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Aug 18

I'm my own creative industry


me and Fred Van Lente (right) and a lot of our comics

I’ve been an independent cartoonist on the internet since 1999 and I’ve tried EVERY internet based platform or service available to "empower" creative people like me to distribute our work to the masses and potentially grow our audience. Cafe Press, ComicSpace, Blogger, DeviantArt, dozens more I'm forgetting… I tried them ALL, a few successfully, a lot not. Whenever I tried them out, my primary aim was to find:


  • an effective platform to promote my work

  • an affordable way to reproduce (print) my work

  • an unfussy way to sell my work


…all while retaining as much control over the work itself and not giving an unreasonable amount of money or control to any middlemen.


This is all the stuff that currently works for me (and might work for you) as of August, 2024. Not all solutions will work for everyone’s needs, but these are the places one budget-conscious mid-career freelance comics creator recommends you check out.



WEBSITES

When I needed to find a home for the Action Philosophers webcomic I went with Digitalpress.blog. Their free tier gave me 1GB of storage, plenty of templates, one of the most user-friendly experiences I’ve ever seen and and even let me hook up a custom domain name - all for free. They claim they use ads to support it but I’ve never seen them. This has my HIGHEST recommendation if you're looking to start a webcomic site or personal blog or you want a zero-cost professional website, and I will definitely use it again in the future.


Neocities is another zero-cost ad-free web host unlimited storage and you can hook up a domain name for $5. I like it but you need to know how to hand-code html to get it to work, so it's not for everyone.


The site you’re reading this on is hosted by Wix. Making art and comics is my full-time job and  paying a premium for having a reliable web host with a browser-based WYSIWIG website builder was the right move for me. I’ve used it for about 10 years and I recommend it if you have the budget for it.


Social media and subscription services can be a very effective places to peddle your creativity if you're savy and lucky (or rich). Ultimately though, none of these "free" online platforms are your creative partners. YOU are their product, and when you are no longer useful to them they will cut you loose (along with the audience you built and your free creative labor) in a micro-second (see: Patreon), or they will exploit your work in ways you don't want them too (see: Meta/Instagram/Facebook/EVERYONE). To promote yourself effectively you absolutely should build your own "home base" website that you control 100%, even if you are a social media user (guilty). Get yourself a website.



DOMAIN NAMES

Seriously - register a domain name for yourself, they are just as important as having a real website. I recommend something that broadly identifies YOU rather than a project or company name. There's literally hundreds of places to register domains (because: the internet) and I'm currently using multiple services - so dig around and find a bargain and registrar that suits you. It doesn’t have to be a .com either. Go for a cheap one instead: .art is a perfectly good domain. I know people that used .pizza for their pro site - my partner’s pro website is liza.town. You're a creative person, get creative!


As of this writing, Namecheap’s price for .art domains is $3.98 a year. So you could register YOURNAME.art and hook it up to a digitalpress.blog site and you’d have a professional web presence for less than $5 a year. "I can't afford a real website I'll just use [insert social media platform]." Well, now you can. Do it.



PRINTING COMICS AND ZINES

Mixam is currently the best value I’ve found for low-volume print runs of booklets, especially full-color. If you're flexible with your formats and paper stock you can play around with Mixam's online price quote calculator and discover some amazing price breaks - I print all my self-published color comics at “Royal” size instead of standard US Comic size because I like the slightly smaller format and it’s a much lower price (like 60%). Another example: printing a 4.9 x 6.9 inch book is almost HALF the cost of printing a 5 x 7 inch book. Kick the tires, find a bargain. Prices are good for short-run paperbacks too - but look into Ingram Spark and Amazon KDP as well - the printing costs are competitive but neither is just a printer so you need to be aware of what you're committing to if you use them to make your book.


I still think the best way to make a comic is the half-letter zine format. All you need is the stapler (about $20), a paper trimmer ($10), some plain copy paper ($5/ream or $0 if you steal it from work!) and a basic monochrome laser printer (about $100-150 - but keep in mind you'll use it for EVERYTHING). You can figure out the rest. Total cost for setup is less than it would cost to get 50 copies of a comic printed once. The only real drawback is that all that repetitive stapling, folding and trimming of booklets can hurt your hands, especially if you’re an elder comic booker like me.


STICKERS



Sticker App has a $26 minimum order per design and it has a cool feature that will calculate the quantity you will get based on the size and material of the sticker you want. This is where I try out new designs to sell at comic shows with low risk. It's good quality stuff too - their glitter stickers are pricey but very nice.


Sticky Brand has a perpetual special where you get a hundred 2.5 inch stickers for $19. These make excellent giveaways and I use it often.



ART PRINTS

Buy local. Never order prints online - paper is heavy and shipping is expensive. Instead do a google search for “digital printing” in your local area. Ask them all for quotes for printing 20 full color copies on Cover Stock (very important) at a standard size - 8.5 x 11 or 11 x 17 - sizes that you can fit in an off-the-shelf frame. Any reputable place will charge about $1 a print, and all these places use the same equipment so the quality will be identical. Pick the print shop closest to your house that gave you a fair quote and that’s your new printing partner. Since 2013, all my prints are made by the copy shop 2 blocks from my house. Huge thanks to Rusty Shackles for this tip!


