Monetizing A Webcomic

[A sketch from a page of something in the works... ]

I’m thinking of drawing a webcomic and my concern is how money can be made from it.

Lest you think me too mercenary, my goal is not to design a comic first to make money but because I want to draw and tell a story foremost; money is just important to facilitate me being able to dedicate time to this webcomic. Do I have a need to be defense about this point? Perhaps it reveals more of myself than I intend, so I’ll admit it: I do share Jonathan Blow’s views on the purity of art — in the linked example, as regards advertising in games. But to say it generally: I’m highly critical of the mixing of money and art. Yes obviously I need to pay rent and eat, and so does everyone.  I hear the “it’s just so” response far too often to justify abuses of commerce upon arts and I think it’s quite entirely unfortunate that discussion does not often get much farther than that. The status quo does not need your banal restatement, it already and overwhelming is!

Besides, if I wanted to make money I sure wouldn’t be trying to draw a webcomic to do it; there are better ways, I assure you. Like making a porn site or Evony Online or something.

So here’s my thought:
One can think of a webcomic as a serially-updated attention-attractor (albeit one with strong narrative themes and characters, which I’ll discuss in a moment). In this, a webcomic is not so different from a small free web-based game like any number of flash portal games, web-based games, or Facebook apps. Farmville, say? Admittedly, I don’t actually play any of these games. They’re usually too … shamelessly commercial.
Q: How do these make money?

A1: Advertising
I guess advertising is an obvious approach for any web site that’s trying to make money. Ads interfere with content, however, and I’d be strongly concerned about having ads anywhere near my artistic vision (says The Artist). Maybe they could appear somewhere on a separate news page, not juxtaposed with the comic content itself; never.

I’m thinking generic and easy to implement here; Google Ads is the obvious answer. Not everyone is Penny Arcade and is an entire ad market and brand in and of themself (and I repeat this to myself over and over, I am not Penny Arcade).

A2: Micropayments
Players of certain otherwise free web games pay money for extra content, for extra-ordinary customization, or to sidestep tedious gameplay time (which speaks to me of a game designer purposely wasting my time, but I digress). I’m not sure how any of these could translate very well to a webcomic because reading the comic itself is about the whole of its content — and what, should I draw five panels and charge money if people want to see the sixth? I’d never stand for that as a reader and I doubt anyone else would.

Although: There could be some kind of extra content or privilege made available for being a “sponsor” or “patron” of the comic (thinking of a marketable name for a donation-giver, ya’see). I’m unsure what this extra content would be aside from more story. “Behind the scenes” content? Preliminary sketches/writing? (Are they really that good or interesting? It worked for DVDs, though “extra features” are too often hastily assembled fluff. More digression.)

The patron/donor bragging-rights idea is perhaps good for the donation model. Get your name on a public list to show off on, if you like. Maybe get a little graphic drawn for you and a personal ‘thankyou’.

A few? games run off donations; at least for beer money. One game that actually gets away with it that I know of is Dwarf Fortress.

Setting out a PayPal link is pretty much default practice for a hopeful webcomic in any event, so it’s something to try. I wonder how well it works. Maybe I’d have to ask some web comic artists how they do at it.

A3: Merch
Think hard-copy books! T-shirts, prints, coffee cups, stickers, print-on-demand Cafepress BS (though ideally not so cheesy). Comics have strong narratives and characters and can get away with merchandizing in a way that most games cannot (so this answer might well be swinging away from the considering-webcomics-as-games conceit, but it should be discussed).

Merch requires an established community of decent size slash enthusiasm as well as a certain amount of up-front investment and energy. Maybe: When the community (when you /have/ a community) starts making t-shirts for itself, you know it’s time to start selling them.  … I saw the DF forums spontaneously begin t-shirt production once…

Ultimately, community building takes time, and time is money, friend.

