Comic Strip Superfool
I guess the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies sell less units like they used to. Because of this, Andrews McMeel Publishing (aka Universal Press Syndicate) has now resorted to screwing aspiring cartoonists as an additional source of revenue. They and their partner Amazon (Shame on them, too!) have recently announced a new contest called Comic Strip Superstar. The winner gets a $5000 advance for a future book deal. This sounds good at first, but there are more catches in the contract than in your average baseball season. In the end, the “winner” (or rather loser) would end in a lousily paid part time job for Universal while signing away a large portion of his precious rights.
If you’re interested in more details you should read the following article and the comments on Webcomics.com: Comic Strip Superstar contest announced. There is also a large discussion about the subject at The Daily Cartoonist with Tony Piro (the creator of the webcomic Calamities of Nature) making several well-informed remarks.
I think it’s funny that Powree already makes significantly more money of Sandra and Woo for significantly less work. At the very least she does not have to write all those strips on top of drawing them.
You should put the project wonderful ad boxes back up.
I liked to bid on your ads I always got LOADS of hits.
You could certainly make some extra cash to support your comic that way.
Tension rises.
I have removed the Project Wonderful ads from my website to replace them with banner ads from Six Apart / Adify and Burst Media since we get at least twice as much money that way. If you are not seeing those banner ads you are using an adblocker with a filter for those ad networks.
Daily Strips?! I’ll suffer stress and probably won’t last for two weeks :))
Gah. Hit the enter button too fast. There’s something similar like this at a popular manga publisher, it’s stressing. So many traps for newcomers…
Well informed? Clearly you have me confused with someone else.
Actually, I just made a blog post on my site that you’ll probably enjoy
http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/index.php?blog=196
Plus Monday’s comic will also be about comic syndication. Then I’m done with this issue! Really! Doctor’s orders!
Perhaps you could move your various webcomic vote buttons further up the page. I didn’t know you were registered on any of them until this past week. If more of your fans saw and voted for you, it would move you up in the ranks faster and others who haven’t seen your comic might come take a look upon seeing you there. It’s how I found some of the comics I read.
Usually only comics with voting incentives reach the top positions on webcomic lists. We won’t do them and so we have no chance of reaching the top positions and so those vote buttons shouldn’t be in the best places on our website.
Who said anything about aiming for #1? Many in the top 100 don’t have an incentive. For example, Faux Pas hovers right around #100 every month on topwebcomics, with no voting incentive. It’s artist/author moved the button to the top of her web comic page for one month. That month, they shot up to #50. The button has since moved back down below and they’ve again, dropped back to around #100.
And this is why I would love to go into business for myself instead of working for a company that will initially end up screwing me in the end.It’s horrible how some of this places take advantage of creativity of other people for their own gains instead of just cutting clean down the middle to be fair.
Also,considering how much attention and traffic Sandra and Woo get every week,doesn’t surprise me that you and Powree get a decent amount of extra spending cash every now and then :P.