You can also make prints on your own printer of course, which gives you lots of control and can be super cost-effective if you know what you're doing. I don't know anything about making prints/riso/silkscreens at home because I am too busy/lazy.



PRINT-ON-DEMAND

Don’t do it. Print on demand services fucking suck. You get a microscopic profit margin (ex: $1 royalty from a $20 t-shirt), the goods are sub-par quality, setting up the files is a huge time suck and ultimately no one needs some stupid swag that's gonna end up in a landfill in less than a year. I admit it's a very attractive proposition to make your art instantly available for purchase on t-shirts and beer coozies and other B.S. and you don't have to print or ship anything yourself but the bottom line is that POD services need your free creativity more than you need their ability to slap your art on garbage. In other words: you don’t need them at all.


Bill Watterson was totally right - branded merchandise has NOTHING to do with the creative work itself and is a waste of time if you're an artist. If you need prints and books and stickers use a real printing service and sell them yourself. If you need t-shirts or patches for your comic or band or club go to a local screen printing shop or learn to do it yourself. Everything else? Walk away, it's a waste of your valuable time.


That being said, I still set up an Action Philosophers shop on Threadless (the least offensive of all the POD services) because they’re the only ones with SKATEBOARDS (!!!) and I already had the files ready to go from another project so it took less than an hour to set up and skateboards are cool as hell. But also keep in mind that since it launched in spring 2024 - we sold two items. One "Plato Smash!" shirt and one Nietzsche skateboard. And I was the one who bought the skateboard. Worth it.


currently in use by my 17 year old son to mildly shred around NYC



ECOMMERCE

I use Square to host my online shop. Not Squarespace, Square. If you sell your art in person at comic cons and festivals and whatnot you will need a Square account anyways to process credit card purchases (they take a small % of each payment). But not many Square users know they also have a free online store that synchs with your in-person sales - no subscription fee, no item limits and you can even hook up a domain name to it. Get it.


I recommend NOT selling eBay or Etsy. They are no longer friendly to small sellers anymore. Their fees and policies will bleed you dry, the privileged demands of their customer base will crush your creative spirit and they're both havens for bootleg POD junk. AND: Etsy is allowing Generative A.I. garbage to be sold on their site. I used both for years but times change - never again.


SHIPPING

For US residents like me, Pirate Ship kicks ass - you type in the info and it gives you multiple options from every package carrier then you buy and print the label at home and drop off the package. But I also just use good-old fashioned USPS stamps if my items are small and light enough (stickers and cards).



SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES & CROWDFUNDING

I tried Patreon, Ko-Fi, Gumroad and a lot more I'm forgetting and…nah. No thanks. On solo projects I can never stick to a schedule - I need partners or real deadlines or incentives to stick to a schedule. Subscription services have none of those things so they are not for me - and as we've seen recently the revenue streams that these services generate for artists can switch at a moments notice, which is no fun at all. So I don't play with subscription services. I just make the stuff and then I give it away for free or find a way to sell it. Easy peasy.


Crowdfunding on the other hand I'm a big believer in - if it's done right. I'm not going to go into details here about how to do it there are way better sources out there than me and that's not what this writing is about. The two Kickstarters I co-ran with Fred Van Lente did great but then I did a personal Kickstarter in Summer 2023 and it went pretty well until it came time to deliver the goods and I fumbled the deadline, big time. I'm still going to fulfill it but I learned I probably shouldn't do a solo crowdfunding projects. (And I definitely shouldn't be giving advice on them!)


I'm almost done! I swear!



PROMO MATERIALS: DISPLAY BANNERS, POSTCARDS AND BUSINESS CARDS

Qiagraphix prints my display banners and I like them a lot. When I need promo materials I always just go on eBay and buy from the cheapest deal. (Yeah, I don't sell on eBay, but I buy there - classic Gen-X hypocrite.) I figure I'm just giving this stuff away anyways and it doesn’t have to be anything special and I really don't want to spend too much so I try not to over-think it. I would use a local printer but they all tend to over-charge.


WRAP UP


All the links I mentioned above:


And if you want to print anything besides books and stickers - choose local.


In case you couldn't tell, I'm a strong believer in the DIY ethic. I like working with individuals, art directors, creative directors and companies that are true creative partners that I can trust - like the co-authors and publishers of my mass-market comics and graphic novels. I really want my friends, my peers and creative people in general to succeed with their creative works on their own terms. I don't want to see any creators tricked into spending too much money on promoting themselves or (worse) handing over the ownership and labor of their creative work to faceless entities who are pretending they have their best interests at heart. Whenever I can find a better way to make creative things come to life on my own without giving it away to predatory middlemen I will always go that route. I hope you do too.


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