Tonight I read Unnatural Talent, a book on making and marketing comics on the web by Jason Brubaker, the cartoonist behind ReMind.
I was pretty pleased by it. A lot of the book felt like the exact same things I find myself typing on forums all the time, when people ask for advice on makin’ comics. It didn’t start to become anything new to me until the last couple of chapters, but there were some ideas in those that feel pretty valuable. I’ll be trying some of them out soon. Overall it felt like a pretty solid snapshot of what it takes to make and promote a comic in 2013.
It was kind of a nice feeling to read a book on this whole process and feel like most of it was stuff I already knew, and was either already doing, or had considered doing and consciously decided not to do. It tells me I’m doing pretty good here.
For instance, when he talks about his Kickstarter strategies, he discusses having a zillion stretch goals, with staged reveals; I’ve decided to make my campaigns really just focus on delivering the book and nothing else, without a ton of other stuff to source and ship. I may well be leaving money on the table by doing this, but I’m also saving myself a ton of stress and hassle. I can also afford to take this kind of slow route.
There was one thing I think he left out; in his chapter on getting your comics online via WordPress and Comic Easel, he listed six classes of plugins that are very worth having, but missed out one final important one: Security plugins. Trust me, if you’re running a self-hosted WP installation, you want to have something to make it a little harder to get 0wned; I learnt this the hard way. I currently use Better WP Security but do your own research and pick one.
Anyway. If you’re interested in making comics and getting people to read them, it’s probably worth grabbing.
(And speaking of making comics, I really have to start cracking the whip on myself on the next page of Rita. It’s another dense page, and I’ve been looking at it, wincing at the complexity, and switching back to the web browser or going to play Dark Souls or something instead of spending some time chipping away at it. Having complex pages come up while I was already stressed by dealing with my mistake in putting together book 2 didn’t help my motivation, either…)