There’s a nice article about educational videogames that includes a brief interview with my friend and colleague Alan Gershenfeld of E-Line (he sits two desks over from me, so I almost feel like a star myself, in his glorious PR radiation) about our upcoming videogame releases and general plans, here. Not much about the comics side of the business — that stuff is still actually under wraps, more or less — but for those who are curious about the bedfellows we’ve made for ourselves here at ComicSpace, it’s worth a read.

I created some comics at about the same time! I did! They were mostly stupid, but also a little bit bad. I was young, what can you do? This was before webcomics, of course, so I had to xerox them and send them by mail to my comic-creating friends, all of whom I met through classified ads in the Comic Buyer’s Guide (all of whom also sent me their xeroxed comics by mail). My mom still has copies. Maybe I will get them and scan them someday. I’d have to find the co-creators, though … Dean Webb, Mat Kramer, Bill Anderson, Jerry Foley, Filthy McNasty, Dan Taylor (not the one who created that comic about superheroes at a bar) … are you guys still out there? Anyway, if, instead of making stupid and bad comics (stupidly and badly written … my co-creators, the artists, were great), I had been creating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I would be 60 million dollars richer today! Talk about a V8 moment! D’oh! Kind of puts the success of even the most successful current webcomics into perspective, dunnit? On the other hand, with capitalism’s speedier ways these days, I doubt it will take so many decades for some webcartoonist to have a similar payday.

But which one? I dunno.

One final bit of advice to webcartoonists, to close out this week: you should beware anybody who tries to build a career and a name brand for him/herself writing blog posts (or books, or whatever) giving you business advice. Including me! Professional self-help gurus are the worst, and webcomics is much better off without them. I like to think I’m not really that guy. I’m just a guy who has been around this particular set of blocks a few times, who occasionally comes up with some thoughts (I had a lot of thoughts this week, but I don’t always blog so much about business). When I have thoughts that might be worthwhile, I’ll share them. Nobody, but nobody, is required to agree with me!

Nothing could be more boring and dangerous than a guru. Don’t hand over the dreaming of your dreams or the planning of your plans to anybody. Test everything you read against your own instincts. And most of all: have fun!

It’s difficult to make a living in any art form. There are twenty thousand wannabe actors who are still waiting tables at the age of forty for every one Brad Pitt. For every true genius, for every Marlon Brando, there are one million six hundred thousand and seventy two sad waiters, standing over by the credenza, hands clasped behind their backs, dreaming of what might have been, and wondering if they should recommend the chicken tonight, or the fish. You might even say that no actor ever succeeds, because the ones who do are such a small subset as to be statistically insignificant. And that’s a multi-billion dollar industry with an established business model and a proven pathway to success. Same with music. Same with television. Same with, oh, I don’t know, mime. Same with every other art form you can name. Webcomics? Pah. You might as well give up.

And another thing. Webcomics is a level playing field, but that makes it a fractious one, too, shaking and screaming with competitive rage. Anybody and everybody around you will take advantage of every weakness they can find. Especially if you look like you might succeed. The moment you have the slightest bit of success — and I mean the slightest bit of success — you’ll be the subject of somebody else’s mad-on. Manifestos (manifesti?) will be written denouncing your very existence. People will send you pictures of their gun collections and mention that they look forward to seeing you at your booth at [insert name of comic book convention]. They’ll be sure to let you know that they’ve memorized your booth number, and maybe even that they know which hotel you’re staying at. You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? You’ll see. You’ll see. And bloggers will ridicule every single thing you say. They’ll make fun of your weight, your looks, your friends, your family, your sexual practices, and even your little dog, too. They’ll question your business success, and spit on your dreams. Why will they do this? Because they’re bloggers, of course. Because that’s what they do: mess with your head, if you let them, just because they can. Just because you’re there. Just because you’re doing what they thought they wanted to do (but they didn’t want to work hard enough, or weren’t talented enough, or whatever, to get there). And even the other people who have had a little success, or even a lot of success, the ones who aren’t jealous, who can’t possibly be, will often — not all of them, not always, but often enough — view you with mistrust and fear. It’s worse than high school. It’s worse than the pressure and pettiness of any regular office job. And you’ll probably still have one of those too, by the way, for at least the first few years, and probably for the first decade or two or three. Who needs that kind of hassle? You might as well give up.

