I am this way when trying to decide where to post my blog, comic or artwork online. I’ve studied all kinds of options.  I tried multiple services for years with my portfolio. I learned Flash and built animated menus. I tried free portfolios. Even MySpace for some dumb reason. I’ve used many hosting sites some of which really sucked and some were okay but overwhelming when trying to settle on a hosting package. I mean, what’s SSH, SSL, CGI, Ruby, RoR, Perl, PHP, and MySQL? Please don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.

So to make this simple, I’m not going to go into all the options, hosts, sites and portals that you can use. Instead I will focus on the two best ways for artists to start a blog or comic online. I might talk about BAD options later, but not now.

The two best options are Google’s Blogger or WordPress.org. Both are great and could be your Internet home depending on what you want out of it.  Before you decide, here are pros and cons of each that are important to me as an artist.

Google’s Blogger (Blogspot domains)

Blogger – Pros

• Blogger is super easy
• Blogger has free hosting of your blog and files.
• Blogger is easy to access from any online computer.
• Blogger does not spam your site with unwanted ads.
• Blogger has a big artist community.
• You don’t need to know any programming at all. Period.

Blogger – Cons

• Blogger has to have (.blogspot) within you domain name. Unless you forward one to it but that costs money.
• Blogger has limited templates to choose from.
• Blogger does not have a menu bar.
• If you want to move to another host later then all your permalinks are permafried.

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WordPress.org with ComicPress template

WordPress – Pros

• ComicPress.
• WordPress has thousands of free plug-ins and widgets.
• which means WordPress is easy to customize to do ANYTHING you want.
• WordPress has the ComicPress template to help showcase your comics in addition to your blog.
• All your permalinks are registered to your domain name so they can be moved to a different host without changing your links.
• WordPress has page options and so it could pass as a website or portfolio as well as a blog.
• Comicpress allows you to click through your comic pages easily as well as many other features.

WordPress – Cons

• WordPress takes a bit more time to set up.
• ComicPress takes some knowledge of CSS to customize.
• WordPress needs a webhost to store your files.
• You need to buy a domain name and web hosting service.
• I recently noticed lots of spam comments. But this can be controlled. It’s still a little hassle.

So there you have it. If you want things as simple as possible then use Blogger but don’t expect it to be unique. If you want more info on the two then do the google search: Blogger vs. WordPress. You might want to get comfortable. It’s an endless search. But that just proves they are the two best choices.

I switched to WordPress because I wanted to start having a professional presence on the web. I wanted my site/blog to have a unique feel as well as other pages with links and information aside from my blog. I liked the idea of controlling my permalinks and content too. Here’s what reMINDblog looked like on Blogger. It’s still active but I rarely update it.  But if you decide to set up a WordPress blog then I strongly recommend one host.

Bluehost.com

I’ve used many hosts before and the only one I will recommend is Bluehost. In fact Bluehost will give you a free Domain name for life if you use them as your host.  It’s $6.95 a month for everything.  Wordpress recommends Bluehost above all the other hosts and Bluehost is the only one to offer a WordPress auto install. I used it and it set up everything in a minute and logged me onto my new WordPress site. Bluehost also includes everything you need for WordPress and Comicpress to function. Bluehost has unlimited bandwidth. This is important if your art or comic gets popular. You don’t want your site getting shut down when tons of people start flocking to it or be forced to pay more money for more bandwidth.

This week was pretty productive with reMIND. I almost finished coloring 4 pages (2 spreads) and I sketched some thumbnails for my Flight submission. I also think I figured out how I want my word balloons to look finally. This spread is an example of what I’m thinking so far. It’s more of a hand drawn look to match my art and lettering. I’m also toying with the idea of making each characters word balloon a unique color. I’m not sure if this will help or just make the pages look more colorful. We will see as the pages go. I’ll try to incorporate the color balloons from now on.

So, we are approaching the end of the first chapter finally. I think there will be 7 chapters total divided into 2 hard cover books about 130 pages each. It’s my attempt at bridging the gap between European and American comics. European comics are cool because they a treated more like books from what I’ve seen. They are around 40 to 64 pages and they come out whenever the artist finishes, sometimes taking a year or two. There’s just something I really like about that. It’s more about getting it right then hitting a monthly deadline. My only difference is printing in dimensions of standard American comics and having more pages so it’s a nice thick hard bound book. Anyway, enough of my idealistic daydreaming babble, there are several things I want to share today so I better begin.

First of all, notice the new advertisement that is on the left hand side of the blog. I just started this Saturday to see the results. If anyone has a graphic novel related blog then please join Project Wonderful and put your ad up here. It’s free until someone else outbids you. Plus if I end up getting a few bucks a month from it then I could use that to advertise on other sites.  Allowing others to advertise on my site brought up an interesting strategy. If you do a search on Project Wonderful for smaller sites without others bidding yet, then you can potentially put ads up on several sites without paying for any advertising. Just have your maximum bid at $0 and if no one else is bidding then your ad will pop up. It’s just an idea based on a few people doing that with my site. Another thing I’ve noticed is how inflated the numbers seem to be in the site statistics for my site on Project Wonderful. This makes me question how accurate the numbers are for some of the other sites I’m buying ad space on. It might just be a glitch so I’ll keep my eye on it and let you know how it goes.

