation is to set an AskPrice and watch the fill rate. Let it stand for a couple days to get a good measurement. If you’d like to see the fill rate rise, lower the AskPrice a little. And as you’re tinkering, watch your daily total ad revenue. Like I said earlier, a larger fill rate does you no good if you’re not selling them at a decent CPM. So your daily total revenue is going to be the final arbiter of whether you’re maximizing your sales.
So why do I recommend a fill rate of under 100%? Because ContextWeb isn’t the sum total of the ads that I run on my site. It’s the top of a chain of ads.
The process is simple. As a user loads an ad, ContextWeb gets first crack at serving an ad in that position. If ContextWeb declines, the position is thrown to a default ad. If I have multiple default ads for a single ad position, they are served according to a percentage that I determine.
Take my leaderboard for example. By clicking on the Leaderboard link on the far left of the Manager page, I get this:
Those Backup Tags are my default ads.
As a result, any ad impression that ContextWeb passes on is then delivered to one of my back-up ads. Twenty-five percent of those back-up ads are handled by Project Wonderful, 25% goes to Tribal Fusion and so on.
I just happen to have all of the percentages set equally. During the holiday season, I had about ten back-up tags set, with some of them set to 1%.
Don’t forget that you can make your own house ands and place them into the rotation of back-up ads as well. This is as simple as a line of HTML code for a hyperlinked image (hosted on your own server). Here’s my house ad for the 2012 Evil Inc calendar:
<a href=”http://www.evil-inc.com/forums/stains/8843/”><img src=”http://www.evil-inc.com/images/EI_calendar_ad_2012.jpg”></a>
As I’ve stated in the past, I think house ads are an important part of your ad chain. Your ad space has value. You should be availing yourself of some of that value. This could be the case during those times (like the First Quarter) at which your advertisers aren’t willing to pay for the space. Or it could be during times when you have merchandise you want to be sure your readers are aware of.
I’ve recommend you enable Performance Pricing in all of your ContextWeb ads.
Your Performance Price allows ContextWeb to beat your back-up ads with paid advertising.
You should set your Performance Price to be slightly higher than the eCPM (estimated CPM) of the default ads you’re serving (even Project Wonderful).
Otherwise, you’ll be passing over a higher-paying back-up ad in favor of a low-priced Performance Price ad.
Cool tech hint: If your Performace Price is under a dollar, enter it with a zero before the ceimal point. Like this:
$0.50
Otherwise, it won’t take.
So, how can you set the best Performance Price? Recently ContextWeb added an optimization chart to their Dashboard. Using this, you can look at each of your default ads and see where the optimal Performance Price lies.
ContextWeb offers the option of serving in-text ads. Theses are ads that show up as hyperlinks in the text of your site. For example, if you blog about Star Trek, it might place a hyperlink on the word “tricorder” that takes the reader off-site to a palce where he or she may purchase a tricorder toy.
I have recommend against in-text advertising.
In participating, you’re diluting your own ability to link effectively from your site. See, aside from a double-underline, there’s nothing to alert a reader that this is an advertising link. And you have to know that you’re going to be disappointing a number of your readers — especially the less-Web-savvy ones — who are going to click on a link and be taken to an advertiser’s site against their will. And after they’ve been burned once, they may be very reticent to follow any links from your site — thus eroding your ability to direct readers anywhere on your site.
The final piece of advice I’d like to offer is about blocking ads.
Some ads may not be appropriate for your site. And if you followed the posts about Facebinks, you know that sometimes a malicious advertiser can deliver harmful material to your readers through the advertising. One way of patrolling this is to establish a list of know offenders and blocking them from your site.
ContextWeb allows you to do this two ways. First, you can block ads by ad type. So you can automatically block that content from your site. For example, one type of ad I block outright are lead-generation ads. These are ads that are placed for the sole purpose of gathering user data to deliver spam to at a later date.
Secondly, you can block ads by domain. For example, facebinks.com is on my list of domains to block outright.
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