Help a reporter (and yourself)

Getting media coverage for your comic is a great way to garner some no-cost promotion for yourself. But finding someone who wants to do a story about you can be difficult. Heck, finding someone who wants to do yet another "Look, kids! Comics on the Web!" story is getting to be darned hard.

Here's a pretty neat way to get some media attention -- from news sources that are hoping you'll get in touch.

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Friday Archive Dive: Offering Free Wallpaper for a Donation

Today's Archive Dive take us to Oct. 28, 2009, when I showed how to use Paypal's redirect to reward your readers with a free desktop wallpaper when they donate money to your webcomic.

If you use PayPal to collect money on your site, you can easily offer free desktop wallpaper to someone who buys merchandise or makes a donation.

Default Giveaway

I have created a default checkout page that PayPal redirects to once a sale or donation has been successfully transmitted. This page is hosted on my site and features links to the different sizes of the wallpaper being offered.

This can easily be set up in your Account profile. Once you've logged into Paypal:

• Click on My Account
• Click on Profile
• Click on Website Payment Preferences

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Healthy hands -- more excersizes

This piece was kindly submitted by J.R. Faulkner, and is sourced by Katherine Shanta Wehrli, Certified Yogini and Wellness Coach. 

A short while ago, we talked about some exercises for keeping your hands healthy. Here is the second part, with even more tips on keeping your digits decent.

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Defending the 72-dpi "myth"

To wrap up our discussion of image preparation, here's a few thoughts on resolution.

Let's keep this simple, shall we?

For the Web, your image should be 72 dpi*

For color or grayscale images, your image should be no lower than 300 ppi

For b&w lineart (with no tones), your image should be no lower than 600 dpi

*or ppi... they're interchangeable

You will probably come across someone who wants to tell you that 72 dpi is a myth. They'll say "You don't have to prep an image file at 72-dpi for the Web." 

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Gary Trudeau on Webcomics

Everyone in webcomics got their knickers in a twist yesterday when a Slate article was misrepresented as having said Doonesbury's Gary Trudeau said that you can't make a living doing webcomics.

However, I think he made an awfully good point.