And another thing. What if you happen to find a few readers? That’s the worst thing in the world that could happen. They never stop wanting more, the readers. The damned readers! Nothing annoys like a reader! Gods! Let’s say you manage, just once, by reaching as far into your soul as you possibly can, to cough up the funny (or the tragic, or the dramatic, or the whatever you’ve promised your readers you’d cough up), and lay it out on a page, a beautiful, bloody, bony piece of yourself you can never have back once you’ve released it into the world — one time. Something that never existed before, that couldn’t have existed without you. Just once. That’s something. That’s amazing. That’s more than most artists (or “artists”) are able to accomplish in their entire lives. One time. One day. One strip. Guess what? Tomorrow, or next Wednesday, or whatever (depending on the schedule you’ve set for yourself), you’ve got to do it again. And then again. And then again. And again, and again, and again. And if you haven’t set a fairly frenzied schedule, if you don’t update often enough, nobody will bother reading your comic. On the other hand, if you set an ambitious schedule, but you don’t bring your heart to the table every time, if you don’t tear yourself up and break yourself down and make it really matter, every single time, if you just offer filler when you’re uninspired, just to hit that update schedule, nobody will bother reading your comic. You’re screwed either way. You might as well give up.

Oh yeah. One more thing. Let’s say you do manage to make enough money with your webcomic, somehow, to “make a living.” What does that get you? For the most part, even if you’re lucky enough to “make a living,” you’re still firmly in the middle class at best, and you’re very probably in the lower middle class. There’s a reason most of the webcartoonists who make a living with their work don’t live in expensive cities; they can’t afford them. I spoke with a reasonably popular webcartoonist not so terribly long ago, a couple of years ago, someone you have heard of, someone you probably think of as a superstar, and she told me that her dream was to make at least $30K that year from her webcomic. $30K. In a major metropolitan area where the median income, the median is higher than that. Which means that secretaries probably make more than that. Janitors probably make more than that. The manager at McDonald’s definitely makes more than that. And you aren’t nearly as talented, or as attractive, or as intelligent, or as much of a publicity hound and businessperson, as this particular cartoonist. Your prospects are even slimmer. You’re likely to make much more money working a regular nine-to-five office job, than you would making a webcomic. You’re likely to make more money hanging out in front of Home Depot picking up day labor! You might as well give up.

Yup. It’s hopeless. You might as well give up. You might as well give up. You know what you might as well do? Give up.

Have you given up yet? Good. Because if I was able to talk you out of it so easily, with one stupid blog post, then you didn’t have what it takes. Not everybody gets to make a living at webcomics, because not everybody is talented enough and determined enough to do so. And guess what? That’s just fine. You’re better off where you are. Making a living at webcomics is hard, it’s unlikely, it’s the most impossible thing you could ever decide to do for a living, and in order to stand a chance you have to want it so badly that you’re willing to push through anything, anybody, any time, push beyond human reason and common sense, and then push a little harder, even, than that, if you’re going to really commit yourself to the grueling effort that is required to succeed at webcomics (or at any art, but maybe especially webcomics). So yeah. One blog post and you’re out? Cool. You can still read them, you know, and enjoy them. That’s what they’re there for! Also: please stop reading this post now. Thanks.

And if you haven’t given up yet?

Congratulations, you damn fool. You sad case. You crazy-rare and beautiful creature. You really are a webcartoonist. You are the one we’ve been waiting for. You will show us new ways to look at the world. You will stand shoulder to shoulder with giants. You will give us, your readers and fans, what we didn’t remember forgetting to need from our comics, from our art, from our entertainment, from our lives. That is the job description, and you’re the one to do the job. I just know it! And those other paragraphs up there, forget those, okay? They were placed there very strategically, to scare off everybody else. The secret is this, the thing I didn’t want them to read: there is no job more awesome than a job, any job, in webcomics. I’m not a cartoonist, but I’ve managed, against all odds, to make a full-time living in the field, as a publisher, as a coder, as a hosting provider, and as that most annoying and useless and stupid of all things in the world, a blogger, for almost eight years now, and I’m still going strong. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And it will be for you, too. Welcome to the club. Happy to make your acquaintance.

