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.

There’s a job opening at E-Line, the parent company of ComicSpace. You have to live in the New York City area, even though it’s a part-time, telecommuting gig. Here’s the info:

E-Line is a publisher of digital entertainment that engages and empowers. We are in development on a slate of original games and comics that are fun, relevant and genuinely impactful in the areas of learning, health and youth empowerment. The E-Line team features seasoned executives who’ve helped build some of the world’s leading game and digital comic franchises as well as social entrepreneurs who are committed to harnessing popular media for impact.

http://www.elinemedia.com/

We are seeking an experienced online advertising sales contractor to sell banner ads and other types of online media across our network of websites, currently serving 50 million pageviews to 1.2 million unique users per month. Knowledge of comics, videogames, and social networking trends is desirable but not required.

Very generous commission.

Please send cover letter and resume to: jobs01@elinemedia.com

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.

There’s this quote that floats around about “breaking in” to the corporate comics industry. “The comics industry is like a high-security government installation. Nobody gets in the same way twice, because after they find out you got in, they seal up that entrance.” Or something like that. I wish I could remember who it is attributed to. Gail Simone, maybe?

There’s another answer. The only infinitely-replicable way to “break into” the comics industry.

Make great comics. Publish them (online, in minicomic form, whatever). Make them popular.

People want the corporate comics industry to lift them up, to take them from where they are to where they want to be. Unfortunately, the industry wants creators who are already, you know, there. The corporate comics industry doesn’t exist to fulfill the dreams of its freelancers, or even of its readers. It exists to risk money in order to make more money. Just like any business. If you approach these people from a position of strength — established readers, a brand name, a strong aesthetic and personal style — if, in other words, you don’t need them, then, yeah, you’ll get anything and everything you want from them.

This is good news. Because thanks to the web, and to the comics community’s long tradition of print self-publishing (comics is one of the few forms of media where self-publishing isn’t considered a nasty sadness), you have the power within yourself to make all of this stuff happen for you. That’s the most powerful position you will find, as a newcomer, in any creative field.

Which isn’t to say that working in corporate comics is a bad thing. It’s just that they don’t want you until you don’t need them. And, again, that, too, is a very powerful position for you to be in. I want to make sure that this doesn’t come across as negative. I want you to understand that everything is up to you.

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.

Graveyard Greg is looking to revive THE GUARDIANS on Graphic Smash.

You might be the one who can help him!

Send samples of your best work to Graveyard Greg, and if chosen, you will be the next penciller for one of the highest ranked comics on Graphic Smash!

I’ve been following the phenomenon of digital comic sales through iTunes, for reading on iPhones and iPod Touches, with a great deal of interest lately. Seems to be heating up. For some reason, people will pay for digital content on a mobile device that they’d expect to get for free in a web browser (see: ringtones, small sprite-based games, and wallpapers). I don’t know why this is. I don’t know how long it will last. But it does seem to be the case. And this includes comics. I spoke with a fairly well-known indie creator the other day who told me that his sales, through iVerse’s digital comics app, are in the “tens of thousands a month.” That’s more than he’s selling in the Direct Market, in the form of comic books. And it’s more than anybody ever sold through Modern Tales or, I’d bet, Bitpass. The Transformers comic was the number one app in the App Store for several weeks, and then the Spider-Woman motion comic was very, very popular, apparently, and so on.

All of which is weird to me, because all the things people complain about when they complain about reading webcomics on a computer screen are even more annoying when reading digital comics on a tiny handheld screen. I guess iTunes is able to reach people who don’t read print comics, therefore they have no reason to complain about digital ones? Maybe? And maybe they don’t even read webcomics, either? I dunno. Everybody reads at least one webcomic, I think. And that one webcomic is probably xkcd.

So, yeah, anyway, whatever the reason, it does look like we’ve got ourselves a burgeoning little digital comics marketplace, in the form of iTunes, almost by accident. But it’s still kind of unorganized and messy to buy comics there, as opposed to other kinds of stuff you might want to buy in iTunes. If you want to buy a TV show in iTunes, you click the “TV Shows” tab. Right? If you want to buy a song, you click “Music,” and so on. If you want a game, you go to the App Store and filter down to games.

There’s no such category for comics; they’re all over the place. You can buy digital comics in the “TV Shows” section (like Spider-Woman and Watchmen: The Motion Comic). You can buy comics in the “App Store” section as one-off e-books (like “Godland Issue 3“). You can buy comics within the context of some multi-comic meta-apps like iVerse, mentioned above, which has its own store within the app, and whose competitors are the Comixology app and the Panelfly app — both of which have their own, completely separate, in-app stores. There may be three or four more of these comics-library-and-store type apps by the time you read this.

And now you can even buy digital comics in the “Music” section of iTunes, thanks to “iTunes LP,” Apple’s new multimedia format ostensibly created as a way to boost whole-album sales (over single-song sales) by bringing back the meta-material (liner notes, artwork, etc) associated with vinyl albums, but which has been bent to the purposes of displaying Tyrese Gibson’s “Mayhem.” In fact, “Mayhem” was, according to this post at the Apple Insider blog, the very first iTunes LP made available for sale. So comics beat actual albums to the format that was supposed to bring back record album sales! Just more proof that comics is one of the most entrepreneurial little industries, like, ever.

But it’s still confusing. On iTunes, a comic is a TV show, or it’s an ebook, or it’s a subset of a larger app, or it’s a record album. There’s no one place to go browse iTunes just to find comics.

I wonder if Apple will ever decide to set up a standard format for digital comics, and create a section of iTunes where they can be easily found? This might be a very good thing for digital comics sales, and maybe a very bad thing for some of the companies who are building their own stores, either through iTunes apps or otherwise. I kind of like the mayhem (no pun intended) right now. But I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term. At some point, some software platform and file format and distribution mechanism will take over. My guess is that Apple is in as good a position as any — is in a better position than most — to step up and create those things. That doesn’t mean that they will, though. Just that I’d be surprised if they don’t.

Glorious Bounty recounts the non-adventures of four pathetic, third-rate bounty hunters who travel deep space with no moral compass. Each full-length storyline focuses on what goes down after the hit. Where do they go? What do they talk about? Why do they want to hurt each other? Hey, why is that robot spraying acid everywhere? Oh god, sweet Jesus, it burns! Get it off me!

Meet manic-depressive Furious Bruce, with his mysterious past, borrowed face and nunchuks that shoot lasers. The reprehensible squid-like Deevis, professional conman, liar and smuggler of dead prostitutes. Funf the gigantic, raging, idiot, lizard. And PK, the robot that has been programmed to hate everything.

Written/coloured by fringe-dwelling Perth playwright Luke Milton and lovingly illustrated by Australian comics aficionado Edward J. Grug III. The story continues every Tuesday and Thursday.

gloriousbounty.com

There’s a new game in town, same as the old game.

Brad Guigar over at Webcomics.com has posted a comprehensive analysis of the official rules for the “Comic Strip Superstar” contest, which is an American Idol type thingie allowing upstart cartoonists to compete for a contract with a big comic strip syndicate. While Guigar is careful not to express a specific opinion about whether or not cartoonists should enter this thingie — that way lies drama and hurt feelings! — he does an excellent job of unpacking the contest rules and the intellectual property agreements that may come with winning. Generally, the tone is respectful but very skeptical. Which sounds about right to me.

If you are looking to enter this contest, you’d do yourself a great service by reading the piece and thinking through the points Guigar raises, whether or not you end up agreeing with him. The man is a pro.