Successful Cartooning in the Digital World

“successful” = “making money” “digital world” = “the Internet”

Three Guideposts

• Own Your Content

Three Guideposts

• Own Your Audience

Three Guideposts

• Own Your Career

Who Owns These Now?

• Newspaper publishers own the audience.

• Syndicates may own the content.• The person signing the paycheck you

can’t live without owns your career.

Taking Ownership of the Career

• Make sure no single paycheck (“revenue stream”) is one you cannot live without.

• A good rule of thumb: no single source of revenue should account for more than 40% of what you make.

• Corollary: Have at least three.

Taking Ownership of the Content

• You need to be able to:– Re-publish comics you’ve

drawn once they’re published in papers

– Host a gallery of your work on a site you own

– Write and illustrate things not owned by your paper or syndicate

Taking Ownership of the Audience

• Brand yourself with your name

• Own the dot-com of that name, or a simple derivation

• Post regular content to the website at that domain

Monetizing the Audience

• Point of order: “monetizing” is not a dirty word. The people who have paid you in the past used it, just maybe not around you. You took their money.

Monetizing the Audience

• Sell things to them

• Sell access to them to other people, so that those people can sell things to them

Monetizing the Audience

• Sell things to them (MERCHANDISING)

• Sell access to them to other people, so that those people can sell things to them

(ADVERTISING)

Advertising

• Turn-key Networks– Google Adsense– Pulsepoint– Project Wonderful– Amazon Affiliates– About a zillion others

• Direct ad sales– This is hard to set up and maintain. – I’m an artist, not an ad salesman.

Ads

Content

Some Site Stats

Data from Google Analytics for schlockmercenary.com for the period of May 26-June25, 2013

Those Numbers Distilled

• Four-point-eight million pages delivered to browsers each month.

• At an average of three ads per page, that’s 15 million ads per month.

• I make an average of $4,000 per month on ads.

• I make $0.0008 per page-view– That’s $0.00026 per ad.

Merchandising

• POD Print collections (Print On Demand)– Low risk, low profit margin

• Offset Print collections– High risk, high profit margin

• Digital collections– Low risk, high margin

• Subscriptions (paywall, premium content)• T-Shirts• Something Else. Something Awesome

In Order To Sell Things…

• You need to figure out what your audience wants to buy

• You need a storefront• You need to spend time filling orders

and doing other “customer service” stuff

• Yes, it is totally possible to outsource some of this. But be sure you still own your career.

My Merchandising, Distilled

• We ship to about 2500 customers each year

• In 2012, store.schlockmercenary.com grossed $139k in sales– After shipping and manufacturing costs,

the net was $82k• Each paying customer spent, on the

average, $55.60 – …contributing $32.80 to that net

Further Distilling…

• 134,000 monthly readers• 2500 customers per year• $180k company gross

– After paying postage, manufacturing, hosting, warehousing, and my colorist…

– My wife and I take home about $75k

• Each reader yields an average of 55 cents per year to my dinner-plate

The Key, Then, is a Big Audience

• If I had a guaranteed method for growing a large audience on the web, you would have paid a lot more money to hear me speak.

Growing an Audience*

• Create Engaging Content– Deliver it where that audience hangs out:

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Google+– Brand it so they come back to you. Your name

and URL go everywhere your work goes.

• Give them a reason to follow, friend, “like,” and bookmark you– Website exclusives– Archived content

• Win the heart of a signal booster

*results not guaranteed

Summing Up

Own Your Content

Be able to do whatever you want with it: Re-post, re-publish, re-sell, recycle…Own Your Audience

Your name, your domain, your siteSell them to advertisers Sell them merchandise

Own Your CareerStart growing an audience nowDevelop at least three revenue streamsLearn all of the things