Saturday, December 27, 2014

Online Publishing Strategy...

Probably the biggest mistake I made entering the business of comics was to not have an online and digital publishing or webcomic e-publishing strategy. Like my writing and drawing style, it was spontaneous, inspired more by Jack Kerouac's writing style than Norman Rockwell (who used extensive art production strategies for building his massive paintings). I was never that organized, and as a result the online presentation of my art suffered because I never took it seriously. I never announced when I'd be publishing new work in the near future, I never wrote artists commentaries for pages or illustration pieces, and I never thought ahead in general. Part of the problem was I didn't take online publishing seriously as a professional outlet of distribution and audience attainment at the time. I viewed it as inferior and secondary to traditional publishing, just because the artists on these sites are young, naive, and inexperienced, and don't seem to completely know what they were doing at the time. In terms of online publishing of artwork, I lived in the moment until recently. Then Joey Manley died, and saw what a mess Webcomics Nation ended up as as a result of his immortal absence from online comics publishing, and I realized, I gotta get my sh*t together. Joey Manley didn't, and look what happened to his web empire. It's borderline frozen in time. God only know how long the site's inheritors will take to make the site operational in Manley's permanent absence. If they ever do get the site to be operational again. 

So in the future I'll be

Announcing future publishing dates of pages
Scheduling my work time
Scheduling my publishing time

Just making my whereabouts and work routines more public and operational so they're more reliable and hopefully I won't get sidetracked by stress, pressure from my job, or contingencies as much in the future and recently

I'm publishing on Blogger, Tumblr, Pixiv, Ink Blazers, Google+, and ComicFury now. 

But until recently, I considered them a "play hobby" to be done for fun. Not seriously organized as a serious operation. I didn't do it that way because I assumed no one else was doing it that way. But even IF no one is doing it that way, I can be one of the first if that's the case, if people aren't already approaching their webcomics work in a professional serious minded profession, even if it's essentially unpaid mostly primary school volunteer work for the most part.

If I take my act more seriously in terms of the time put in and the workload, I suspect other people might follow my methodology example the way people take after my artwork in their own fan artwork.

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