[Comic Advice] ... I'm doing something wrong here.

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Jekkal
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[Comic Advice] ... I'm doing something wrong here.

Post by Jekkal »

Brief intro: I draw Last Resort, a comic about a futuristic reality show. Since April I've been updating it weekly (every Sunday) and I've built up a healthy buffer, my work's improving constantly, etc. etc. etc.

. . . I have no clue what sort of following my comic has.

I've been following my site's hosting statistics, so I know I'm getting raw traffic to the site. I have a blog that has 5 comments, total. My comic's made $20 in donations from 3 people, and I'll get an email about once a month. I don't have forums right now, because my attempt at an LJ community went sour and I was told not to get forums until I have a bigger following (how I'm supposed to tell when I get THAT is something I have no clue about).

Facebook has a group of 12 members, which still isn't saying much. I have DeviantArt and FurAffinity accounts with the comic mirrored, but the response seems lukewarm, if there at all (and the last time I tried to drum up people seeing it, I got flamed for my trouble). I also have a ComicSpace account, but it sees little use.

I want to believe that I just don't know how to promote the comic, but right now I just have no clue who's paying attention and it makes me wonder how much of my current efforts are actually 'worth it' and if it's just a case that not enough people have seen it yet versus there being something horribly wrong with the comic.

Any assistance/feedback would be appreciated.

... ANY.

Seriously.
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Joel Fagin
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Post by Joel Fagin »

Being a regular here you may have read this already. Still, it's pretty much what I have to say on the matter, so...

Fans and Feedback

- Joel Fagin
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NakedElf
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Post by NakedElf »

The two things which indicate most to me how many readers I've got are my 'returning visitors' stat and my shoutbox.

Anything which requires people to sign up or go elsewhere or simply be elsewhere besides your comic will not be an accurate representation of your comic's audience. After all, not everyone who reads your comic will be on Facebook or DA or want to bother signing up with a forum. However, anyone stopping by your comic can drop a note in a shoutbox with almost minimal effort. So I would see those other community things as more a way to attract people who are already on Facebook or DA or whatever *to* your comic, and not so much as a way to get an overall perspective on your readership.

Obviously a shoutbox isn't the be-all end-all of everything, but I've been very happy with mine.

Also, 20 bucks? Hot damn. I've received diddly squat, and I've been updating since 2005. :P

Personally, I find myself more attracted to comics which update more than once a week. I have no idea about other people, but that's just me--so it's possible that updating more often would raise your hits and attract more regular readers. At this point you've got, what, about 30 comics total in your archives? That's just not very much. Not much to draw a new reader in with and not much for them to click through to give you hits. However you do it, as your archives increase, you'll likely get more hits. ^_^
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Vulpeslibertas
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Re: [Comic Advice] ... I'm doing something wrong here.

Post by Vulpeslibertas »

jekkal wrote:I've been following my site's hosting statistics, so I know I'm getting raw traffic to the site. I have a blog that has 5 comments, total. My comic's made $20 in donations from 3 people, and I'll get an email about once a month.
You're living the dream. I've been webcomicking for two and a half years. In that time I've recieved one e-mail, and that was from a fellow webcomicker. I've have been linked a handful of times by other sites, though. And donations? Bwa ha ha ha -choke-, yes well, that's all I have to say about that.

:cry: <- Tears of eternal sadness and such

Granted, I haven't done any advertising, and most of my time has been spent at the Webcomic List (which while full of other authors, is a mite short on readers).

It's a long lonely road. If you do get fans, they'll probably be raving madmen and you'll probably regret it.
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Post by [geoduck] »

I ditto the comment about adding a shoutbox; that's where I get the vast majority of my feedback. (And yes, I've gotten a few donations, enough to pay for my "mansionofe.com" costs..)
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Shishio
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Post by Shishio »

Yeah, I think you're doing way better than most of us.