Chances are that there are more people who live within a hundred mile radius of you than there are who read your webcomic. There are a few exceptions. If you live in Dead Horse, Alaska, for example, this may not be true. If you live in Dead Horse (and I’ve never been there, but my dad worked there once, and sent back pictures) I can’t help you here. Good luck to you, though. Brrr.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. The local angle.

Newspapers and local tv news reporters love “human interest” stories; they love stories with an arts angle; and they love stories with a business angle. The local webcartoonist is the perfect storm for them. You just need to find out how to contact the person in charge of editorial for the Arts section of the paper, or the Local Business section (if you have any traction at all in your comics business especially) and pop them a polite but excited email. Or give them a call! Somebody will take your call at one of the tv stations or another. That’s why they have telephones there. So people will call them. Don’t be afraid. You can do this. The worst thing that can happen is that they don’t do a story about you — and guess what? That’s already happening, guaranteed, if you don’t call.

If you’re in college, even better. You probably know somebody who writes for the college paper. And if your comic isn’t appearing within said paper yet — why not?

If you live in a big city like New York, you may have to take another approach. The New York Times isn’t particularly interested in you, more than it’s interested in the other twenty thousand webcartoonists in the city; in cities of that size, you’re better off hitting the neighborhood rags, like the Bay Ridge Courier or Chelsea Now.

What? You’re still here? What are you waiting for? Have at it. Go!

If you hand some random new non-comics acquaintance a graphic novel, or a comic book, or especially a mini-comic, they’ll often look at you like you’ve just handed them poo. “I don’t read comics,” they’ll tell you. Not every time. But often. If you send them a link to xkcd or whatever, though, they’ll more often than not actually follow the link, and read the comic, and send an email back thanking you (if you read their personality correctly and sent the one comic that they needed to read, which is almost always xkcd, but is sometimes Digger).

In print, comics are their own category of thing. People think you have to be a special kind of person to read and enjoy them. They’re either intimidated by comics, or superior to comics, or both. Not always. Yeah. But often.

On the web, comics are just one more fun thing to look at. It’s all part of “the web,” and people don’t get their guard up so quickly. They go from blog to animated cartoon to webcomic to photo-sharing site to social network and back to blog again, without paying attention to the differences between these things. It’s just one big mush of fun. They don’t feel like they have to be “comics fans” to read a webcomic.

And if you’re a comics creator, that’s great news. There’s a whole world of new readers out there who you can reach now, who weren’t available before.

I see creators who are accustomed to the small press world make the mistake, over and over again, of only trying to find readers within the ever-shrinking ranks of comic book aficionados — even when their work is online. I guess they have an excuse. That’s the world they’re used to.

What really surprises me is when webcomics authors, people who started their careers on the web, make the same mistake.

The vast majority of xkcd’s audience didn’t find out about it on ComixTalk or ComicSpace. They found it on a math professor’s blog, or in the forum for a site about physics, or whatever. Likewise, much of Penny Arcade’s vast audience couldn’t care less about other comics, or even about the comic form of the content: they’re there for the, um, content of the content, the sharp look at the videogame world, and the funny. The fact that it happens to be a comic is secondary to them. I’m not saying that they don’t enjoy the comic as a comic (and it is, almost always, a very enjoyable comic). But that’s not why they’re there.

That’s true of just about any huge hit in the webcomics world. There aren’t enough people who self-identify as “webcomics fans” to sustain a meaningful business — but there are enough people out there who will read a webcomic, if it fits their other interests.

Even if your webcomic is supremely “comic-booky,” superheroes, say, or angsty personal confessions (to go to either extreme of the comic book world), there’s bound to be a non-comics-oriented community out there on the web who might find it interesting. You just have to look a little harder. And the nice thing is that those people won’t already be committed to Morrison and Quitely (if your comic is a superhero comic) or Chester Brown (if your comic is about your chronic … um … addiciton to … ah … yeah, never mind). Your comic will stand out more, in those communities, than it might in one where lots of people already read lots of comics.

