Waffle

Starting tomorrow, there'll be a new voter incentive for ROCR at TopWebcomics every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, for the time being. Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on that topsite list to get some sneak peeks into the production process, such as pencil art and ink-only versions of the latest pages, and commentary about the digital inking proces and fixes made. You will be able to vote every day, but because most people don't visit every day, incentives will not be replaced more than 3 times a week so people get more of a chance to look at them.

I was always dubious about the whole idea of top site lists, but the system at TopWebComics is easy to use and does benefit site owners. Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is currently at #332 in the rankings for March. I want to figure out if we can push it up to a place where it's more visible. Voter incentives will work well for me because I have a process in which I keep almost everything, and there is enough to tell about my experiences learning to do digital art.

I will of course go on posting other things on the other sites... the incentives will be strictly behind-the-scenes.

One of the hardest things I've done in nearly nine years of putting Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan online was the work I did for the FRAMED!!! Great Escape crossover, a multi-comic crossover from 2001. It only involved me drawing 7 installments and co-scripting another 21, but everything that could possibly go wrong, did, and over the years, the sites other participating comics were on dropped like flies. About a year ago, I was warned that the domain for the Silly Cone V comic had been squatted on by some ghastly incest porn website and had to take down all the links.

Recently, though, I've been putting up the ROCR comics from that crossover for the Drunk Duck mirror for ROCR and, because I knew where to find an alternate domain for the lost comics, I fixed the links on both the main site and the mirror as I went along. So for the first time in almost a year, my little section of that multi-webcomic crossover event is complete! Of course, most of the rest of the Great Escape is still gone, but the subplot I was in should be comprehensible enough, or at least not unintentionally incomprehensible.

For the first time in years, you can now vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on a topsite list. Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics! Update: link corrected.

Rocr.net had 211051 pageviews in February, coming from 9586 unique visitors measured on a by-month basis. The pageviews are up 70,000 compared to January but the uniques have contracted a bit, by almost 300. The ROCR re-runs on Drunk Duck earned 7110 pageviews, which is about the same as they did in the two previous months.

The Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archive on Modern Tales earned about 23,000 pageviews together, based on statistics from Project Wonderful (making this a very rough guess, but MT/WCN's internal statistics are less useful for month-by-month data).

In all, my little empire earned nearly a quarter of a million pageviews in the past month. Most of the extra pageviews were earned by paid advertising, because while there are plenty of opportunities for free publicity, such as joining topsite lists, contributing to forums, exchanging links or simply asking for a mention and a link, they involve putting in time and effort that I cannot spare at the moment. It's hard enough for me just to write and draw the comic at the moment.

Next month, I will know if the paid advertising was cost-effective. I spent about $ 100 out of pocket, so if I made more from that in February through Webcomics World, I'll be doing good. Beyond that, it's simply nice to have my comics read by many people, so if end up making a modest loss, I won't cut my advertising altogether, though I probably will reduce the budget again.

I am somewhat concerned about the drop in uniques on ROCR.net, though these will be offset by new readers in places where I can't really count them. The uniques are a measure of my longer-term readership and therefore the longer-term health of the comic. So I will try some advertising on new locations, and if I do find the time, to put some work into unpaid publicity like joining a topsite. Targets for next month: 12,000 uniques, 1/3 million pvs.

To prepare for the return of Feral as the ongoing serial on ROCR.net, I have moved Invasion back to the Crossovers section of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives. Feral returns on Monday with a (hopefully) weekly schedule. Until then, you'll be seeing the last page published, from back in September of last year. I hope this doesn't confuse people too much - it's what happens when you've got two series from the same continuity running over the same period.

Last year when Aggie was drawing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, the size of the images gradually expanded from a width of 560 pixels to, eventually one of 648 pixels, with proportional but varying height. To make things more consistent, I have remastered the pages before Aggie's stint to that same width, but I want to test them before uploading them to the website, to see if the dithering has turned out right and if the pages haven't turned out too heavy (they're at around 200 KB per image these days, which I think is pushing things a bit for webcomics). So I'm posting some of them here to see if they work and look good on various browser/OS combinations. The preview images are scaled down by WordPress, but clicking on them will bring up the full web images:

Now that Invasion is over, I'm switching back to the Feral storyline, so that'll be coming back soon. Unfortunately, I'm still strapped for time and the switch involves writing a lot of new material before I can even start drawing, so it'll be a while before new updates start coming. I'm aiming for new updates to start on a weekly basis on Monday, February 23, 2009, though.

They'll be some changes to the process again. I'll be doing things mostly digitally for a while, at least until I've got the A3 scanner working again. Penciling is still done on paper, but Aggie has challenged me to come up with a comics page that's done entirely in digital media before she does. Sounds like fun!

