Things Without Arms and Without Legs

Thanks for a great first year everyone!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Also, ZOMG. comic 130! Comic 130!!!!!!! I promised I would make 130 comics by June 23 and I did it!

For a bit I was drawing a comic every day and zooming ahead like a machine, then (just as a wise writer told me this was probably not a good long term strategy) my drawing fell over and I did close to nothing for two months. I hoisted myself back into the saddle and with more than a little fear in my eyes I’ve successfully put out one comic every two days.

We have ARRIVED!… but I don’t think we’re there yet, I think we’ll keep going. I think there’s a mountain over there that looks interesting. I think there’s a cardboard box with something scary inside. I think I don’t know what the road ahead looks like, but I’d like you to share it with me and I hope we’ll make some cool discoveries together.

If you have ideas about promotion, merchandise, cool things you’d like to see, please let me know. I’m participating in the Clarion Write-a-thon again this year and hopefully I will have a modest budget for merch and advertising next financial year.

There will be an extra piece of art on the website later today (or tomorrow if you live in Australian-style time zones).

Done

• Created the Support? page
• Yay! I have a character list with bios, bio pics and tagging
• Update the mid section of comics so that the comic thumbnail displays properly
• Create a Project Wonderful account and started to explore the options within

To do

• Make cute forwards, backwards and random buttons.
• Figure out how to get them to display in CSS
• Fiddle with the fonts and make the menu look prettier
• Fiddle with featured image size? Are the comics displaying too big?
• and I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what my brain’s got right now.

I’m participating in the Clarion Write-a-thon, as I do every year. It’s how this comic came into existence!

Part of my project this year has been to actually… you know… let people who aren’t friends know about my comic!

Donations to the write-a-thon this year will define my budget for promoting the Things for the year. AKA, your money still goes towards the worthy cause that is Clarion AND at the same time you give me permission to spend money out of my own pocket to let people know that the Things exist.

Promotional work pre-writeathon:

• Giving the Things a domain of their own and building this website using WordPress and Comics Easel. More infrastructural than promotional, but you have to build it if you want them to come
• Printing business cards that have a cute comic on the front
• Created a profile on comicrocket
• Using twitter, facebook and tumblr (sometimes google+)

Some of the promotional work during the write-a-thon (I’m in the middle of the write-a-thon right now):

• Using the Comicrocket Genie tool to register my webcomic with Ink Outbreak, The Webcomic List, TopWebComics, The Belfry WebComics Index, Piperka – see new traffic from all these sources, ’cause, you know, I told them that I existed.
• Explore advertising with Project Wonderful. Play with different advertising banners, methodologies and campaigns… Project Wonderful sure can suck up a lot of time!!!!
• Thinking more about what makes a good advertising banner or button. I plan to advertise with Comic Rocket soon, but it’s a bigger financial commitment ($25 a shot, which is quite small in the world of advertising, but my budget is sponsor defined), so I want to draft a few more banners and see how I can improve on what I created for Project Wonderful. I really like the reach of Comic Rocket and I want to make a good first impression!
• Read a lot more comics!… ok maybe it’s not promotional directly, but I’m paying more attention to the big world out there and there are lots of interesting comics.
• Registered with Comic Basement – after I’d finished my registration they sent me an approval note that asked me to install a tracking code. I don’t remember that being in the registration info and I feel mildly resistant to installing it. I need to install it to be ranked, but I feel like the requirement was jumped on me without warning (it is there in the FAQ now that I’m poking around, but not on the registration page).
• Researched promotional material, so much to think about in this regard, what will work? Should I do bookmarks, postcards, even fancier merch? I have my glorious new iPad to get used to, which will allow me to draw things with enough pixels to look good at a larger size… I still have a lot more research to do in this area, suggestions always welcome.

All this activity has absolutely increased my comic’s visibility. It’s brought strange new eyes to my work and I’ve seen a steady increase in viewers. That said, none of this has been as powerful as word of mouth… and word of mouth relies on my work being awesome enough for you to want to mention it to people! So thank you to everyone who’s shared a link or mentioned me somewhere out in the world. You are the bees knees and make a world of difference.

Every time I see a sudden surge in interest it’s because of something you have done. I shall work hard to be worthy of your support.