January To-Do List

This is the perfect time to get organized for a successful year in webcomics.

Saturday Deep Dive: Page Bleeds

Before we go into today's Deep Dive, I want to point out that this will mark almost an entire year* of this site updating six days a week. Before you discount the Archive Dive and the Saturday Deep Dive, please go back and read some of those posts. Under several of them, you'll find a comment from a member who is excited to have the information (or didn't know of its existence in the archives).

It was a major improvement of the site in 2013, but it's not even close to what I have planned for 2014. But that's a topic for an upcoming January post.

Now, on with the Deep Dive. It's a post from Dec, 16, 2010, a comprehensive tutorial on Page Bleeds.

If you're printing a book in color, you'll likely be asked by your printer to set up "bleeds" for the pages. It can get confusing, so let's go over some of the basics.

Read the entire post and comment there.

* With very few exceptions.

Friday Archive Dive: If It Sounds Too Good To Be True...

Today's Archive Dive dates back to Jan. 22, 2012, and it discusses a rash of amazing claims being made in the world of webcomics.

As happens from time to time in webcomics, we're entering another period of time in which creators are being inundated with a lot of amazing claims. As you've seen in the forum, new webcomic aggregator sites (like this one and this one) seem to be on the rise. And my inbox is full of people who are trying to make sense of amazing claims of new business models and overnight success that they're hearing from other sources.

So let's take a moment to try to make sense of it all.

Read the entire post and comment there.

Removing the Hexagram endorsement (formerly known as Scribol)

When Scribol first came out, I was an early adopter, and reported very favorable results here. In short, Scribol was an updated take on the old Webring concept. You displayed a bank of several small promos on your site, and in exchange, you were given the ability to place your promos on other Scribol sites. The number of views your promos received were based on the number of views for other sites you displayed.

As you can see from this chart that appeared in Aug 2011, it yeilded very good results. Since that post, I had removed the Scribol widget from its rotation in my ad server and placed it directly below the comic (in a non-rotation basis).

And I want to point out that the guys from Scribol were extremely helpful and hardworking people. Their software worked great, and they worked hard.

Unfortunately, it seems, we are becoming victims of their success.

Earlier this year, they were bought out by Hexagram, a native advertising exchange entity. It's basically the same concept, but with dollar values attached. You're still displaying small ads through the Hexagram widget, but now you're earning a dollar value for those ads. And you still have the ability to advertise through Hexagram, but now those ads cost you money.

From what I can see, there's an internal mechanism that seems to keep you from going in the red, but I can't state that as fact. And that's the first reason I'm removing mt endorsement of Scribol/Hexagram: everything about Hexagram has been entirely opaque. And that's what I have to remove my endorsement.

Christmas Eve Archive Dive: My Ad Revenue Tanked!

Today's Archive Dive is from January 6, 2012, when I explained the January ad doldrums.

If you're experiencing a severe downturn in the first few weeks of January -- and if you, like me, first thought it was the beginning of the end -- then I have some news for you...

Read the entire post and comment there.