So what are you waiting for? The plan here is obvious. Get your head out of the comics community sites like this one, at least for a little while. Get yourself out there into the rest of the web — or even the rest of the real world. Don’t be a pest (that should go without saying), but find the communities whose obsessions intersect with the subject matter of your comic, and participate in those communities as a useful, helpful, friendly face. And eventually some of them will follow you over to your comic. And then more, and then more. Maybe. If you do it right. And if your comic is great.

Which it is, right?

If it’s not, then you should stop worrying about webcomic promotion and work on that first.

There are two kinds of promotional strategies: active and passive. You have to practice both.

Active promotion is pretty obvious — stop by ComixTalk or this very site right here and post a promotional bulletin; make friends in the webcomics world and get them as excited about your comics as you are about theirs (so that you can legitimately cross-promote one another); and so on. Many newcomers to the webcomics field are good at this kind of thing.

But there are more people out there who don’t read webcomics (yet) than there are who do — and not everybody who reads webcomics participates in webcomics community sites — so just pulling readers from within the webcomics community isn’t enough. You have to get at least some of the other people, too. And that’s all about search engines. You need to make your website a magnet for the kind of people who are destined to find it, but have no idea it exists. You have to expose to search engines exactly what each piece of content is really about. That’s harder than it sounds.

Search engines understand text. They don’t know how to read comics. Not even the word balloons or the captions inside your comic. They don’t even see those. Your comic image file looks like a big block of nothing to search engines. So you need to make sure that there’s some significant amount of relevant textual content that appears on the page with your comic, that the search engines can understand. At a minimum, you should use a descriptive “alt” attribute in your image tag (or better yet, a “longdesc” attribute) — but even that won’t help terribly much. Search engines have their own rules, and one of the things they’ve decided, over the years, is that text that doesn’t appear visibly on the page (like an “alt” or “longdesc” attribute within an image tag) is not as important as stuff that does. That’s probably because spammers have loaded up their images with deceptive descriptions in order to get more traffic. Blah. Spammers ruin everything.

If you really want to get maximum searchability, you need relevant site-wide text (what your comic is about, generally) that appears on every page of your site, and you also need relevant text about each individual strip underneath, or beside, or around that strip. Otherwise, how are skateboarders going to find out that your comic is generally about skateboarding, and specifically how are Hawaiian skateboarders going to find out that strip # 112 is about the great skateboarder vs. surfer wars in Maui? Or whatever? Ideally, your textual content should have all the keywords a search engine needs to make sure that a robot (or a search engine) can understand it, but should also be legitimately readable and an interesting addition to the experience for your human readers as well.

A lot of people are now using blog engines to run their webcomic sites, and that just naturally causes them to write text that appears under their comics. That’s a good thing. But it can go very, very wrong. Some cartoonists, faced with that big text-entry block under their comic upload form, will fill it up with personal chit-chat, and only personal chit-chat. If your comic is about elves and witches, and your blog post is about redecorating your house and worrying about your dog piddling on the carpet, then you’re going to get a search-engine audience of dog-lovers and interior designers before you get an audience of fantasy fans. Which is fine, I guess, as long as they stick around. But they probably won’t. Building an audience is as much about building an interested audience as it is about anything else.

Chit-chat has some value (it helps your readers to feel closer to you personally), but you need to be aware that everything you write will be read by robots, too, and robots are stupid — but they are the charioteers who may bring even more people to your world. Remember the robots.

A good example of relevant textual content being used around a comic can be found at Smith Magazine. Jeff Newelt, the comics editor there (who, full disclosure, is a personal friend) is the King of Metacontent, and the biggest rising star in webcomics promotion. Study what he’s done there. The extra information is on-target, meaningful to people (deepening the aesthetic experience) but also useful in hinting to robots about the kind of content the site — and each individual page — contains. That’s the answer. Learn it well.

There’s a temptation, when trying to promote your webcomic (or your blog, or just your own “brand,” or whatever), to pick fights with people who are out there in the webcomics world, in the hopes that they will bring their audience to you. You should avoid that.

I don’t say this from some high and mighty self-righteous position, God knows. I’ve been there, and I’ve done that. Way, way, way back in the mid-nineties, for example (and, yeah, this is just one example), when I worked in the online video field, I used to pick fights with Mark Cuban, who was then best known as the founder/owner of broadcast.com. It worked at first. People paid more attention to me. Hits to my site went up. I thought I was the big man. But the kind of attention they paid was the kind of attention that I didn’t need: look at the freaky freak; look at the sad clown. They were not able to help me reach my real goals. They were only there to point and stare. I learned better, slowly, over time. (Mark, for his part, was a gentleman over it, and even offered me a job at one point, which I turned down — stupidly — two weeks before their IPO).

