That Worked Fast. Bonus Update Tommorow!

Apparently the old adage of having many interested fans vs. one dedicated fan just paid off.

Thanks to that, we've got two bonus updates to do. One goes up tomorrow, because this particular fan was eager for his fix, and the other goes up next Wednesday. At some point in-between the two we should have the usual Sunday update as well.

And at some point in all of that I'll be over here in the corner blinking in disbelief. Hoo Boy.

Top 10 Ways Morning Coffee Changes how you Read Webcomics

Yes, I've already mentioned Morning Coffee several times, but this thing really is a handy little gadget that I use daily, and I find it to be one of the best FireFox extensions out there next to ChatZilla and ForecastFox. It doesn't take much effort at all to install and use, and once you do, you'll really appreciate what it does for you.

1. It's FireFox Exclusive! If you don't have Firefox already, get it. I'm serious. It's free, it's uber-customizable, and if you're still browsing with Internet Explorer in this day and age, you may as well be bent over like goatse.
2. One-Click Browsing. Every day, all I have to do to read dozens of webcomics is click that little coffee cup, and they all load in their own separate tabs, loading in the background while I wait to see whose server responds first. You may already have aggregates or bookmark folders (or even del.icio.us!), but when a single tap does it all for you, why bother?
   
3. Browse By Day. As long as you tell it which days to look at a certain comic, it will being up the day's listed comics. No more stress trying to remember what day it is and which comics need checking; it's already there.
4. Loading While You Read. If one comic takes longer than the others, you read the others while waiting for the last one to load. Certainly less stressful than waiting for each page to load individually, and when we're talking large images (my own pages range from 150-200k each), this can be a big sticking point.
   
5. Find Out Which Comics Respect their Readers. Yes, maintaining a schedule is tough, but unless the artist is just starting out in comics, they should know by now what pace they can keep. If you keep visiting a page on the schedule it claims to keep and they don't, then you can either push their update check back a day, or you can drop the page if the schedule is truly erratic. It may be harsh, but if the artist assumes that the fans who truly care will check his page obsessively anyway...
   
6. Easier to Remember to Read New Comics! Found a great little site you're on the fence about? Set Morning Coffee to make you check it when it updates, and now you have several chances to read more of the comic as it progresses to decide if you really like it. If you hate it, you can always just remove it from your lists later.
   
7. Works at any browser speed! Yes, it's trying to load everything at once, which can be slow. But waiting once beats having to do it dozens of times for several sites each, and even if all that time spent waiting is enough time to make a sandwich, at least it's time you spent some other way than just sitting in front of the computer waiting.
   
8. Really Appreciate Little Domain Icons! Lots of Comic sites use 'em because they're cute, creative little details, but they really stand out when you've got 'em all in a row.
9. Waste Less (Loading) Time! This gadget really is a timesaver when you realize that it's already done the major legwork for you. That leaves more time for your own work (or even just wasting more time in each comic's forums!)
   
10. You can check 'em all at Midnight! Granted, not every site updates exactly at midnight, but for the ones that do, you can appreciate 'em properly. ;)

Why should reading comics be any tougher than it has to? People want you to read their comics, you want to read comics, and this makes it so you read them as quickly and easily as possible, with the least amount of effort.

Start using it!

Page 26: Cypress is one Crafty Croc.

Not that any of the characters really have room to be stupid when they're about to let a dozen criminals or so loose on their new holovision escapade, but Cypress doesn't look like she's about to let the apple fall too far from the tree; either Cypress is a better judge of Jigsaw's character than she has any business being, or she knows something about Jigsaw that even Damien and Nate could only dream of.

Those of you with good eyes will notice something a little off about Daisy as well; of course, those who've been clicking on her to donate won't be as shocked. Call it one of those little details that runs up there with Jigsaw's violin case.

Five Tips for Selling Yourself First

Online, an artist is only as good (or as bad) as their reputation. Some key concepts:

1. People don't just want an artist anymore. They want a friend.
Make yourself available. Chill in other comics' forums. For the first few months of your comic's existance, resign yourself to the idea that you're going to be leaching off of other established artist's groups, because quite frankly if you know how to reach any other audience you'd be writing a blog like this one. It may seem counter-intuitive and vaguely insulting, but for what it's worth, it's a lot cheaper than most other advertising routes open to you.

