Weighing Opportunity

Comic contests, solicitations to have your comic reprinted in a magazine, offers to run your comics on other sites...

It would be nice if opportunity actually knocked.

But let's face it, sometimes opportunity stands outside the door and kinda... waits. Or maybe sulks out by the shrubs.

Most of the time, it's hard to tell if it's opportunity at all.

So how do you know when to open the door?

Here's a few things on my own checklist.

This post discusses ways to judge different opportunities based on bullet-list-style breakdowns that help separate the good ones from the scams. Log in for the entire post.

Good news / bad new on digital-marketing budgets

According to a recent survey, companies will be spending more on digital marketing (by an average of about 17%) in 2010.

Econsultancy, a digital marketing firm, and ExactTarget, a services provider, surveyed 1,000 marketers to find out how they were allocating their budgets for the year. BigFatMarketingBlog has an excellent analysis of their study, "Marketing Budgets 2010."

The good news: 66% of respondants reported plans to increase digital-marketing spending in 2010, with 30% planning no changes from last year.

In this post, we'll look at a breakdown of where the money's going and what it means to webcartoonists. What are they doing that follows advice from 2008's "How To Make Webcomics"? And how can webcartoonists benefit from the trend? Log in to read the entire post.



Glossary of Contract Terms

I had originally planned this for later in the month, but since the copyright discussion generated such a strong conversation, I figured I'd move this up in the schedule. It's a list of terms to look out for when you're reading a legal contract.

This post features a list of terms commonly used in the kinds of legal contracts that a webcartoonist might typically be faced with. Each of the terms is explained, and links to further information are provided. Log in to read the entire post.

Random Workshop: Punchline critique

From time to time, I come across some work from a subscriber that I'd like to talk about within the structure of this site. Maybe they're doing something right that I'd like to share or maybe they're making an error that I'm seeing in a lot of other people's work that I'd like to address. I'll file these under "Random Workshops."

In the case of Brent, who graciously agreed to let me use him as an example, it was a little bit of both.

In this post, we take a comic from a subscriber and workshop it to try to improve the punchline and the overall presentation. A step-by-step look at the processes is provided. Log in to read the entire post.

10 Copyright Myths Explained

Here are some very good pieces that discuss copyright law:

Brad Templeton's Brief Intro to Copyright is an excellent primer on copyright law, and his 10 Myths About Copyright Explained contains some common misconceptions about the subject.

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