Waffle

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.

Quietly and without fanfare, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's hiatus has been interrupted twice by updates in the past two weeks. I'm still officially on hiatus but the productivity machine has been grinding and stuttering into motion lately. I expect that there'll be more regular updates in December, knock on wood.

Life in BF, middle Tennessee has been very good indeed and in fact I've had so little to whine about that I haven't blogged for a whole month. I'm sure that will change too, eventually.

I'm going to stop counting the numbers for the Webcomicsnation and Modern Tales sections of my content empire for now. Together, they make up a very small percentage of my pageviews and counting them is just too much work as my only source for them is the Project Wonderful listing for the ads that appear on those sites. Project Wonderful only counts the past 30 days so if I'm late tallying up the statistics, they're gone. Bugger that.

Now that Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is on indefinite hiatus (and honestly, it may take a LONG time for it to come back. Preparing for emigration while holding down my job has absolute priority and I simply can't afford to commit to any kind of schedule or deadline), pageviews are predictably going down, except on the . Here are the numbers (compare with last month):
ROCR.net: 78022 pageviews, 7939 uniques month-on-month. Down from 82343/8184 last month. Not so bad, all things considered.
ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16640, down slightly from 16810. I guess July's result was a bit of a fluke, and indeed there is a lot of day to day variation on Drunk Duck. Number of uniques unknown.

Shout-out: Thank you to George of Amazoness! for linking me in your blog. It's bringing in half a dozen readers a day and is probably part of the reason why the drop in readership hasn't been larger.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is going on indefinite hiatus starting today. All the stuff I need to do in preparation for my wedding has a lot to do with it but the main reason for calling it quits for now is that my motivation has gotten very low.

Actually, come to think of it, those two factors work in concert. Imagine waking up on a Saturday knowing that this, the weekend, is the time you have to work on your hobby. But it's a nice, sunny day, maybe the last of the year, there are friends you haven't seen in months and may soon never be able to see again. There are unread books on the shelves, unwatched videos on your hard drive. There are vague ideas for new comics buzzing around in your head, that you haven't developed but they seem fresher than your project of the past 18 years, and may have wider appeal. There is maintenance to do on your existing, 1400-comic archive. There is grocery shopping, chores around the house, and all the time you were planning to work on the comic, your attention goes to those things. Oh, and it won't be long before that short time window opens when both you and you fiancee in a different time zone are both up and available to talk.

Doesn't seem like a whole weekend is all that long anymore? Those four or five hours for a comic suddenly look like a big chunk of your free time. Now imagine all that, plus being aware that you need to get off your ass to prepare for a big, permanent change to your life.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining or making excuses. I know perfectly well that if I really wanted to, if I was really driven, I'd sacrifice all the other stuff I want to do, the stuff that normal people do on a weekend, to get my art out for you to read. But right now, unlike say four or five years ago, I'm not that driven. I want to do it, but at my own leisure. And as a result, making myself sit at home working on comics over a weekend makes me feel like a rat in a cage. So I'm calling the schedule off until my head is clearer and the drive returns.

Again, don't get me wrong. It is a very good time to be me. I'm not fed up with my comic just yet, and I'm happier than I've been in a long time. I'm just adjusting to some new realities in my life and one of them is that if you're going to maintain a webcomic on a regular schedule at my age, you can only do that if it's the number one thing you're obsessed about. I'm not, so I won't.

The one thing that will continue on schedule is the Drunk Duck re-runs. As much of a pain in the ass as working on that can be, this situation is a big part of what the re-run project is for: to keep the comic in the back of my mind when for one reason or another, I have to take a break from it. It doesn't take nearly as much time as it used to, and I can do it in small time increments without harming the art quality because all the art work is already drawn. So go there for your daily fix - there have been changes from the comics as originally run.