Syndicate vs. some-indie-cult

Successful webcomic artists talk about the business.

The "money" quote from the whole thing is, not surprisingly, about money:

But for [Questionable Content creator Jeph] Jacques and many other webcomic artists, syndication is out of the picture.

"There’s no real money in that," he says.

Other interesting takeaways:

There are apparently 47 wiki-notable, wiki-verifiable "professional" (by which I assume they mean it's their sole employment) webcomic artists. And many thousands upon thousands of webcomics. Those who cheerlead for the old ways of doing things would probably call this a point for syndication, or a sign of the weakness of the webcomic market. But that would actually suggest that all those "failures" would get a syndication deal, which is far from the case.

And it's not a binary matter, where there are 47 decent quality webcomics that make their creators a living and then a mountain of garbage stacked to the moon... at WisCon 35, I spoke a bit on the way web-based self-publishing offers more shades of success. If you cartoon as a hobby, your work is going nowhere but your co-workers' cubicle walls or your mom's fridge or the free bin at your local indie whatever shop... unless you put it online, where it might find appreciation among a few dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of readers.

And it might make you some money... or it might just give you the boost you need to keep doing it. People of the current and up-and-coming generation are less likely to define themselves throughout their adult lives by what they do for a living, by their career... some people go into a profession, but many more people just get a job. You need a job to have money, you need money to secure the essentials of living and... one hopes... have some time to enjoy life.

So how do you define yourself? Your art, your music, your gaming, your writing, your blogging. This could probably be a whole separate blog post, but it's the things you do that you find fulfilling that define you best, not the things you do because you have to.

To pull this back: someone whose comic makes "some money" will never score (or keep) a syndication deal as long as there's another artist out there hungry for that spot whose comic will make "some more money". And in either case that money will be parceled out into a lot of different hands, leaving the one person who was most instrumental in this singular piece of creative content with a relative pittance.

So while there may be only about fifty people making a living off webcomics as far as can be verified to kipedia, there are more people out there seeing money from their creations than could be accommodated by the syndicates.

And I don't get the local paper, but I doubt there are 47 comics in it. I know there aren't hundreds or thousands. I don't read hundreds of comics. I don't even read 47. There's probably around a dozen I check regularly. But I don't remember any point in my history, from the time I first became aware of the funny pages, that there were a dozen strips that I really liked that, that really spoke to who I am and to my interests and sensibilities and sense of humor. The whole internet doesn't cater to me and me alone, but it doesn't have to. I don't need the whole internet. I just need my dozen strips.

The creator of Dominic Deegan... whose name I neither retain nor care enough about to shift-tab back to that article and find out... is referenced and quoted in that article as talking about how he knew his strip would have a particular kind of niche appeal. And it really does. There's a really strong, really large, and really organized "hatedom" against his strip, with targets including everything from the questionable moral lessons and careworn tropes to the faux-manga art style to the forced humor (its sole redeeming value). I would hazard that more people on the internet have tried to read Dominic Deegan and not liked it than have ever liked it.

In fact, the first strip I mentioned at the top of this blog post, Questionable Content, is probably the same way. I know a lot of people in my immediate circle who like it. I like it. But it seems like any random community or forum where I see it being discussed, it's people tearing down the art or the characterizations or the artist's attitude or whatever.

This is the flipside of me not needing the whole internet to cater to my tastes: creators online don't need to capture the whole internet audience. They don't need to think in those terms. Some do, I'm sure. Some set out to create the most broadly appealing thing they can think of. I can't think of any really successful webcomic that really does that. No comic could appeal to ~*the mass market*~ as strongly as Questionable Content or Dominic Deegan or _your_favorite_strip_here_ appeals directly to its fans.

And that's the practical lesson to be learned from this article. Not "don't join a syndicate"... for the vast majority of cartoonists out there, particularly those posting online, "should I accept this contract from the syndicate" is a question that will never, ever need to be considered.

No, the lesson is to find the audience you can connect with most strongly. You can play around with how much you can broaden the appeal without watering down the attraction, but at the end of the day you have to be satisfied with what you're doing so you might as well just do it the way you want to.

After all, if you're not making a living and you're not satisfied with your work then you have to ask what you're doing it for... and if you are making a living at it but you're not satisfied with your work, you've effectively turned your dream career into a dead-end job.

It's hard to tell...

...if I'm being trolled or if people genuinely think they're being helpful, but in case it's the latter I'd like to remind everyone that I really don't care to see any new links to what anyone might be saying regarding the call-out. If morbid curiosity doesn't get the better of me, I'll still waste time and spoons and brain cycles wrestling with it.

Our words are out there and they're doing their job. For our own health and safety, it's time to move on.

I'm going to turn off my email notification for a while, so if you're commenting on one of the screened posts or you comment on a regular post and I haven't friended you, your comment might stay screened. Though I'll be checking the newer posts for comments.

