Reduced update schedule

Unfortunately, I have to announce that we’re going back to a “Tuesday – Friday – Tuesday” update cycle with just three new Gaia pages in two weeks. There are two reasons for this:

  • We need to build a larger buffer of finished comic pages.
  • Our partnership with MangaMagazine.net (Gaia on MangaMagazine.net) may turn out to be very profitable for us. Therefore it’s my plan to gradually increase the amount of pages which are available on MangaMagazine.net, but not yet on our main website. We also have to publish 15 pages, which aren’t available on our main website yet, every second month to qualify for the very important “premium comic” category. Note that we will soon reach the point where only subscribers of MangaMagazine.net will be able to read the new Gaia pages posted on MangaMagazine.net. Subscribers must pay a small monthly fee of $2.99 to be able to read the later pages of all premium comics on MangaMagazine.net. See the MangaMagazine.net FAQ for that.

UPDATE

I thought I was clear, but maybe not clear enough:

  • Gaia will continue to be available for free on this website. But it will update only around 13 times per 2 months.
  • On MangaMagazine.net, Gaia will update at least 15 times every second month. This way, it qualifies as a “premium comic” in that month. But not in the other month with no updates.
  • Since Gaia’ chapters are so long, the subscription threshold on MangaMagazine.net won’t be 8 chapters for Gaia but a certain number of pages. After that, only MangaMagazine.net subscribers will be able to see those pages after the threshold.

Promoted on MangaMagazine.net + Interview

Gaia was just promoted to be one of only 19 “premium” comics on MangaMagazine.net! Click here to see the page for Gaia at MangaMagazine.net. If you ever considered re-reading the first hundred pages or so of Gaia this would be the perfect opportunity since we earn money for each new reader of Gaia on MangaMagazine.net. Click here to read from the beginning!

Gaia at MangaMagazine.net

I was also interviewed by MangaMagazine.net. In the interview, I answer the following questions:

  • How does your experience on MangaMagazine compare with your experience managing your own webcomic site?
  • Now I know you don’t just work with Powree on Gaia, you both work on Sandra and Woo as well. How did you two get started working together? Is it difficult collaborating when you’re both located in separate countries?
  • Tell us a little bit about your creative team. You have several editors, and on occasion I’ve seen a guest colorist appear in Sandra and Woo.
  • Did you always plan on having Gaia told in a comic format?
  • I’ve noticed some mythological references riddled throughout the first couple chapters of Gaia. Are there any historical, mythological, or pop culture pieces that influence the story?
  • Do you have any plans for putting out a print version of Gaia once there are enough chapters? Or will this comic be strictly digital?
  • As a writer, what part of the creative process do you find the most interesting or enjoyable?
  • Are there any other projects that you’re working on right now? Where could we find them?

Google goes too far with new image search

A couple of days ago, Google released a new version of its image search. This turned out to be a huge slap in the face of content creators like me. When clicking on a thumbnail, the original image is hotlinked and embedded into Google’s result page. This costs bandwidth and the user has less incentive to visit the webpage of the original creator.

Here is a nice comment about the topic by a webmaster called EcoCatLady in response to Google’s blog post:

Well, it is easy to use – but it’s killing my biggest web site (a photography site) which is also my main source of income. In the past few days my page views have been cut in half while my bandwidth usage has increased – thanks to Google’s hotlinking of high resolution photos.

If this continues it will force me to either make some dramatic changes to the site (ie: removing all high resolution images and forcing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them) or it will put me out of business all together.

I really don’t understand why Google insists upon harassing image publishers in this way… for all other types of content Google allows the user to find the content, but sends the user to the page to read the article or watch the video. But for image publishers it simply provides an easy way for people to access our content while circumventing our websites completely. The least you could do would be to disable right clicking on the hotlinked image and get rid of the “view original image” button so people would have to come to the site to download the content. It’s only fair…

I know user experience is paramount, and I’m all about share and share alike (I’ve even released all of my photos into the public domain.) But bandwidth costs money, and publishers do have to make a living, and for most of us that means we rely on page views and ad revenue. Is this groovy search feature really worthwhile if it puts the publishers out of business and ultimately means that quality images are being removed from the web because we simply can’t afford it anymore?


Merry Christmas!

I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Once again, my family has the bestest Christmas tree:

Christmas tree


Copyright infringements and you

More and more frequently, I receive e-mails from readers who want to inform me that images from our comic(s) are posted on other websites. This can be very helpful to detect copyright infringements, so I’m grateful for every notice I receive.

Note, however, that not every usage of our comics is automatically a copyright infringement. Our comics are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. In short, this free license allows the publication on non-commercial websites if proper attribution to the creators is given (more info).

But even if you believe that there’s a massive copyright infringement going on, you should never file a take-down request yourself! This is still my job if I feel that some kind of reaction is required. What you can do, apart from informing me, is to write a comment beneath the submission/blog post/… with a link to our comic website. Plenty of readers have found our comics this way.