Second, I wanted to say thanks for all your feedback last week with the ads. It’s been really helpful and has worked wonders for bringing in new viewers. Saturday was my best day yet. I placed an ad for $2 and brought in almost 200 unique viewers with a very low bounce rate.  It looks like quite a few people subscribed as well. Advertising on other webcomics really works for bringing traffic to an online graphic novel.

Third, I wanted to point at a few people out there who are making some interesting comics and blogging about it . I’m going to add these guys to my list of Comic Creator Blogs at the top left of this site. Please note that this list might change solely on how I feel about it. Later on I plan on making a giant list of links on my links page.

Other Good Comic Creator Blogs:

Shane M. Vidaurri

SMVidaurri.blogspot.com - Blog

SMVidaurri.com - Illustration site

I met this guy on the Flight Forum and have been following him ever since. Shane has been making a beautiful water colored comic and posting pages on his blog. Check it out and show him some love. He does some neat compositions and has a great style.

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Yaxin the Faun – Man Arenas 

I don’t know to much about this guy because I can’t read his blog but his graphic novel “Yaxin the Faun” is so beautiful that I just had to share it with anyone wanting inspiration. He also has a artist blog with other amazing art. His page layouts and compositions are really cool. His colors and character designs are quite good too.

yacinfields.blogspot.com - Yaxin the Faun

man-arenas-news.blogspot.com - Art blog

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Sam Mooney – a Manga Addict

Sam is living in Japan and drawing lots of short Manga stories on the side. He has some interesting compositions and stories techniques. I hope Sam keeps making progress on these and keeps sharing his artistic journey.

amangaaddict.blogspot.com - Manga Blog

nihonniiru.blogspot.com - Main Blog

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I have a few friends who are also starting a graphic novel blog. I’ll share them when they have some stuff to show.  If you have a blog specifically about making a graphic novel, showing your progress or techniques then please send it my way. I’d love to check it out and and maybe even list it here.

I decided to start calling the spreads "pages" now because I don't like that Google's number 3 keyword for my site is "spread". In case you are wondering why the page numbers don't quite match up to the spread number, it's because I'm using the page number of the printed book just so I don't get confused. Worry not, you are still seeing all the pages here.

How to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days.

So if anyone wants to know how to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days, then write an article about how much you love or hate Comic Sans MS and submit it to a few sites. A warning though. With great arguments comes heated comments. Not so much on my blog but on the websites linked to my article. 

Most of the negative comments came from my statement that people will hate you for using Comic Sans in your comic. Now I know the truth, may people will hate you for talking about Comic Sans no matter what the context. So to please all the haters, I have changed my statement from "many people will hate you" to "many letterers will want to dropkick you." I hope you will take me seriously from now on. I never joke. Comic artists don't exaggerate anything. EVER.

I was going to compose a top ten list of hate comments from other sites linking to my post but it would be to hard to weed through. Plus, some are so vulgar it would make a drunk navy trucker quiver. So I decided to share one of the funniest comments I read among the rantings. And here it is:

"Comic Sans is based on Watchmen. Why do you hate Alan Moore?"

This quote truely sums up the power of the internet. I laughed, I cried. I scratched my head because, Wow!

First of all, Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, not lettered by him. Dave Gibbons lettered Watchmen and in an interview with him he says Comic Sans is "an appalling-looking font" and "Comic Sans is so ugly" and "The major sin about it that really bugs me is that it only includes the uppercase I, the one with bars on the top and bottom, which as you know, you only use in comics for the first-person pronoun."  Read the interview here.

With all the opinionated controversy behind me, it's time for my next subject. Why Mac's are better then PC's. ha!

I finally got my Page Rank back!

I'm sure there are a number of you who love this technical stuff like PageRank and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I am mostly clueless about making my site stand out on search engines. From what I know, search engines like Google, rank websites depending on things like who and how many links they have going to them. The more incoming links a site has the higher the page rank. The higher the page rank, the better chance that site has of being displayed in a search with similar keywords.

Before I switched from Blogger to WordPress, my site had a 3 out of 10. Shortly after I switched, it dropped to 0 and I couldn't figure out how to get Google to know I had switched. Apparently I didn't submit a sitemap to google. My IT guy helped me and a week later my site was recognized by google again. I now have a 3 out of 10 page rank.  The funny thing is, I still had the same amount of traffic after dropping to a "0" as I did with a "3" from before. So now I'm trying to figure out why. It seems like many of you understand this better then I do so maybe you can shed some light on it. I also read that there is a difference between a PageRank and a page rank. So confusing. Anyway, I have a 3 now and I feel better about myself but I'm not sure what it's really doing for me.

I have the day off so hopefully I’ll be able to get a little work done on reMIND this week. Due to recent events, I’ve decided it’s time to change up a few things.

First, a small change. When you click on the page image below you will be taken directly to the graphic novel to view the pages instead of having it scale to fit your screen. This was causing problems with clarity of the pages.

