As originally posted at THE DESERT PEACH WEBCOMIC.
More to come soon!
The Desert Peach #1, Pages 3-5 (For Pages 1 and 2 go HERE and HERE, respectively)
Continue reading about The Desert Peach #1, Pages 3-5 (of 31)
After a 2 month hiatus, KILLING THE GRIZZLY continues!
This should be the last “monster” sized installment. It’s at long last the beginning of the answer to the question: What is the Digital Comics Business Model? Future chapters will be shorter and come sooner, with step after step and suggestion after suggestion on how to run on online digital comics venture. But here’s where we begin.
Inside KILLING THE GRIZZLY #4: THE DIGITAL COMICS BUSINESS MODEL, You’ll Find:
- Are You Ready? (Where and How to Find Collaborators, Build Your Creative Team)
- Do You Even Have a Book? (Graphic Novel vs. the Ongoing Serial)
- Digital Comics vs. Webcomics
- How To Build a Webcomic Site? (Comic Gallery 1.2 vs. ComicPress 2.7)
- Customization Tutorials
- WordPress Advantages and Plugins
Whew! And that’s just the BEGINNING….
Continue reading about Killing the Grizzly #4: The Digital Comics Business Model
Immense Updates are coming!!!
Yes, we’ve been awful quiet around these here parts. But holy hell is it NOT because we’ve been idle. Lots of news to announce, which is coming up right after this “hey, hey, we’re back” post. GILLIAN’S HEART BLOG is going to be changing in the near future, getting a little slicker, possibly a new design to reflect the new elements that should be added on within the next month or so. Maybe I’ll just add some new pages, but more likely I’ll be giving this site a complete overhaul.
So what are the updates? To tease, the updates will be:
- Regular postings of new content of the first webcomic site I ever designed, www.RickWorley.com, which hosts the regular “webcomix” series, A WASTE OF TIME. Look for every post there to be posted here, the first of many webcomics that will be produced under a single banner, that banner being me, though I promise to eventually come up with a cleverer name that that. Or…who knows? Maybe “Me Comics” is good? (likely the artists won’t think so!) Rick also happens to be the artist on…
Continue reading about Immense Updates! Complete Overhaul is coming!
Killing the Grizzly returns! With an extra-long article chronicling just where digital comics sit now that Diamond has pulled the rug out from under the small press and indie community.
PART 1 – EVERYONE PASSES “GO”: THE BREAKING OF A MONOPOLY
“THE HIBERNATION PERIOD IS OVER, IT’S TIME TO MAKE SOME SOUP. The bear has awakened, and it needs to be killed. Not later, now. Or some comics creators or going to die.”
KILLING THE GRIZZLY was going to focus on a far different topic for its third installment—a fair number of different t’ings, actually—but between KtG #2 and now, something rather big happened, and as it now stands as the (one and only) talk of the town, especially whenever “the changing landscape of comic publishing” is brought up, by necessity it must then become the core of this latest one-sided conversation between you and me.
Diamond has raised the minimum bar on preorders for comics. For those of you not in the know, here’s the skinny: Diamond Distributors has been the sole source of mainstream Marvel, DC, Image, and Darkhorse distribution since the early 90’s, as well as for all major small publishers and the few lucky independents that wedge their way inside the hallowed halls of Diamond’s Previews catalogue. It is the one and only retailer resource for ordering comics across a national system and in any quantity that truly matters to creators.
Diamond is and has been for some time, a monopoly. They are, by-and-large, the stranglehold on the industry in much the same way that megaliths Borders and Barnes & Noble alongside the practice of “returns” are the stranglehold squeezing the life’s blood out of the book publishing industry. Everyone involved is aware of the limitations such monopolies enforce on either side of the commercial print world, but little has ever been done to change the reality, or challenge it, even as the world of publishing has suffered a slow, suffering decline in recent years.
So when Diamond announced a hefty raise on the minimum order allowed for all comics carried in their catalogue, this meant that any book Diamond ships to retailers must achieve a guaranteed revenue via pre-orders…or else they’ll be dropped. Not immediately, per se, but eventually, should sales not increase, a book will find itself without retail distribution, or at least without distribution through the sole retailer that has ever carried any sincere weight within the American comic book market model for the past fifteen years.
Continue reading about KILLING THE GRIZZLY #3 – Life After Diamond, Parts 1 and 2
Second installment of this exploration into the possibilities of the online comic distribution model is up!
Titled “The Long Tail and The True Fan”, this one is closest I’ve ever gotten to true-blue journalism. I like to say that this comprises the Newtonian Physics of the digital independant business model. Soon to come then is the Special Relativity, General Relativity, and Superstring theory of the same. Hopefully, ultimately, this should all lead to an M-theory-like TOE of making a living making comics. The American dream, in a way. It’s changed, and radically, but only in its details, not its heart-and-soul.
Continue reading about Killing the Grizzly #2 – The Long Tail and The True Fan
Whoot! My new super-cool gig at Septagon Studios has begun.
KILLING THE GRIZZLY #1 – the first of a long series of articles dedicated to chronicling the rise of the online comic boos publishing sphere, from e-comics, downloadable comics, online marketplaces such as Wowio, Literate Machine, Lulu, Clickwheel, then independent folks who are trying some truly cutting edge things, plus creative collectives like Chimera and Alterna, who have found solid success in keeping everything electronic. Creators have literally DROPPED their productive print contracts in favor of going digital. Why? Because their making money, when in print they were not. How?
Come join me and find out.
Continue reading about Killing the Grizzly #1 – My First e-Comics Column at Septagon Studios
Really, really, really, really, REALLY inspiring video of Howard Tayler – the creator of the daily webstrip SCHLOCK MERCENARY, a comic that’s allowed Tayler to quit his day job and work for himself full time – as he speaks on how to turn a webcomic into a profitable small business for yourself. He got ME [...]
Continue reading about Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary talks how webcomics can be profitable