Monday, July 20, 2009
The Web Comic Project: Day 20
I'm having to focus on Other Work right now but I wanted to mention that ComixTalk appears to be the first comic media site to mention the WCP. Many thanks for that (Twitter still wins for being the first source of a hit surge). And speaking of Twitter: I've already built up a list of folks I'm following. Some of these people are actually living quite interesting lives (I'm looking at you, Neil Gaiman). As for myself, I just got back from some grocery shopping and will soon be making shortribs with my Famous Mashed Potatoes. I will be dining with my wife, kids, mother-in-law and fending off a couple of kittens. Then I will wash the dishes and eventually get back to work. Ah, the glamor.
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4 comments:
Whoo! I can see grounds for some immediate scrambling-to-fix in Java Town. I will eludicate, because I know you are a grown-up and listening to feedback :) that's rare on the Internet, and a major credit to you, by the way.
The initial comic you've got up has a poll asking if people like the way it's presented. The results are TEN to one, no.
I guarantee part of that is that you have a donate button up before you've earned any respect, and that the button shows up on the TOP, above the comic, and it shows up many seconds before the comic even appears at all.
That's huge, you've got to change that. The Flickr interface isn't really working- it cycles through to join the beginning again, and is not how people typically like to view comics. But I am absolutely certain that the up-top donate button sitting there while the comic hasn't loaded at all- is a major factor in people not liking the presentation, and it's more fixable than the more major work involved in changing the Flickr interface to something else.
I'm going to suggest respectfully that for the time being you remove the donate button entirely- it's far too soon, you cannot do that without significant amounts of content already up, and even if you did, it really doesn't work to have it be up-top and sitting there before the art loads at all.
You've got my interest, and to an extent my sympathy- I'm not sure I ever got anything as scathing as a ten-to-one 'no it doesn't work'. I don't think that's a mistake- I just hope I've correctly identified part of the reason.
I had picked 'no' pretty much because of the donate button and slow art loading, and then when I saw it was ten to one against I went 'whoa' and ran to warn you :) if I'd known, I don't think I would have said anything, but too late now...
I plan on doing a post on the polling very soon. You want to know the saddest thing about the that little effort? The lone "yes" vote is mine!
As for the comment about the "donate" button: well, that's exactly the kind of thing I want to hear. For the record, I didn't put the button there, someone else (probably publisher Dan Vado) did sometime during the first incarnation of Java Town -- JT actually started a year ago as a hand-drawn strip reaching about 20 pages before I got sick and had to stop. Donation buttons are so ubiquitous that I honestly didn't think much about it (and I didn't think anybody would use it either but since I didn't install it I wasn't going to remove it -- it's not my web site). I don't even like donation buttons, it's too much like begging. Out of curiosity, how many hours of labor is required before a web cartoonist has earned the right to ask for a small donation? (This is a serious question. I know it may sound snotty, but I'd really like to know.)
That, I'm not sure. It's more a statistical thing- like 10% of people will never accept a button, 10% are okay with one from the very first real strip, and so on.
Placement is huge- hide it and you can really go much earlier with such a thing. Who you are plays a part- if you're a teenage girl drawing a web manga, people will accept a donation button much quicker than if you have a day job and a car.
You're luckier than me in one way- I can't do a PayPal donation button at all. They'd call me porn and probably freeze the whole account and mess with me. It's not worth it.
I think the point of a donation button is if you are poor and innocent- if you have a sophisticated site and ads etc, to some extent you don't qualify. The idea is, you can think of more effective ways.
Here's an idea- rather than plain donation, repackage stuff into wallpapers and sell those, but urge people to buy them as if you were urging them to donate. People will get used to the idea of you being pushy if you have something to offer. You don't have to play innocent, you just have to be able to deliver some kind of content.
Then you see if people are liking it, by how much they buy or how much they return to become regular readers.
Really? 10% would never accept a donation button? I would love to know just what moral high ground they think they're occupying.
I'm not trying to be "pushy" or give the great masses the vapors by offending their utopian sensibilities. I just believe that creativity and the work associated with it has value and should be supported. It seems that I have to keep pressing this point with other artists -- I find this distressing -- but I appreciate the input just the same.
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