I see people trying to do that, from time to time, in the webcomics field. The fight-picker (or “troll”) thinks that if he (and it’s almost always a “he”) can get a rise out of, say, Scott Kurtz, or Scott McCloud, or the Penny-Arcade guys or somebody, anybody, then he’s won: the victim will link to their blog in order to argue with them. Or, better yet, one of these people will engage them in some public way — which ultimately raises the profile of the troll, supposedly. If as prominent a figure as Scott McCloud or Scott Kurtz is arguing with you, then you must be somebody, right? You must be worth paying attention to.

Not really, no.

Here’s a secret to success on the web, that isn’t really a secret at all: surrounding yourself with negativity, with anger, and with outrage, though it brings attention, is not sustainable as a long-term strategy for building an audience. Oh — you’ll get an audience. But it won’t be the kind of audience who will help support you in the long haul. It’ll be the kind of audience that will regard you as a sideshow. As soon as something else catches their attention, they’ll be out of there. They never cared about what you were doing. They only cared about (and “cared” in this context could be hate or love) the more-famous person you were fighting with. As soon as that’s done, so is their attention.

The people who will stick around and spend money on you (or click your banners, or whatever), are there because you make them happy, not because you help them get angry. Build your brand around positive interactions; excite your readers with the greatness of your content, not with the ferocity of your flamewars.

And especially if you’re trying to pick a fight with me in order to get attention: don’t bother. Everybody’s had a go at this old punching bag. It’s not even news anymore, and nobody will even notice — least of all me.

People who will never find love are those who imagine that there’s a formula to successful courtship, “I did thing A, thing B, thing C, and the inevitable result should be that the object of my affection falls in love with me — because that’s how it happened for these other people I know or have heard of. I took all the necessary steps!” They fail to take into account the unaccountables, of course: personality, situation, timing and accident. There is no one pathway to true love. There is no magic potion.

It’s the same with growing an audience for your website — webcomic or otherwise. You can’t just do what other people did, and there’s very little you can learn from other people’s experience, beyond the bare fundamentals. You should have a clean, well-designed, attractive website with plenty of good keywords, so that it’s findable in search engines. Your content should be great. And so on. That’s the equivalent of taking showers and dressing nicely when you’re courting (unless, of course, you’re courting a hippie — but that’s a story for another day, I guess). Everybody who takes showers and dresses nicely, as necessary as those steps usually are, will not find love. Everybody who has an attractive website will not find popularity.

The way to find love is to be yourself and stop worrying about it. Right? Be open to the experience you’re living. Take each day as an exciting opportunity to learn and experience and grow. The way to find love is to have fun. Same with popularity on the web.

Anybody who tells you they have found the secret formula is selling you Spanish Fly. It won’t work. And it may even be poisonous.

So this is a quick post, because the answer is far simpler than you may have heard. There are two steps, and only two steps.

1. Make a great comic.
2. Make it very popular.

You may think I’m being silly, that this is the equivalent of those instructions on becoming a millionaire that start with “first, get a million dollars.” But I’m dead serious, and the above information is sorely lacking from much of the online chatter on this topic.

If you do those two things, and in that order, money will attach itself to your work. Your comic will create its own business models.

Honestly, come to think of it, (2) is the only actual requirement, but (1) definitely helps you achieve (2) in most cases.

You want to know what will not help you make a living with webcomics? Obsessing over anything other than making a great comic, and making it popular. That includes fighting with people on messageboards and blog comment threads; or even quietly and nervously checking your success against somebody else’s; reading books and blog posts about how to make a living with webcomics (including this one); arguing with other people about books and blog posts about how to make a living with webcomics; and etc. You know, all the things that are tempting to do because they are easy distractions from the real work at hand.

But here’s the good news. It’s all about you. You have the power to do these two things. You just have to learn how to make a great comic, and you have to learn how to make it popular. Both require nothing but hard work and constant attention, and those are certainly things you are capable of. All of us are.