In short, new comic on Monday the 23rd. Hopefully, I'll have the whole story in the bag before the end of the year.

In the comments to last week's Invasion episode on ROCR.net, reader TuuronTour asks:

Is this storyline going to be the final end of ROCR? I get the feeling everything is being wrapped up to get our rogue's a well-earned "and they liveth long and happily".

Tuur is almost right: the ending to Invasion doesn't so much wrap everything up as set things up so that I have the largest number of possibilities open. It'll be a while before the world will see a sequel to Invasion, but when I decide, in a year or so, to pick up where I left, I can treat the next story as essentially a new series, with a new cast of characters: Tamlin, Ragnarok, Atra, Jake, Owen, Hildegard, and... one more, with their offspring. It won't be necesary for new readers to learn the backstory - this new lot will be the gang. Older readers will still enjoy the similarities and differences between, say, original Atra and rejuvenated Atra, or be able to see the Tamlin-Ragnarok dynamic in the light of the dynamic that there used to be.

Or... I might scrap that plan altogether, bring Kel and Jodoque back a few years down the line, fast-forwarding to the year 1010. Either way works for me.

Before then, though, I will work on the three remaining stories set in the "old" ROCR universe: Feral, King Groy and Muscle. I am now writing material for Feral and while the first batch of new writing came out as drivel, there are some salvageable elements in it that should get the story moving again. I expect to be taking a few weeks off before I get around to posting any new comics though, and when I do, they will almost certainly be irregular again.

There's also the possibility of a spin-off comic set in the Wodeskog, based on the faerie village and what else might be living there. That's another thing that may or may not happen though.

Next: one more digital drawing. It's an inked version of the penciled character drawing of Aleas I did some six months ago:

I have a working SCSI card again, and though it uses a different cable configuration than I described earlier, I know what cable that is and where to find it. I may balk a bit at the cost but will probably put in the order soon, as the alternatives aren't too appealing. I have had a few items scanned at a local scanner service, but at a price of € 5 a scan and a maximum resolution of 400 DPI (NOT good enough for archiving or indeed for submission to a professionally printed magazine), the cable price becomes worth paying very quickly.

It may still be a few days before I can scan at home again, and today after testing the card, I spent some time exploring yet another alternative: all-digital drawing. I've had tablets for years, and do a lot of work with them, but until today, I had never created more than a doodle from scratch in any art software. Today, I changed that by drawing this:

It was a bit awkward for me to work on as I found it hard to draw some of the curves. I undid the jawline a few dozen times before getting one that was good enough. But the result, while flawed, is flawed in pretty much the same ways as my hand-drawn work, so for a first attempt, it's very encouraging. The image is used in the new cast pages on Modern Tales and I will try and do a full-body portrait this weekend. Total time less than an hour and likely to get faster with practice.

I've been doing a lot of stuff to the website lately. Here's what's been changed in the latest tune-up:

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and Chronicles of the Witch Queen now have ads from a new ad provider, Webcomics World. This represents a significant policy change for me as I will be allowing some Flash ads, which will have Behaviours. I will pre-approve those on a case-by-case basis but I will no longer be denying them automatically. We'll see what happens - there's the potential for good earnings there, which will make it easier for me to spend more time and effort on webcomicking again.

To compensate, I've cut the horizontal Google ads on the archive pages on the main site, and will be looking to cull more advertising if this pans out.

The Drunk Duck mirror also gets one of the new ads, because a) it is actually bringing in decent pageview numbers, and b) it looks like I will have to put a lot more work into it in the next month or two, as the infamous FRAMED!!! Great Escape Crossover is due to be repeated there. I will have to write to the other artists involved to try and give all pages a permanent location.

The cast page for Invasion has been updated, as has the main cast page. Individual cast bios on the main site now have comments enabled, so people can write their own notes on the characters. I have also made a start on a cast section for the archives on Modern Tales, and updated the Fan art section there. The interface for uploading fan art was broken the last few times I tried using it last year, but it works now.

I have added some new stuff to Odds and Ends and to the DeviantArt site

This leaves me still having to update the old Comicgenesis site which I essentially forgot about midway through Aggie's tenure as a guest artist. That might be a more complicated job, but as I'm sitting at home with a sore foot, I might as well do it now.

All this work on various mirrors entails a serious reduplication of effort, but that is paying off. Because of the different automated cross-promotion/reader-alerting tools that the various systems have, the combined sites now have about 200,000 pageviews a month, for a comic that has in recent months updated once a month. The reason I'm doing it now is that the Invasion storyline is due to end next Monday, and after that, I want to get back to Feral as soon as I can, though it's likely I'll post a little bit of filler first. If the new ads pay off, I may well soon be updating more frequently again, though it's unlikely that I'll go back to three or more new updates a week.