When I started doing Terran Omega, there were a couple of things I really wanted to do, quite apart from write/draw my own comic.
I wanted to really experiment with how I bring an audience to it. As an artist, I often defer to the writer/publisher when it comes to chasing an audience. I’m conscious that sometimes I can be obnoxious, and irratating and general worried that I’ll mess up, and so I tend to sit back, get on with drawing and allow others to organise PR.
I mean, I probably shouldn’t. I probably should pursue that stuff to, but it’s so much easier if a publisher is the single point for that stuff. Besides I have limited access to venues, and all I can do is ask those places based on what I know.
So usually I say yes to every interview that’s organised and hope.
Way back when we were talking about doing a collection of the Folklore stories, having built some sort of audience for it on twitter by posting it weekly, I wanted the publisher to offer a kickstarter – not so much to pay for it, but to actually build excitement round the book, and try and get that twitter audience that I’d been building to buy in to the kickstarter. I think that’s where something like kickstarter can be good. I mean it would also help fund the book, but really the book cost a lot of money to produce and it’s unlikely the kickstarter would’ve funded it. BUT! It would have then gone on to do what the publisher originally wanted anyway selling how they expected. Sadly, I couldn’t really convince anyone of the value of that, and the book while it is beuatiful and produced to an incredibly high standard by the publisher ultimately hasn’t really had much of an impact.
(You can still buy it from John Reppion’s website!)
So Terran Omega is allowing me to try all of the things. One of the things I’ve been doing is dropping the comic strip weekly into various reddit forums:
- r/comics is the most obvious (as long as your comic is marked as [OC] – meaning Original Content – you can do that any day) it averages 1.6m weekly visitors, my strips get an average of around 1.5k views with 4-5 upvotes.
- r/indiecomics ([OC] required, but you can only do this on a Thursday) 445 weekly visitors, 217 views, 4-6 upvotes
- r/webcomics (no need to tag it, though if you’re crossposting – posting in one forum and then using that post to post in other forums, you’re better just leaving [OC] in the title, for clarity) 134k weekly visitors, 410 views, 2-3 upvotes
- r/2000ad – because I’m best known as a Dredd artist, I figure it’s ok to post this scifi comic there, I mark it as [OC] 4.3k weekly, 638 views, 4-5 upvotes.
- r/scifi – this is the major scifi topic in reddit, and allows original content (Marked [OC] BUT only on a Saturday!), but I get the impression there’s a few in there that maybe aren’t keen on comics because I’ll see upvotes that then become downvotes. BUT the readership makes it worth persevering! The average visitor count is 364k, and the strips tend to get around 4k views, with upvotes about 1 or 2. With the caveat that I’m convinced at least one or two people have been downvoting it (possibly paranoia!)
In the my latest post of the strip in r/scifi I decided to try a little upvoting experiment and asked anyone who was following me on bluesky to nip over and click the upvote – and howboy did that make a massive difference. My average upvotes went from 1/2 quickly skyrocketed to 32!) Making it the #6 most popular post on that subforum today.
So I might try and do that.
One thing I’ve done each time I post in the forums is ask people to head on over to my patreon and sign up, but I’ve also posted about signing up to the newsletter and coming on over to the blog. I think I’m sending very mixed messages.
I’m not sure how many are doing it. I do have some stats, a very crudely built utility that counts where someone has come from as it sends them on to my patreon page. Based on that, in the entire time I’ve been doing this (about 18 weeks) there’s been about 510 uses of the link. Now, that might be miscounted, over counted a little because sometimes the links are followed by bots (and ai bots). So let’s call it say 1/5 of that total. 100 real uses of the link. Well, my patreon following is about 243 right now, but for a large part many of those people are coming from bluesky. In other words, I don’t think reddit is doing a heck of a lot.
I think I need to start to refine my call to action (see, now the blog title makes sense!) simply to send them to the patreon.
I should add as well as posting the comic in reddit I’ve also put in an effort to be a good reddit citizen and tried to contribute to as many topics as I can (where my contribution is useful or interesting, and avoiding where I’d just post a zinger – which is terribly tempting sometimes)
I start firming up ideas about a kickstarter I hopefully will be able to take the passive audience that exists and convert it into a kickstarter audience. I’m conscious that not everyone buys in to patreon (and patreon has made it a little difficult to see how to follow people for free sometimes).
That will allow me to post in r/kickstarter and kickstarter itself, all with a simple call to action.
Anyway, that’s it. I’d intended to talk about making sure you keep one simple call to action ask in any post, otherwise you risk people having to make decisions and people don’t want to do that when they’re passively reading stuff. Instead it’s been about my adventures in reddit.
Yesterday on Social Media
Well, flip, for whatever reason I didn’t actually post a lot on bluesky yesterday! I know! I’m as shocked as anyone!
I dunno if you’ve been following the traitors, but I have – it’s such low stakes/high camp/drama, it’s a delight.
Anyway, I made this observation
Jessie from the Traitors is like if Harley Quinn was a good guy. (Gal)
Here’s Jessie’s reaction to that:
Oh, thought this was funny! (my qt on John Wiswell’s slightly weird trending topics)
And I guess that was it! (Ok, I also got annoyed about the state of the world, but if I’m honest, the stuff I’d rather hold on to now are funny jokes about the famine than the possibility of wwiii starting with Trump invading Greenland)
And I’ll let the final word fall to Nick Stone‘s great little Project diagram.
