Self-Publishing and Webcomics, or “Haven’t We Been Here Before?”

[ursulav]

Sometimes you sit with your fingers over the keyboard, and you KNOW somebody’s gonna get mad at you.

Ideas are like potatoes. No matter how many ways you turn your idea around, looking for the best possible angle, it’s got lumps and somebody out there wanted cauliflower.

I’m gonna talk about self-publishing for a bit. And webcomics. Because, as my

Comments

[orv]

Pretty much. I'm also seeing a lot of evidence that self-publishing is being used as a sort of farm team for small, more traditional indie publishers; I've known people whose self-published e-books got them that kind of attention. Not that I'm saying "do it for the exposure" is any less crappy advice than it ever was, but in both comics and writing there's definitely a benefit to having proven you can do something and hold the attention of a fanbase. In either case you'd better be good at self-promotion or no one will notice you, of course. Not the best game for shy introverts.

And of course writing has ALWAYS been a game where most people make less than epsilon, a small number of people make a living, and a tiny proportion of people get rich. It's just that now, there's no gatekeeper to blame if you're not one of the chosen few.

[dragonsong]

" there's no gatekeeper to blame if you're not one of the chosen few."

And isn't it going to be interesting to watch once people start realizing this?

[mizkit]

People, I said with great confidence, are *never* going to realize that. Not en masse. :)

[dragonsong]

I'm sure you're right. It'll always be someone else's fault.

[greyduck]

Bravo. Bravissimo.

The timing of this amuses me, as I'm about to wrap up my four-year webcomic run and follow it up with a writing project. My comic's readership remains at the same, steady, two-dozen-human-beings-worldwide that it started with, and I guess I'm most happy that I didn't lose them along the way. (Rubber ducks. Talk about a niche.) I didn't get into it to make money since I can't really monetize photographs of rubber ducks anyway. So there's that.

The writing project is trickier, though. Nobody knows me from a hole in the ground, and I have precisely zero dollars to put toward trying to actually "publish," so it's probably going to end up a serialized blog project sort of thing. C'est la vie. I'm not doing it for fame or money, I'm doing it because if I don't have some sort of creative outlet I will lose my everloving marbles.

At any rate: Well put, and hopefully all of this self-pub wankery dies down a bit soon...

[telophase]

I learned how to spell "separate" after a teacher told me there was a rat in "separate."

Knowing how to spell it doesn't stop me from constantly mistyping it, though: it took me 3 tries to type it properly in the above sentence.

[ursulav]

The rat wasn't the problem, it was the par. I don't think I put up a page in the entire history of Digger where that was spelled correctly the first time.

[telophase]

You just have to remember it's A rat!

I was probably fixed into my mind when I looked at my friend's notebook after the lecture. She'd written "separate," drew a little rat below it and then drew a box around the words "a rat" in "separate" and the rat. And then, on the very next line of her notes, spelled it "seperate," which I thought was hilarious.

[brooksmoses]

As a tangent -- because I totally agree with most of the post -- I found it interesting how much the "your art had to not suck and your writing REALLY had to not suck" equation favored writing. You've seen the art in the first six months of Schlock Mercenary, right?

On the other hand, I think the key there is that Howard got better, and as the strip started getting a real following -- and, for that matter, as there started to be more competition; he was in the game really early -- the art started getting passably good, and then it kept getting better.

It is also interesting what shapes "your art has to not suck" takes. XKCD actually does remarkably good stick figures, if you pay attention. Real Life in the earlier days was basically the same Illustrator shape repeated over and over. Basic Instructions is traced photographs -- often the same traced photographs. And so on. But the thing is, they have all gotten good at doing what they do, and they are also all good at laying out a readable comic.

[derakon]

Put it simply, people can recognize when you do good work with a (possibly intentionally) limited toolset vs. when you're just being lazy. And the general webcomic-reading public's tolerance for laziness has dropped off steadily with time. As a reader, if I'm not enjoying myself then there's plenty of quality content out there (for free!) that I can read instead; it's up to the author/artist to make me care, to get me to notice, to get me to be invested. And that takes a lot of effort!

(On a similar note, if I'm 50 pages into a book and don't really care about what's going on, I feel perfectly free to put the book down and walk away. There will always be more books to read)

[dragonsong]

I couldn't make myself put down a book until I got a Nook and started hitting B&N's free book fridays. The official free book was usually good, but a lot of the other books that get linked are self-published drek. Not all, but most. It's gotten to the point that I flat won't download anything from Smashwords, I've been burned so many times.

It's actually been pretty freeing.

[jeliza]

XKCD has the most expressive stick figures ever. To get so much emotion out of a 5 lines and a circle is just amazing.

[rysmiel]

That connection makes a great deal of sense, and thank you for laying it out so clearly (and making me giggle in work while so doing).

As an aspiring writer of prose with a strong focus on traditional publishing, the current trend for both self-publication, and lots of self-managed publicity even for some traditionally-published author, is one I look at somewhat askance, because I'm a shy introvert who would really rather that my job consisted of just telling the blasted story and leaving any marketing to people whose job that is and who can plausibly be presumed to know what they are doing better than I would.

[orv]

I hear you. I'm also a shy introvert, and it genuinely concerns me that there are fewer and fewer jobs available to people like us. Even the traditional refuge of introverts, computer programming, is now often done in "teams." Heck, the process of FINDING a job increasingly hinges on "networking," basically having enough friends who know people in the industry that they can recommend you for a position...

It's an extrovert's world out there. I'm trying to learn how to at least fake it.

[randombler]

There are loopholes. The team that admires my ability, that is depending on my delivery, doesn't want me at the team standups enough to walk 30 ft to tell me they are happening. I am happily introverted - but worry that my team seems to fear me as much as thy admire me.

[dogmatix_san]

Ugh, I hear you. =/ I hate basically lying (aka. aggrandizing myself while claiming I have no faults) in job interviews. I fail at shmoozing. Mind you, I like interacting with people sometimes, but I loathe acting like a secondhand car-salesman to get ahead - why can't my work and track record just speak for themselves?