So here’s my plan:

1: Ads
Consider using low-key-as-possible ads on the comic’s news page and make token efforts to update the news page with something interesting as regularly as the comic is updated. Assuming this comic is a writer/artist team, there should always be someone willing to write something. Be upfront about what the ads mean for the comic; If they don’t work out or prove unpopular, remove them. (Yes, more projection of my strong anti-ad feelings.)

2: Donations
Set out the PayPal tip-jar and beg for change. Make a bragging-rights page for certain levels of patronage with fun icons next to people’s names/aliases. Maybe even custom art for a certain level of donation from a viewer. Do an extra content update if donations exceed a certain amount. This approach could be described as soft-micropayments : donations-with-rewards.

3: Merch
Do merch when/if the community gets to the point where it’d be worthwhile. How exactly to do this can be worried about when the time comes; skills can be learned or someone willing can surely be found from the unwashed masses.

The most important reason why this could work is that I think I can draw better than most webcomics and I wouldn’t write like an idiot — or I know a couple writers who can do that bit for me. (And there I go, wording in my typical negative manner: “Everyone else sucks so much that I can’t fail!”

It’s just a matter of having the time, and time, as said, is money. There is a starting investment to be made that may or may not end up paying off.

Meta: Finding an Approach to Blogging

0.
I imagine this sort of meta-blogging post is profoundly uninteresting from a certain standpoint, if not many. If so, feel free to stop reading here. I won’t be offended. The reason for writing this up is purely selfish; I find that doing so helps me compile my thoughts which I then must commit-to because I’ve posted them publicly.

And another great counter to me being meta is that I ought to be writing about my primary topics rather than thinking about how to write as a subject itself. To be /meta/ in this respect, it is to be (with apologies to Pratchett for stealing his line),  second-guessing myself, then third-guessing those thoughts, then fourth-guessing and so on in a spiral of self-questioning — it is simply what I do.
(It’s amazing I get anything done.)

The point though is the question of how I’m approaching the act of writing for this blog:

1.
There’s a school of blogging that says you should make your updates brief and often. I saw this stated explicitly a few years ago on Raph Koster’s site somewhere; I don’t remember the precise post, but you can see it in his style of updating. It’s like twittering. Personally I find this format insubstantial. (Yes, yes, I like posting single sentence quips as much as the next guy, but there’s more to life than only ever being able to do that.) — Thoughts are not developed enough to be really interesting or engaging, with any depth.

(And the cynical thought: This post-lots-with-little-content is efficacious if your goal is to stream as many eyes as possible past your ads as often as possible.)

2.
There’s another school of blogging, the Steve Yegge School that holds that you should update very substantially, far and in-between, and that it is a long-format piece of writing that will be able to sink into memory and stick with a reader. I agree, and I find his insanely-long-by-current-standards posts fascinating, but they are indeed difficult to digest given a busy schedule with 5-15 minute breaks between periods of work, so I can see how such huge posts would be difficult to read in terms of the trends of web media consumption. (Did I just make that sentence? Kick me.)

3.
Another school of thought holds that you should update your webpage (and by extension blog) only when you don’t suck — thanks Mu. And this bit of advice from somehow who went over 3 years without updating his site except once to say that everything sucks at the midpoint of that time period. Take it how you will.

In other words: update only when you feel like you have something interesting to say, be it long or short. This seems like a good rule, a compromise between long and short form blogging with the ultimate goal being quality. I shall try to follow this rule.

(And don’t apologize for not updating. Nothing is so pathetic as the blog that apologies for not having content!)

So I’ll see you next time I have something to post that I think doesn’t suck.

[A sketch of a city with no sprawl.]

Digital Painting: Character Portraits for Aragon Online

I’ve been digitally painting character portraits for the web fantasy rpg/wargame Aragon Online. I’ve turned into a huge perfectionist about these images and have been getting very excited about learning technique.

Unfortunately these are intended to end up as at 80×80 pixels, so I’m quite overdoing my job.

