The Webcomics.com Awards

Over the past few years, several attempts have been made to establish Official webcomic awards. The Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards ran from 2001 to 2008. More recently, The Webcomic List Awards and the Riffys have arisen to try to fill a perceived void in self-congratulation.

Of course, none of these awards have the gravitas that a site like Webcomics.com brings, so I've decided to host the first annual Webcomics.com Awards.

And the nominees are...

• The cartoonist whose creative need is fulfilled by his or her comic.
• The self-publisher who sees his business growing a little bit larger every month.
• The recipients of e-mail, tweets, posts, likes and other messages from people who have been touched by their work.
• Creators who know more about ad chains, print runs, CMYK, pageviews, typography and about three-dozen other obscure topics than they did a year ago.
• The cartoonist who is happy to be presenting his work to an audience on his/her terms... and can see a future in doing so for a long time to come.
• The cartoonist who does better work today than he/she did one year ago today.

And the winner is...

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When is it Done?

Q. You start off the "How To Make Webcomics" book briefly touching on the attribute that a lot of  artists seem to have. It's the "I'm not good enough" syndrome. Well after battling this through my life I set it aside to start the webcomic but now I find it creeping back again. I draw a strip and immediately want to redraw it knowing that I can do better.
How have you guys gotten past this and when do you know that the strip is ready to publish?

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Member Benefit: 20% off Web hosting at RSCI Publishing

RCSI Publishing, is offering hosting to members of Webcomics.com at 20% off their regular rates.

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Friday Archive Dive: Web advertising strategy

Since this week's discussion has leaned so heavily towards advertising, today's archive dive take us to January 20, 2010, when member Jeffery Stevenson, of the comic Brat-halla, shared his approach to managing his advertising.

The following was quickly written based on an outline for an article I started working on a few years ago after I took our comic on GraphicSmash from 300-400 pageviews one day to over 80K pageviews the next day through advertising. (What wasn't as easy to see in the stats at GraphicSmash was the jump to around 7500 readers that day). I didn't have the funds to maintain that level every day, but after a few weeks (advertising a couple times a week), I pulled in enough new returning readers to keep us around 5K pageviews a day on average (and we still have a good amount of readers at GraphicSmash even though it isn't our primary site any longer).

Now, even though that one day made a big jump for us, I didn't just go out there on a whim one day to see if I could do it... I planned for months. Here are some of the steps I did in preparing for that day:

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Selling T-shirts at Conventions

Webcomics.com member Jen Brazas kindly submitted the following information about selling T-shirts successfully at cons.

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