Second, I love writing articles about what I’ve learned on Thursdays, however I’ve noticed writing the articles takes the place of the time I have to work on reMIND. These last few weeks have been especially draining because my whole family has been sick and I literally haven’t gotten any headway on reMIND the whole time. So instead of stressing out about keeping my articles on schedule, they will come out when they get done. If I’d have written an article last week, I wouldn’t have had the time to make all the revisions on those pages. The funniest thing about all this; shortly after I decided my articles were taking precedence over my comic, I read this short article by Seth called The Distraction, the Tail and the Dog. It pretty much describes exactly what’s happening here. The reMINDblog articles were wagging the reMINDblog graphic novel and it should be the other way around. (That makes sense if you read the linked article.)

Just to make it clear, Mondays will always have new pages but the rest of the week will be random stuff. I hope this doesn’t upset anyone who springs to life hearing their 5:30 A.M. alarm that enables their 5:42 A.M. shower for exactly 6 minutes leaving precisely 2 minutes to make their Almond Mocha Chi Tea Latte as they relax for the next 10 minutes to enjoy the morning paper that is EXACTLY ON SCHEDULE.

I originally made my Thursday article schedule because I read that Google’s search engines really favored blogs that worked on a timely manner. I have to admit, Google searches bring in a good 20 to 50 unique visitors a day but most of them are empty clicks. Still, a few people have become regulars because of Google but it’s a super small fraction. Who knows maybe this new method will bring a surge in Google traffic.

I still have the coloring tutorials in the works and I’ll get them out soon enough so worry not. I might end up releasing it all as a PDF booklet instead. We will see.

reMIND is on the front page of a google search now.

Speaking of Google. I just typed “remind” into Google and my blog is on the front page of searches now. That’s pretty cool considering the word is so vague and has nothing to do with comics in general. Before I use to have to type in “remind graphic novel” for it to show up on the first page. Anything to make it easier for people to find it is good news.

DeviantArt

You might have noticed the buttons have changed and moved on the site. I just learned that the top right side of a webpage is the most clicked and viewed area. Apparently this is where you want your most critical information that you want people to see. So, I moved all my important buttons there to test this. I know for a fact that before I created that big RSS subscribe button and placed it there, I didn’t get a single subscriber. The day I put it there I had 18 new ones. That was also the day that CartoonBrew featured my blog but I still get new subscribers every day and I blame it on the buttons superior location.

I also added a DeviantArt button in case you want to see more than just reMIND stuff. I would also suggest joining DeviantArt if you want to promote your web comic because it’s massive. I was never really into the idea before as a professional artist. I use to look down on it because it seemed so… well, unprofessional and hard to navigate a simple portfolio. Lately, I understand that it’s not just a portfolio for upcoming artists but a massive community that really is passionate about supporting each other and building each other up. When you get featured on DA which is called a “Daily Deviant” you instantly get hundreds of followers and hundreds of comments from people who really love your work, not just empty small talk. If you want to build a fan base for your web comic, I strongly recommend looking into DeviantArt as another conduit.

Thanks again for all your wonderful comments and feedback on this graphic novel. Remember, the best gift you could ever give to show your appreciation is word-of-mouth advertising. To make it really easy, you can copy and paste this next sentence into Twitter or Facebook.

Check out @Jason_Brubaker and his graphic novel at http://reMINDblog.com/

and please remember to VOTE for reMIND at TopWebComics.com.

See you soon!

Aside from spending late nights working on my pages, I’ve been doing research on writing press releases, PR, marketing and distribution.  It’s a ton of stuff to take in. In my search for information I’ve come across a few sites that might be useful to anyone who is making their own graphic novel. Happy trolling! Is that an oxymoron?

Great Self-Publishing articles

This one was emailed to me.  It’s a series of four articles written about self-publishing an anthology comic by Sam Costello called Split Lip.

Sam Costello – On My Own in Independent Comics

Next, I found Lars Martinson, a Xeric Grant winner who wrote some interesting posts on self-publishing. He wrote and drew a graphic novel called Tonoharu: Part One. Here’s his series on How he self-published his graphic novel:

Lars Martinson – How I Self-Published a Graphic Novel

Third, I’ve been reading all kinds of articles written on Midwestbookreview.com. There is a huge resource for self-publishers talking about everything from distribution to marketing your book. Here is a link to the giant list of informative articles:

Advice for Writers & Publishers

Hopefully that can tide you over until I can get around to finishing my next coloring tutorial. Sorry to dash your hopes against the pavement.

- Jason

P.S. Please keep sending in your pin-ups. I’ve received some great ones already that I can’t wait to share here.

P.P.S. Remember, Ian, who wrote a guest post for reMINDblog.com about finding artists for your comic? Well, he started a kickstarter campaign and he needs to raise $500 in order to get the funding for his book. This book prooves that he knows what he’s talking about because he has some great artists in it. Go over to kickstarter and check it out.

P.P.P.S. If anyone wants to join the reMIND monthly mailing list to get your name added to the random drawings, receive email updates, special offers and news, then opt in by clicking below and filling out the form. This is the best way for me to keep in contact with you so please take a moment to join. No spam. I promise! Unsubscribe at any time.