Don't worry about spreading yourself thin; Even if all you do is make a few high-profile posts on a forum, it's probably gotten you some decent legwork done, and that's umpteen more people that know about the comic when they wouldn't have otherwise.

2. They want you to spend some time on them personally.
If you're too busy to talk, your would-be-fans are too enamoured with other people to pay attention to you. Also, let's face it; you're drawing a WEBCOMIC. You have time to burn.

There's a few ways to accomplish this, and either it involves some "Author's Notes/Blog" type comics where you speak directly to the readers using the strip, or you keep a separate blog/LJ as a supplement to the comic. My personal favorite toy in this regard is using Twitter: It encourages you to write very tiny posts, so you can not only keep off-topic-ness to a minimum, but you can write LOTS of them in a day and nobody minds. Heck, that's what it's best used for. It still keeps an archive of everything, and it's accessible from so many places (Facebook comes to mind as the most recent 'new frontier'), so your fans can't help but keep up.

3. They want you to draw not just for their entertainment, but for THEM.
We're talking commissions, guest strips, fanservice, and other little things that give in to a reader's desires. If you're lucky a few of them coincide with each other and someone's commission of your character in a cheesecake pose can be used for merchandise later, effectively allowing you to be paid twice and get some good mileage out of the work. If you decide to do some sexy pinups for the hell of it anyway, don't think "I should be working on the comic instead of this"; think "I can use this as a wallpaper for a donation incentive"!

Unfortunately for you and your wallet, commissions are an outreach of reputation, so your reputation will affect the number of fans, which in turn affect the prices you can charge. The general translation is to wait a little while until people start asking you for art, then offer to charge. If nobody offers, start doing art for your friends, call them 'commissions' (even if they're technically freebies), and see if that gets more people to bite once they realize you're not above drawing their characters.

4. Keeping your readers informed on your life helps them care for you as a person.
Keeping a good comic is Internet Karma: Be good to the net, the net is good to you. Even if you're doing just fine without people's help, you'll still want them to donate, because money is a great incentive (especially to other people who wonder why you're wasting your time!). The more you can convince your readers you're an all-around awesome person and you can use the cash wisely, the more they'll give you what you need.

When you DO fall on hard times, you'll want the press to keep you afloat and your fans to keep looking out for you; you can't very well do it when you're laid up, so you may as well earn the karma now while you're healthy.

5. Be aware of the 'content flow'. More importantly, make sure it's consistent.
People like an artist they can keep their watches to, if only because it means they stand half a chance of keeping up with their work. Reading the archives of a webcomic can be daunting, especially if the comic in question is old. The best solution available is to make sure that users don't fall behind any more than they have to, which typically means update schedules for everyone's sanity.

How to decide on an update schedule: Figure out how many strips a week you can do when you're at your absolute goddamn worst and there's three finals to study for. Set the schedule accordingly; we want to aim for your minimum amount you can accomplish in a week, so you don't kill yourself trying to update too quickly. As a bonus, it also gives you a chance to work ahead and save future strips (known as a buffer or a backlog) so when cool stuff comes up, like conventions, trips, or just plain "I-don't-feel-like-it"-itis, you still have stuff waiting to go.

Don't worry about ever having 'too much' backlog, either; Howard Tayler keeps around 30-50 strips in his buffer fairly constantly, and I'm sitting on sixteen weeks of strips as of writing this post. Of course, we have different reasons for keeping them; Howard uses an automatic updater and being paranoid about his ability to produce the strip later always works in his favor, so keeping the buffer huge is a big advantage for him, while I'm building my buffer during the summer months so I can update at college with very little stress involved, or possibly speed up my update rate if it becomes insane to manage.

If you ever do have to do without a strip, at least put up something so your fans know something's up. Get Guest Strips and Fan Art to fill the void while you're out. You can accelerate the schedule or supplement it (like I'm doing with this blog), but slowing it down tends to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Respect the update schedule, you respect the fans.

Respect the fans, and they respect you.