Some thoughts:

• From my compositions, I can see that I’m clearly quite taken with the use of rich colors with strong black lines and shadows.
• Rendering of colored light adds something quite expressive and lovely, I think.  (Can I be the Thomas Kinkade of overblown fantasy painting? For all I loathe his artistic practice, he does indeed employ admirable technique.)
• I saw this page (by Daniel Olafson) on the dramatic effect of painting clouds with a sharp brush and was inspired to take up his approach; I’ve very pleased with the results.
• I’m trying to experiment with the rendering of different materials. Flat metal/plastic is easy and largely textureless, but I’ve pushed myself a bit with the clouds, the leaves, fur and hair, cloth, and a little with some of the leather. Much more development is needed here. And I seem to really like drawing segmented armor.
• No smiling is allowed. (Or, note to self: I want to try showing a greater range of expression than “grim determination”, appropriate as it may be for a pack of fantasy warriors.)

(Edit: I’ve also made a post on my gamedev journal showing the progression of painting these images with some discussion of what went into each step.)

I can’t wait to do more. And I admit, I wish I could get paid lots of money to do this all the time, but ideas for future creative projects shall be the subject of another post.

Infernopunk

If infernopunk isn’t yet the name of a genre of works inspired somehow by Dante’s Inferno (or, more generally, the medieval conception of hell), …  it should be.  And because someone is going to ask, perhaps the punk implies some kind of post/modern rather than medieval sensibility in approaching the subject and themes surrounding hell. Done.

What are some examples of infernopunk [in video games]? The big one: Id’s Doom.  But the latest I’ve been paying a little attention to in the indie game world is Vic Davis’ Solium Infernum. Outside of video games, there are all kinds of movies and comic books — Hellboy? — , and literature: I think of the Niven/Pournell novel Inferno or Blish’s Black Easter, though I think both of those stick to what is fundamentally a medieval hell upsetting modern sensibilities (which is itself perhaps postmodern?).

Or here’s an angle: Look at what made Blizzard North’s Diablo, the first one in the series, but not Diablo 2 so much — I’d contend that perhaps the difference between the two is that the former is somehow much more infernopunk than the latter (which is a subject fit for its own post). Or, in counterpoint, does Diablo play inferno straight and therefore not count as punk?

… This all came to me this morning reading an infernopunk game idea by some fellow on the GameDev forums and I couldn’t believe that infernopunk didn’t show up on Google. So I had to say it first.

[Image from "Hell", a painting by Bosch ]

Worlds Within Worlds

So here goes.

I’m a freelance digital artist and I mostly do graphics for computer games — “What, really? You make graphics for video games. How is that a real job?” — Yet here I am, paying the rent. It is not so easy as one might imagine — “What, you have to actually work?” — but  there are worse things I could be doing!

I mean hell, it’s not like I haven’t ‘blogged’ before in various forms, particularly on my GameDev journal, but there is some legitimacy to having this *waves hands at screen*. That! … and a blog, from all I’ve seen, is a great way to populate search engines with your stink, thus I have a certain self-promotional angle here which is ideally good not only for me professionally [if I can manage not to stick my foot in my mouth too hard; I assure you, every sentence is a struggle in self-restraint] … um, not only good for me professionally, but it’ll also fulfill some narcissistic impulse I will readily admit to possessing.

Because, honestly, any artist has to be a narcissistic egotist on some level because they think what they have to express is good enough to unload upon the world whether the world likes it or not. With all the junk in the world, it takes some gall to think you’ve got something to add to it. And maybe I just have to because it’s what I must do. I’m just admitting all of this upfront, openly, and self-critically — (I’ll warn you now, I’m all for self-examination. More on this in future self-examinations.)

Right!

I’m going to talk about art, Art (with a capital ‘a’!), digital art, games, drawing comics, game design, game art, game programming, writing, the businesses thereof, and my various struggles within and without it.

With pictures! for you tl:dr folks. (No picture in this post because it’s the first one and I was caught off-guard by the horror of having a silly filler intro remain here and so had to write this whole bit to ameliorate the situation.)