Waffle

We're in the final stages of buying a house - we being me and my fiancee, who is coming over from the US in a month with the kids, dog and cat - and I'm finding, among other things, that the energy for drawing new art, any new art, simply isn't there. I now expect Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan to be on hiatus until October, as well as any and all side projects that I've been working on.
But I am also getting fed up with having Kel dropping that F-bomb on the front page, so I'm calling for guest art! Anyone want to draw something to put on the front page instead? As long as it's reasonably related to Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, I will run it as a front page comic, link to whatever you want it to link to, and move it to the guest art archives later. Your drawing, photograph, or whatever will be seen by hundreds of people and if you're really lucky, your artwork will be the last in line and stay on the front page until October.

Only condition: No more swearing (I'm really, really sick of that) or anything else that I find personally distasteful. My limits are fairly wide, but I do have them and I will know if they've been passed when I see it. Most people who read the comic should find it easy to stay within them.

The advertising campaign that Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset bought me for the tenth anniversary of ROCR online brought several hundred new readers in. Combined with the fact that I had been advertising a little bit starting the day before the anniversary, and with the changes I made to the places where the 120x600 skyscraper ad is displayed, this led to a huge spike in the number of pageviews on rocr.net and associated websites: over 20,000 on the second day of the campaign. This triggered an automated bidding war between two sites that like to advertise on larger webcomics sites, and as a result that skyscraper ad earned $6,50 per day in the US for most of July 3.

This is hugely motivational to me. Starting next week, I will be &eur; 120,000 in debt because I'm about to buy a house, and while I obviously cannot quit my day job for something that earns $ 6,50 a day, it would really help me out a lot if I could make that money on top of my day job for a few months. And the fact that it's earning that much without the comic being regularly updated, and with there being an F-bomb on the latest page (two big strikes against any webcomic; F-bombs turn off audiences very quickly), makes me wonder how it would have done if there had been regular updates around the time the campaign ran. I expect to see a drop-off in the next few days but am also wishing for the numbers to stay the same. Practically speaking, the house purchasing process is going to make it impossible for me to get back to the comic in the next week.

But I want to get back to it soon. And it will become easier if at least some money keeps rolling in.

On July 1, 2000, I started the English-language online run of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan with an introductory strip to the Gudrun storyline. That wasn't the first time I'd put the comic online, but it was my first proper go at it, in English and with the intention of making it primarily a webcomic.

Amazingly, ten years on, I'm still here even though the comic now goes for long periods without updates, Day jobs and life plans will do that to a webcomic. And what is there, the 1300+ updates, is still a huge archive that people nevertheless take the time to dive into, and I'm proud of having lasted that long. Next year, the comic itself will be twenty years old. Amazing.

This year, neither I nor Aggie got around to doing an anniversary comic. Too much going on in our lives. We did get an anniversary present though: Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset bought us a short Project Wonderful advertising campaign! And it's a good one, with a good range of websites, some of which show promising conversion rates - if you come from one of these sites, welcome! And thanks Mith and Alien. I'll return the favour when the right time comes.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan was shortlisted for a Clickie this year. The Clickie is an award for webcomics made in the Netherlands and Belgium, instituted in 2005, and is noteworthy because it is a real-world award with an awards ceremony in meatspace, during which an actual physical trophy is handed out. This year's ceremony will be at the Stripdagen Haarlem 2010, a major comics convention for the Netherlands, on Saturday, June 5 at 14:00.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the awards ceremony. My fiancee is over from the United States and she's only staying for two weeks, most of which we will be spending trying to buy a house. Even on the weekends, we will have plenty on our plates and though we have been to comics conventions together in the past, right now it's not something we need to be doing. In addition, I have learned in the past that going to conventions as an artist is something that takes preparation, and right now, I am woefully unprepared. The comic is on hiatus; is no longer part of my professional career; I have no promotional materials, product or prepared statements; I did not rent a table. I have no business being there on the off chance that I might win an award. So instead I'll offer my regrets that I can't be there and hope someone who is going will be able to pick up the award on my behalf if I do win it. Sorry.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is listed on the following listing/voting sites:

The Belfry - the oldest, most complete and most reader-focused webcomics listing site. Supports classification, recommendations and submission of new comics by the readers (link goes to the listing for ROCR).

Top Web Comics - voting/top 100 site. We're not doing too well in that lately, so please click on the banner or link to vote for ROCR! Thanks.

OnlineComics.net - another comprehensive listing site, with stronger controls so that only site owners can add a comic to the list. Looks better than The Belfry, but I personally don't like or use it as much (link goes to listing page for ROCR).

The Webcomics List - Listing, voting and webcomics promotion site. I hadn't actually been there in years prior to writing this post.

For a while we did not have links to these sites on any pages of the ROCR website, but I intend to bring them back. It's time for ROCR to start raising its profile a little again after a couple of years when promotion wasn't a big issue. For these sites to give to me, I will have to give to them first, sort of thing.

I may start posting the following items periodically to remind the entire readership:

1. I still have original artworks for sale through my Comicspace Galleries. The art offered there is from the Feral and Invasion storylines and ranges in price from $25 to $100. That is, if you use the Comicspace gallery interface to purchase. However, you can always contact me personally to haggle. Right now, I am very open to offers. To see the galleries with NSFW content, you need a Comicspace account; these are free and safe to use, though you may or may not experience some difficulty signing up. If you can't see these galleries but want to ask me about a specific original that you want to purchase, e-mail me (see link above).

2. Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan has a Facebook page where I announce new updates and keep people informed about the state of the comic in a more regular fashion than I do here. If you want to be the first to hear of a new update, become a Fan of this page using your regular Facebook account (assuming of course that you have one).

Oh, while I'm at it, I do want to start making some new incentives for Voting for ROCR on Topwebcomics again soon. Even if it's just some raw art from the pages without the lettering and adjustments. If I'm going to embrace Free Publicity as much as I intend to right now, I'm going to have to make an effort to get it!

And then, after nearly three months, there were two new comic episodes within a week. I am going to try to pull this comic out of hiatus and back to some sort of regular schedule. I miss doing regular art and want to get back to it. At the same time, I still have a LOT to do to prepare for my wedding and emigration and I'm nowhere near being on track for it all.

But if I can combine the spiritual need for art with earning a little extra money for emigration, I can probably give the comic more of my attention. The current situation is as follows: during the last three months of hiatus since my return from Tennessee, the viewer numbers have finally plummeted as people gave up on following Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I am surprised they stayed as high as they were for a long as they did, to be honest. I'm not complaining: through these months I've found that even if I do nothing, there will still be a couple of dollars a month coming in from one ad provider. My Project Wonderful ads are dead in the water, but the ones delivered through Comicspace's network perform very steadily if at a low level.

As I'm also a paying member of Comicspace, which eats up those earnings, the site overall operates at a modest loss due to the cost of website hosting, drawing materials, hard disk storage and the annualized cost of computers and scanners. A quick estimate would be that the net loss per year is about € 400 - not budget-neutral but also not the most expensive hobby in the world.

So a reasonable first-step goal would be to earn those € 400 a year back. Increasing the revenue from both my ad providers would help, and that simply requires getting the pageview numbers back up, preferably without investing any more money myself. My strategy should be to rely mostly on free publicity. Over the years, I have spent more on Project Wonderful advertising than I have made, so that is right out. I am, however, paying more attention right now to websites like The Belfry, which have served me a steady stream of readers over the years at no cost to me.

I can also go back to selling more originals. Just three or four would get me a long way towards that goal of making the comic budget-neutral.

The next step would be making a profit - any profit would go straight into my pockets and help me save for my future in Tennessee. Apart from building out the ad revenues and original art sales even more, I could get there by building another tried and tested revenue stream like donation-supported e-books. Unfortunately all the work I did on that last summer was destroyed in one of the many hard drive crashes that have plagued me over the past 9 months, so the Headsmen e-book as already published is al I have to show for that work. The DTP masters were lost as was the master-quality PDF file for that, so I don't even have a printable version. But it may be a good summer project for me to try this again, if I can get a steady stream of new pages going first. That has to be the first priority; I have found that if I spend all my time re-editing old work, I get very frustrated and discouraged.

That's the state of the comic: I will try very hard to get the production up again, as long as this does not interfere with my other plans.

I have updated the cast page with short bios of two minor characters from the Rite of Serfdom storyline: Brakeburn and Brushhead (whose page comes up looking wonky in Safari for a reason I cannot understand). I have also linked the page for Hywel Bastardsson which I created last Summer but forgot to link from the main cast page. Faerie body parts galore so don't read them at work.

I am trying out some Photoshop alternatives for both OS X and Windows, so there will probably be a lot more small updates featuring little graphics made from art created earlier, using Pixelmator, Pixel Studio Pro, Seashore, Paint.net and whatever else I can find. So far, I really like Pixelmator for jobs that are too small to load a full-featured graphics program for. It opens promptly and handles smaller graphics well, and the interface makes common tasks a breeze. For larger, multi-layered jobs, its performance is still severely impaired on my MacBook. Pixel Studio Pro has the advantage of being multi-platform and is also easy to use, but it is also crash-prone on Windows and it comically misinterprets my larger images as animations. Both are hard to bail out of once the spinning beach ball appears. I will want to try both of them intensively, though.

Another piece of technology I'm very interested in is Opera Unite, the small, simple web/file server built into new versions of the Opera web browser. I am already using it to develop and host some new web pages right from my computers at home, and it does make development and sharing a lot easier and more fun. It is very limited, and I wouldn't run a dynamic, database driven website on it even if I could, but as with those small graphics apps, the features it does offer are very handy and will speed up new development on the website. Living in the boonies for months has given me a much stronger appreciation of the need for simplicity in websites, and I do have some ideas for simplifying the ROCR site.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is now on Facebook. Has been for a while actually, but because it's easier to post quick announcements about the comic there than here, I recommend adding the page if you want to keep up with things. Longer, less-frequent announcements and commentary will still also be posted here, though.

I've not been updating much since December, but Aggie has been kicking ass and taking names over at American Gothic Daily lately, and now has several pages backed up so that she can increase the frequency again for a while.

There's some more new ROCR material written, but I need to buy new paper - I got the wrong size last week. Turns out there's another size between A4 and A3 that I hadn't seen in the shops before, so I picked it up thinking it was the A4+ I have been using for the Feral storyline. I expect to have a little bit of drawing time during the week and in the weekend though, so there will be new pages soonish, hopefully maybe.