Thursday: Easy, breezy, beautiful... Clever Girl

News For Today:

Ack. The latest MU chapter is apparently a mess of the sorts of errors that even my proofreading normally picks up, but at least it's being well-received... I wasn't too worried on that score, as I have what is probably one of the few fandoms where a few thousand words about the mechanical considerations of weaving spells and enchanting items could count as fan service.

So far I've managed my goal of writing a bit of fiction every day; sometimes a bit more than a bit. My semidialogue (that is, one half of a dialogue) about living forever will be included in the newsletter I'm putting together for next week; I will probably also be adding it to my modest but growing library of short stories on Kindle. After some of the conversations I had at WisCon and reading and participating in the comment-versations at haikujaguar's journal, I really think short stories are a good income stream and stealth marketing strategy.

State Of The Me:

Better.

Dream Diary:

I haven't been sleeping well enough or deep enough or long enough to have coherent and memorable dreams most nights. I didn't last night, either. But I did between like 9:30 this morning and 2:00 this afternoon.

During the portion of the dream that is really vivid, I was the SHN character "Clever" Claire Clevenger in some sort of detention facility (it wasn't clear if this was meant to be an adult prison or a juvenile facility... When Last We Saw Claire, she was on the verge of legal adulthood, though she has definitely spent time in the juvenile justice system. All the inmates seemed pretty young, so I'm going to say that if I were to turn this dream into a story it would be juvie.

And that's all I'm going to say about it here because I think there is a story in it, and telling a story before I tell a story is a good way to permanently scratch that itch.

Plans For Today:

I'm starting the next chapter of Tales of MU. I'll probably only do a little (defined as ~1,000 words) actual writing on it... my current scheme has me devoting the idle moments of a day to thinking about what I want to do with a chapter (or what I want the chapter to do) before undertaking to actually write it out, as an extension of the "reflect, then write" time divide. The results have been pretty good when I can keep external matters from distracting me.

I'll also be putting some time in on at least one other story, but I'm still waking up and I'm not sure what's going to grab me.

Tips on tipping.

10 Handy Rules For Tipping.

(Spoiler Warning: With remarkably few exceptions, almost all of the 10 rules are tip 20%.)

Obviously this article is aimed at the United States and our particular "tip culture". When I was younger and somehow even more foolish than I am today, I thought this whole thing was backwards and stupid and that when I had a chance I would refuse to participate in it. Not by avoiding patronizing any establishment that didn't build a living wage for its employees into its prices, but by striking a bold blow for truth and justice and the rights of workers by pointedly not tipping, while suggesting to the servers that if they all sought jobs with a better base pay restaurants would be forced to end the charade once for and all.

Fortunately, I outgrew this notion before I had a chance to act on such high-minded, revolutionary, and thoroughly original ideals. It's a sobering thing to look back on one's life and realize how one managed to avoid becoming part of the problem only through sheer lack of opportunity.

It's a sobering thing, too, to realize that there are a lot of people out there who made it to the age of personal dining responsibility and who do still think that way.

Tipping is optional, right? No one charges you with theft or fraud if you don't do it, right? That means it's optional and that means it's your choice.

Yes, technically tipping is optional. A lot of things that are expected of you when you interact with other human beings in public are technically optional. You have the option of treating the cashier at the grocery store as a human being or not. You have the option of treating the assistant to the person you're doing business with as more than a piece of office furniture or not. You have the option of giving courtesy to your fellow human beings and treating them with dignity and respect... or not, as you see fit.

And when it comes to interacting with people in tipping situations, if you choose not to exercise normal levels of courtesy and respect you can even take things further, as you have the further option of rewarding their bringing of food to your table by taking food off of theirs.

I've seen it put this way: if you can't afford the tip, you can't afford the meal... that sort of lesson ought to be taught in school, right along with a greater focus on logic, civics, and public responsibility.

If you still have doubts about the inflexibility of a "baseline" tip, I recommend some further reading courtesy of The Onion: 10% Tip Teaches Waitress Valuable Lesson.

(I tip a fifth of my hat to slacktivist on this one... yeah, I still am conflicted about his choice to join the Patheos community, but on the balance I've decided to stick with him.)

Never Delete Anything

Aaaargh. I have a distinct memory of having written up a description of Eloise Desjardins's background, originally as a blog post but then I ended up not posting it because I thought it would make a good Random MU Bit for the newsletter... then the newsletter was delayed and delayed and now here I am set to work it into the story and I can't remember some of the names I'd come up with because I didn't save the text anywhere, I just figured I'd type it up again for the newsletter.

If I were just throwing names onto places I could just do that again, but as is often the case there are important parallels referenced in the etymology involved. So it's back to the net to try to work my way backwards from the real-world things I'm referencing and try to find, if not the exact names that I came up with before, then ones that work well enough.