Thinking Out Loud: Create Once, Sell Repeatedly.

Recently I've been doing some further thinking about business plan stuff, specifically the golden question of "How Do I Make Money From This?". It's a good plan to diversify as much as you can, as that way you have alternatives available if a given source of income dries up.

To break it down, my current revenue streams are:

• Comics - Decent sales when there's a new issue out in print, but tails off pretty quickly in between.
• Freelance illustration - Pleasantly remunerative when it's available, but not a steady source of income until I've built up lots more contacts who want to procure my services on a regular basis.
• Character sketches - Popular when I've done them at the FLGS, and hopefully this will continue when I start offering them on the site.
• T-shirts and related paraphernalia - Somewhat time-intensive in terms of coming up with polished designs, and a bit of a gamble when it comes to success or failure. Also not hugely lucrative at present - I don't have the funds (or audience) to sink a bunch of cash into inventory that may or may not sell, and print-on-demand gives pretty minimal per-unit profits.
• Advertising space on the site - Negligible at present. Need more site traffic.

Apparently one of the keys to this "making money from art" thing is to get paid as many times as possible for each piece I create. Comics are stupendously time-intensive, but once they're drawn I can print and sell as many copies as people will buy. Likewise t-shirts, posters, that kind of thing - and a design that's good for a t-shirt can also be good for a mug. All these things are slightly impersonal, however, and could be said to lack the artist's touch - and that's a good part of the appeal of buying from an independent creator.

Sketch commissions do have the artist's touch and aren't as time-intensive as making an entire comic or coming up with a refined t-shirt design, but are more of a one-shot deal in terms of revenue - I still only get paid once for each sketch. More elaborate paintings likewise - even more time-consuming, still only get paid once unless I decide to sell prints as well as the original. This could be considered an argument for charging more for my work - if I'm only getting paid for it once, I should make sure I get paid properly.

Ideally, though, I'd be able to create something once and get paid for it multiple times. Something that has that hand-crafted feel, but which doesn't eat up all of my time to produce new instances of it. Something like... printing. Not the copy-shop variety, the art-and-craft variety.

I listen to the Art & Story podcast a lot, and among other things they do a fair bit of printmaking - mainly silkscreen, I think - which gives their stuff a much more personal touch. Bookmarks, minicomic covers, posters, that sort of thing. Designing the original stencil takes time, but once that's done you can, with relative ease, make as many copies as you like before the screen wears out. Now, silkscreening is a bit too costly for me in terms of space and equipment required, but I've been mulling over an alternative:

Lino printing.

Investigating further, it seems kind of ideal. Not a huge space investment, setup and materials aren't too expensive, and the high-contrast style I use for my comic would translate pretty well to this printing technique. And I really like the look of the end result, too - kind of reminiscent of old-fashioned woodcuts (unsurprisingly).

It's also pretty flexible - you can get different effects by varying the combinations of ink and paper colour (dark ink on light paper, light ink on dark paper), you can even do stuff like painting in extra colours by hand to make each print more unique, if you feel like it.

I shall investigate further. And let you know how it turns out.

On the demise of Zuda Comics.

It's been a while since I updated this blog. A long while. Sorry about that.

Today saw the news that Zuda Comics, DC Comics' online imprint, is to close down - or rather, is to be "folded into DC Comics’ exciting, new Digital Publishing initiative".

I will confess, in the interests of full disclosure, that I've not really paid much attention to Zuda in the past - what I saw of strips like High Moon was undeniably of excellent quality, but the godawful Flash-based navigation system meant I never really returned once I'd caught up with the archives.

From my understanding of it (mainly culled from the Wikipedia page), Zuda was a talent-scouting operation in the style of The X Factor - independent creators submit an eight-page comic, ten are selected by the editorial board and then readers vote to select a winner from those ten. The winner gets offered a contract to continue making their comic.

This serves to reduce the risk of a new title turning out to be a flop, on the theory that readers will vote with their wallets the same way they vote with their, uh, votes.

And in quite a few regards it worked - it gave a massive boost to the careers of several online comic creators, it exposed some new voices to a much wider audience than might otherwise have been the case, it garnered a number awards and nominations for some thoroughly deserving titles, and it let a few fortunate (and talented) creators get remunerated for doing what they loved - and isn't that the holy grail of many webcomic creators?

But the thing to bear in mind is that this was never an altruistic gesture on Zuda's part (or by extension DC's). Ultimately the objective of the Zuda imprint was thus:

1. Pick out the best new talent from the up-and-coming generation of comic creators.
2. Find the ones that best appeal to the modern comic-reading audience. 
3. Bring them into the DC Comics fold.
4. Make money for DC Comics. 

It's had some positive results - there are a lot of 8-page comics that would never have been created if not for the incentive of a lucrative contract up for grabs, and that's excellent. There is a handful of exceptionally talented creators who now have the recognition they deserve, and I'm vicariously delighted for them.

But it was never going to be a viable path for the vast majority of webcomic creators, simply because the vast majority of webcomic creators don't meet the high standards of Zuda's editorial board. Harsh, perhaps, but there you are. The good news is that you don't have to adhere to DC/Marvel standards of What Is A Good Comic in order to make it as a webcomic creator.

Overall, I don't think the Zuda experiment has had all that much of an impact on the wider webcomic scene, because it was never really interested in the wider webcomic scene - or in exploring the potential for interesting and novel business models that it presents. It's my (admittedly cynical) suspicion that only the lack of a digital distribution system kept the Zuda imprint alive for this long. The release of the DC Comics iPhone App makes it pretty clear that they're returning to the traditional business model - paper or pixels, if you want to read their comics you pay for them up front. Now that there's a means by which DC can easily charge people to access their comics, there's no longer any need to paddle in the "let people read your stuff for free on the internet" pool.

I don't entirely blame them, as they're a large company with costs to meet and staff to pay, and they can't afford to take the risk on an exploratory and experimental business model. That means it's down to the smaller independent creators. That's us.

That said, I am by no means proposing a stubborn adherence to the "let people read your stuff for free on the internet" model. It's not a matter of principle. If it turns out that the iPhone/iPod/iPad is a viable distribution system for webcomic content then I'll be joining the line to get my comic on an app. But until then I'm going to put more faith in hard work and perseverance than winning a contest.