How To Make a Living With Webcomics
by Joey Manley
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.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:54 am
YOU’RE SO FUCKING WRONG, JOEY.
Kidding. I would actually add a #3: Learn to live cheap.
There’s a reason many (most?) professional webcartoonists are in their early twenties live in North- or Easthamptonshire wherever the hell, not New York City or Chicago. Low cost of living.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Living cheap could help, but it’s not a requirement in the same way that making a great comic that is very popular is required. I recommend Louisville, Kentucky over Northworstershireton, though — it’s warmer.
October 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I’m not sure i agree that’s _all_ there is to it. As great as a comic is, if it doesn’t update regularly, I’ll have trouble following it. Also, if the creator doesn’t interact with their audience, they may be hurting themselves. Community is an important part of success – if people feel they belong to a community they’re far more likely to spend money.
I also think reading those blog posts, message boards, etc, are a component because that’s where people share the successful strategies that work for them. That’s where people can see _how_ someone made something popular.
As for making something good – yeah, that’s all up to the creator. But, constructive criticism always helps.
October 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
How you make a great comic, and how you make it popular, are definitely subjects worthy of discussion.
Those aren’t the subjects I usually see discussed under the rubric “how to make a living at webcomics.” I see people arguing about Alexa and AdsDaq — and that’s just in the “A” part of the discussion. Next comes “B” and “C” and “D.” And they never, or at least rarely, get around to the only two core questions, the only two steps.
There are only two steps. Period. There is nobody that makes a living at webcomics who hasn’t done these two things. There is nobody who has done these two things who has not made a living at webcomics.
Of course, each of these two steps is composed of infinite numbers of details, finesse, and innovations. There’s the rub! How you make a great comic will be different for everybody. Randall Munroe’s great comic is great for completely different reasons than Phil Foglio’s great comic, for example.
That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from studying art and writing — theirs as well as others — and taking what you can from that study, without simply imitating them (because simple imitation is not making something great).
Likewise, popularity comes in many different ways and through many different strategies. But finding out what other people did — while understanding that simply imitating them is not likely to work anymore — can be helpful. For example: PvP started out on a gaming website, then went on its own, carrying some of that audience with it, and then built its own larger audience over time, from that foundation. That’s not something you’ll likely be able to successfully replicate. But you can take elements of that (hm … find a popular website with a similar audience … and make a deal with them … or something). Promotion is every bit as creative an act as cartooning.
But yeah. Still only two requirements. If you wish to make a living at webcomics, and you are participating in the community in order to make this happen, you should ask yourself at every step: is what I am doing helping to make my comic better, or more popular? If the answer to either question is “yes,” then you’re on the right path. If it’s “no,” then you’re not.
October 7th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
It has always been a great disappointment to me to know, as far as creative arts go, that the quality of your work has never been anywhere near as important as your ability to bullshit your audience.
October 7th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“Make it popular” does not imply any one particular strategy.
Gladhanding the fans and being all over the community is one strategy, for example, that the mysterious and elusive Nicholas Gurewich and Randall Munroe never employed. And yet they made their comics popular.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I guess I should be clear: I don’t mean just telling an audience what they want to hear in the blog ala: “Did you like Star Wars? I like it too! We’re so cool! Let’s touch butts!”
The comics themselves are based on that method as well.
Panel 1: “Did you like Star Wars?” “Yes I do!”
Panel 2: “We’re so cool!”
Panel3: Beat
Panel 4: “Let’s touch butts!”
excerpt from “I Like Star Wars.com”
So both in blog and comic, the creator is essentially selling Jesus to the choir for personal gain. (And the religiousness of the practice does irk me. Especially since so many don’t / won’t recognize “1000 True Fans” for what it is.)
Munroe does this as well. He’s not quite a nakedly obvious about this selling of philosophy to people who already follow it as others. Maybe he’s not even aware he does i. But I’d say that contribute a lot to his success.
Gurewich, I have no way to explain. I generally don’t see “It’s really good in every respect!” act as a main selling point for webcomics.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
“Good in every respect” has to be accompanied by “popular,” unfortunately.
I spent much of the early part of my webcomics career trying to get around that fact — trying to find a way that comics that aren’t popular could make money. Now I’m just trying to make comics that are good, popular.
And there’s more than one way to be popular. Pandering has worked for some, but not for all. (And I disagree about Munroe, of course — xkcd could only be described as pandering if there were some way that anybody in the world could have imagined that that comic would have been popular in the first place — nope, it’s just what he does and who he is, and it works).
October 8th, 2009 at 5:57 am
“Good in every respect” has to be accompanied by “popular,” unfortunately.
See, this is the point that I’m not in agreement with that’s the basis of my view.
Let’s take Derek Kirk Kim for example. The guy’s art and story writing typically stands head and shoulders above the typical “Geek culture gag strip X” that makes up the lion’s share of popular webcomics. Yet, if quality equaled popularity, the guy should be running the show. But a quick look at Alexa and Google Trends suggest that he’s not.
So the idea of making a great comic equals a popular one is not true. If it is true, then the people who say CTRL+ALT+DEL is a bad comic MUST retract their words due to it being a popular strip. Popular = good in this view of things. So CTRL+ALT+DEL, a very popular comic, is also a very good comic.
