Networking for New Webcomic Artists: Flaky Artist=Flaky Audience

Nami
Nami
Jul 28, 2017 · 6 min read

Or, “Consistency in creative output: what, why, and how”.

Oh, the possibilities!

Someone recently asked me for advice on how to network if you want to build and maintain an online presence as a webcomic artist. I’ve been in love with webcomics as a medium for years now, and I’ve spent that time diligently, and maybe a bit stalkerishly, following a lot of different creators whose work I’ve loved. It’s been interesting to see who ended up becoming a success (defined here as “makes a living wage from art”); who made it big at first but then faded into obscurity; and lastly, those who never drummed up a much of a following at all.

Now, all the different webcomic artists whose work I’ve followed over the years have been super talented in either writing or drawing — usually both. So why didn’t they all succeed? Seems like talent is maybe about 5% of the success factor in webcomics. What makes up the other 95%?

The main thing to remember is that building and maintaining an audience for a comic is, like all things successful, about consistency and regularity. You need to be consistent and regular in two key areas: output and networking.

Consistency is basically doing things on a set schedule. This is the core of creative business success, but this is especially the case for webcomics.

First, I’ll go into what consistency looks like in creative output, i.e. what you’re actually posting online for public consumption. You need to have consistency down in creative output before you get into networking. I mean, you need to have something to actually be networking about, right? If you network just for the sake of having a network, you’ll be wasting most people’s time — especially people who network to a purpose (i.e. everyone with an online presence who makes their living via art or writing). You’ll mostly just attract people who have few to no plans of succeeding in the field you want to make a career in.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the function of a creative network is to serve as a platform on which your work can be shared with an audience. You want to surround yourself with people who inspire you, who are be inspired by your work, and who can broaden your platform to find even more people like that.

So we’ve established that the first step in building an audience for your work is creative output. Gotta make stuff for people to get into! That’s the “what”. Consistency is the “how”. What does that look like?

Someone once gave me some comic advice that I’ve seen in just about every successful webcomic artist over the years: it’s better to have a set update schedule that you stick to rather than updating sporadically, even if you do it fairly often. Even if that schedule means an update just once a month — set a day that update will be there, and then stick to it.

Having a consistent schedule that people can rely on lets your audience know when to go back and check your site/blog/etc. for updates, and they can comfortably depend on new content being there whenever they check on those days. This cuts down on time they’d spend just haphazardly checking your page every few days or so to see if there are updates. Having to do this makes it easy for people to forget to even go to your page, because they’ll only do it when they sort of happen to think about it — rather than being able to tie Monday+Friday to Mokepon, or Tuesdays+Fridays to This is Not Fiction.

So, for example, let’s say you’ve decided to update your comic every Sunday, so that’s what your front page says. That lets people know: “On Sunday I can depend on there being a new installment of this comic!” The key, though, is that you have to update consistently. If you set a schedule — stick to it.

I know I’m getting redundant here, but consistency is really that important. If you stick to your schedule, your audience will stick with you. And if you flake out on them, they will flake out on you. Making a habit of flaking on your schedule — or, worse, never setting an update schedule in the first place — will make you shed regular readers, and prevent you from getting new ones, faster than anything.

So, to actually be consistent, you need to figure out what’s doable for you personally. One thing you could try, starting out, are once-weekly updates, i.e. a page a week. It can even be less than that, like once every other week. That might sound sparse, and comics that update at that rate take months or years to get through the plot — but what you don’t want to do is over-commit to a workload you can’t keep up with. What happens then is that you’ll burn yourself out, and burnout is probably the most effective way to throw an artist off their creative runway for a few weeks. Or months. Or years. It’s much better to start off slow, with what you’re absolutely positive can be handled without a hitch, and then gradually build up your output from there.

Alright, then let’s say you stick to a once-a-week update schedule for, say, 6 months. And let’s say you build up a really big content buffer during that time, and you really, really feel you can bump up the update schedule to twice a week. That’s great! By this point you’ve already done the once-a-week update schedule faithfully for half a year, and you’ve given yourself time to learn by experience that your work pace outmatches a once-a-week schedule.

Most importantly, working at least 6 months at a pace outmatching your update schedule means that you’ll build up a significant content buffer. The buffer is extremely important, because let’s face it: life happens. Pets get sick. Cars get busted up. Loved ones drop dead. Having a buffer means that during those times when you really need to take a break from pumping out pages, you’re still feeding your audience. Again: if you drift off, so will they.

On the other hand, don’t feel bad if by the end of the 6 months, you feel that once-a-week updates are the most comfortable pace your comic can operate at. That’s still regular enough to draw and maintain an audience. Again, the most important thing is consistency. The worst thing you can do is over-commit. If you need to, cut the update time down to once every two weeks even.

It is much, much better to say you’ll update every other week and then consistently update every other week than to SAY you’ll update once a week, but then only sometimes follow through.

What’s the TL;DR on all this? In short:

  1. Start with a light update schedule that lets you build a buffer.
  2. Stick to the schedule like your life depends on it.
  3. After some time, say, 6 months, increase/decrease/maintain update schedule as needed.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Hey! This doesn’t even go into networking!” Well, look, this IS all part and parcel of networking, because webcomic artist networking is like 50% about posting content for others to engage with. So, in my next post, I’ll cover regularity.

The difference between consistency and regularity is that consistency means making a set post/update schedule, no matter how sparse, and sticking to it no matter what. Regularity, on the other hand, means how OFTEN you post — how dense/sparse your posting frequency is.

That about wraps it up for today! Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. And, as a disclaimer: I don’t make webcomics myself. I’ve just spent a very long time watching people who do.

Nami

Written by

Nami

I’m Nami! I write about autism and comics — less often than I should, but when I do, I try to make it worth your while. Twitter: @breezecast

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