BRB, dying of sick.

On the standard scale of one to on a train, waking up coughing at 4:30 in the morning is pretty darn shitty.

Ads going up.

As a corollary to my post last night about boosting readership, I've started advertising again after having been mostly absent for a few months.

My experience is that you see the best results if your ads are up in the same place for a while - not everybody will click on them the first time they see them, but if they're a regular presence curiosity might strike or you might get someone who just read their favorite webcomic's latest update and then they go, "Okay, what do I read next?" But if you're too much of a presence, you see diminishing returns as your ads fade into the background and a lot of your potential clickers from the targeted audience have already clicked.

I'm advertising Tales of MU, because, of course, that's the big story with the most readers, but I'm also running a small ad for The 3 Seas in a few places. The story's taking off, Iskondra and Tauri are turning into breakout characters among the people who are reading it... the small and initially erratic updates might have made it hard for people to get into, but now that it's flowing steadily I think it's time it came into its own.

In a happy chain of coincidence, just after I threw some MU ads up on Khaos Komix (one of my favorite webcomics), popelizbet told me that the author had just posted a rec for another writer, and scrolling down through the comments there was somebody throwing in a plug for me. Whee!