This disconnect between good and popular has always been a problem for me (In comics since I dabble in them. Were my passions musical, The Pusscat Dolls would doubtless have me banging my head against the wall), and I’ve always been struggling to find the reason for it. Since so much emphasis is always placed on making a “community” with yourself at the head of it, by essentially stroking the balls of your readers, it seems to me that this is taking the burden off of the demands of quality.
It’s either that, or the frequent update thing. Which I’d assume any artist with any amount of pride would want to downplay since it’s basically saying that their comic is popular because it’s a consistent time waster.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Didn’t say great = popular.
Said both are required, if you want to make a living at webcomics.
Big difference.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I understand your point.
But let me try once more to make mine clear: My view is that the “great” condition is normally not being met in many cases of webcomic employment. So I feel there must be something else filling in the gaps. That something else seems to be “community” and frequency.
Though I will admit that a lot of it can be boiled down to taste.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:34 am
The something filling in the gaps may be a function of being very early to the game (when there was less competition). Or maybe these comics are great in ways that you and I don’t understand. None of that matters.
This post wasn’t written for *them*. People who are making a living from their webcomic don’t need to know how to make a living from their webcomic. This post was written for *you*. If *you* (any of you), who aren’t currently making a living from your webcomic, want to make a living from your webcomic, you need to make it great, and make it popular. Anything else is a waste of your time. And the existence of other comics that are popular, but not great, in your estimation or in mine, has no bearing on what your best strategy is, going forward.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:42 am
I think frequency of updates does affect popularity, but it also has do with the core ‘greatness’ of a comic. From my own experience, I know it’s been a primary limiting factor for my own comic’s success. Having a comic that can update consistently (i.e. declaring a schedule and sticking to it) is a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a webcomic in the first place (something I struggled with for a long, long time, but finally overcome). However, it’s been clear for a long time that a comic that updates 5 times a week is going to garner a bigger audience than one that only updates once a week, especially if there’s a continuing story involved. These days, my biggest request from my audience is that I increase my update schedule, but I don’t want to promise it before I can deliver. Then again, I’m not one of the lucky few who truly make their living on this, but I am closer than I once was by a long shot.
October 8th, 2009 at 10:57 am
[...] Joey Manley explains how to make a living with webcomics. [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 12:23 am
nice one. I agree, and i call it “if you build it awesomely, they will come”
October 9th, 2009 at 8:04 am
[...] Manley had some advice (and discussion) about how to make a living with webcomics. I think step #2 is either a lengthy and difficult road OR you are the very fortunate recipient of [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Questions about point #2:
How popular?
How do you make it popular?
Which is better: 10,000 very loyal readers or 50,000 with an average churn rate?
Can a comic be preconceived to be popular?
Is it better to dominate a niche or share a pie?
What role do popular webcomics play in making new comics popular?
Where you go off the rails is forgetting that making a living is an economic question, and economics are addressed by gathering and studying trends and data. Eyeballs is only part of the equation. There is nothing about webcomics that makes them different from other businesses. Like other businesses, they need customers, but again, that only scratches the surface of the economic issues involved. I won’t burden your comments with a long list since I’ll be publishing it soon enough, but I’d respectfully appreciate your thoughts on my questions.
I am rooting for you to supply more brief summaries to complex issues, as it would save webcomics practitioners a lot of work,
(I mean this in a friendly way, not overly serious.)
Bengo
October 9th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Cartoonists with large amounts of readers (and by “large” I mean somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 1 million readers/month) will do well to study these kinds of numbers — they actually have something to gain from them. If you’re wildly popular, and still not making a living from your comic, or making a living but not maximizing your revenue potential, you need to figure that stuff out, or hire somebody to figure it out for you.
Cartoonists with ten readers/day, or a hundred readers/day, or a thousand readers/day, or even more, don’t stand to gain much by the kind of analysis you recommend. At that level of traffic, the difference between choosing the right ad network and the wrong one (for example) hardly amounts to pocket change. The time spent worrying about that stuff is wasted, in other words. They’d be better off making their comic better, and making it more popular. Without doing that, nothing else matters.
[edited to add]:
Hey Bengo! I deleted your angry response to the above. We practice civil conversation here.
You’re welcome to not believe me. Doesn’t matter one way or another, to me. People do what they want to do, and if studying Alexa charts is your bag, you should go for it. I honestly hope you find it helpful.
But I honestly doubt you will — until you have reached a large enough audience to make a living from your webcomic. That’s really what it boils down to, and getting angry with me, or the world, or this or that webcomic clique (and God knows, I know how annoying webcomic cliques can be) isn’t going to change that simple, honest, obvious fact. Popular = money.
And while Good does not always equal popular, the best thing that you can do, as a cartoonist, as an Artist, is to make your work better and better and better. That’s going to put you in the way of getting popular more quickly than any amount of number crunching. People become webcomic artists, presumably, because making webcomics is what they’re good at, and what they want to do with their lives. Otherwise, there are any number of ways to make a living that are much, much easier. So if making webcomics is what you’re good at, is what you want to do with your life, it stands to reason, to me at least, that concentrating on that, focusing all your efforts there, and moving always to higher and higher levels of mastery and accomplishment in making great webcomics, is the way to go. Once you’ve achieved the kind of popularity that warrants it, you can stress over the spreadsheets. Until then, you’re putting the cart way, way, way before the horse, in my opinion.
But yeah. Follow your bliss, man. Nobody wants to tell you you can’t do whatever you think is best. Like I said in my post: it’s all up to you. You have the power. You make the choices. You reap the reward — or not, as the case may be.