Hell, I've advertised like crazy, been at this longer than you, and you seem to have more fans than I do.
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TBAC
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20 $$ is good pay for a webcomic

Post by TBAC »

I think I've received $7.44 out of the 90 or so comics I've posted, a couple of emails, a nice gathering on the shoutbox and two pieces of fan art. I find more people post on the shoutbox when i'm between season btw, then when everything's updating.

I guess it doesn't hurt to spread the word, but sooner or later your audience will find you I think. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Worry about story and that whole art thing. The rest of will take care of it self.

or not.

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Elb
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Post by Elb »

I find myself in roughly jekkal's situation -- the book is out there now (though only 14 pages of it as I write this), but I'm not getting any feedback except from people who know me personally. I've been marketing sporadically for months (though, granted, I've only made a really concerted marketing effort over the last several weeks -- presences on facebook, myspace, deviantART, etc.)

I even made my forum no-registration-required for about six weeks, got completely swamped in sex and viagra ads, and still had nobody post (except people who know me personally). ^.^

I like some of the recommendations in this thread, though. I'm going to look into a shoutbox like NakedElf has mentioned. And setting up a way for people to give me donations seems like a stupid thing NOT to do, but I hadn't really thought about it until now.

Question: How many hits is "a lot?" My traffic monitoring package says I've had 1,500 or 1,600 unique-IP visitors to my site in the month of August, and that number's been climbing by a couple hundred every month as time's been passing, but I really don't have anything to scale that against except my own numbers. Those of you who're running traffic monitors, what kind of numbers do you expect to see?
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Post by Eff »

I've been the delighted recipient of one piece of fan mail so far. I was amazed that someone I didn't know would take the time to write me, I later found out he was a real god damned cartoonist, not someone masquerading around making flash comics like myself. He also had an illustration style I'd kill to possess.

I got 13 visitors on Tuesday as well. I was actually pretty excited about that.

Site stats can be needlessly depressing depending how you interpret the random numbers they generate.

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Post by Elb »

Got my shoutbox. ^.^ http://www.mearnsworld.com/mwwt/ Scroll down a bit and say hi. ;-)

For any of the rest of you who're considering installing one, I did some research and shall share.

The one I installed is Webfroot Shoutbox. You need to be pretty nerdy to get it installed (keep reading if you're not). v2.32 has very serious known security vulnerabilities, but download it for the smileys. Then download v2.371 CVS for the actual code. You'll need MySQL and PHP support on your site, and you'll need to know how to create an empty MySQL database and be comfortable hand-editing config files. The CVS doesn't include the smileys directory, which will result in dead links in your shoutbox, so unpack the v2.32 just so you have the smileys directory to upload along with the v2.371 code.

If you're not that tech-savvy and want something you can just plug in and go, there are tons of options. I rejected most of them because a security problem in a PHP application where users can send data to your webserver can be VERY serious. I went with Webfroot because it's a sourceforge.net project with a long long history, meaning it's probably relatively watertight by now. However, not all shoutboxes require such elaborate setup -- most apparently don't require MySQL. There's a list here.

Thanks very much for the suggestion on setting one up, NakedElf.

Cheers!

P.S. The only thing I don't like about Webfroot is it doesn't in any way auto-refresh, meaning if you're actually trying to carry out a conversation via shoutbox, you'll need to manually hit the refresh button on your browser every little bit. A number of the shoutboxes on the list I linked to above state that they do refresh automatically.
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Post by NakedElf »

Nice. ^_^

*checks stats...* hrm, my monthly average (after 2+ years of comic, and I absolutely guarantee you the numbers were a hell of a lot lower a year ago,) is about 9.5 thousand unique visitors. Of those, 7.5 are new visitors, so a pretty high percentage of the people who encounter my comic aren't coming back.

Eh.


Your tagboard looks strangely wide compared to the text-entry box. You might want to fiddle with the code if you can to even out the disparity.
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Post by Elb »

NakedElf wrote:*checks stats...* hrm, my monthly average (after 2+ years of comic, and I absolutely guarantee you the numbers were a hell of a lot lower a year ago,) is about 9.5 thousand unique visitors.
Okay, so a comparatively high volume of hits doesn't necessarily translate into a large amount of feedback in this game.
NakedElf wrote:Your tagboard looks strangely wide compared to the text-entry box. You might want to fiddle with the code if you can to even out the disparity.
Yeah, it's pre-formatted with the idea that webmasters will use it in basically a vertical layout, but since I wanted to stick it on my full-comic-page HTML pages -- which are laid out to use the full width of the screen -- it made sense to me to change the dimensions to make it more horizontal and stick the shoutbox at the bottom.

That's easy, but there aren't simple variables I can configure to change the width of the input stuff, and also I can anticipate a possible problem with the "past shouts" popup box -- it's fixed into a vertical configuration.

I could probably re-code it "wide" in the standard dialog but "narrow" in the popup, but... that's beginning to sound like a huge potential time sink, and with a buffer limit of like 100 characters, noone's going to need full-line editing anyway.

Which is a very long way of saying I'm going to leave it alone. ^.^ Getting the CSS all tweaked was enough work. ;-)
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Post by Elb »

Joel Fagin wrote:Being a regular here you may have read this already. Still, it's pretty much what I have to say on the matter, so...

Fans and Feedback

- Joel Fagin
I loved your article -- it solidifies some things I've been told, supports some conclusions I've been coming to, and introduces a couple new ideas I hadn't thought of.

I made exactly the mistake you warn against with setting up a forum too early -- in fact I had my forum up before I had my comic up. ;-)

A couple comments about your section on tagboards:

1) You comment that a downside is the fact that a number of tagboard servers place ads on your site. If you have your own webspace with PHP and (if necessary; depends on the package) MySQL support, you can install a PHP tagboard that doesn't rely on a third-party server, and dodge that bullet.

2) You seem to come from the standpoint that one basically wants to put a single tagboard on a central page of the site. But, if you're running tagboard software that allows its interface to be pointed at a specific backend, you can actually scatter tagboard windows all over the place and still have them all show/accept the same posts. I stuck one on the two main pages of my site and one on each of the 14 existing pages of my comic, but they all share the same backend -- so if someone comments in one, the comment appears in all of the 16 interfaces. My reasoning is that having a tagboard interface on every single page where the comic appears will make it that much easier for a reader to toss off a quick comment, whereas s(he) might not be inclined to return to an index page.

I'm taking a look at some of your other articles now. Very nice work, and thanks for making it available to the public.
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NakedElf
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Post by NakedElf »

elb wrote: 2) You seem to come from the standpoint that one basically wants to put a single tagboard on a central page of the site. But, if you're running tagboard software that allows its interface to be pointed at a specific backend, you can actually scatter tagboard windows all over the place and still have them all show/accept the same posts. I stuck one on the two main pages of my site and one on each of the 14 existing pages of my comic, but they all share the same backend -- so if someone comments in one, the comment appears in all of the 16 interfaces. My reasoning is that having a tagboard interface on every single page where the comic appears will make it that much easier for a reader to toss off a quick comment, whereas s(he) might not be inclined to return to an index page.
The problem with this is that it slows loading time. Basically, if I'm reading a good-sized comic, going through a hundred pages or so, having to wait for one more element to load on every single page is going to slow me down. I think the main pages of a comic should be as streamlined and user-friendly as possible to make them easy to read.

Most of my comments come from regular readers--people who're only interested in the newest comic, anyway--and so they're only commenting on the comic on my indexpage. A few people comment because they're new, but y'know, only people who make it all the way through the archives are going to be new readers, anyway. People who only make it halfway and then leave aren't going to be commenting.
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Post by Elb »

Not to hijack the thread, but you might also look around for a webcomic news site and try to get a press release (if you've got an important date coming up) or get them to do an interview with you.

I just did. ^.^

my Jazma Online interview about MWWT

Jazma doesn't usually do webcomics as far as I know, but MWWT is aimed at paper-and-ink publication so they let me slip under the radar. But I imagine there must be similar news sites strictly for webcomics.
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