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And the winner of the “Bad Pun Contest” is……..
Evan from Graycontrast.
But I’d like to thank Luke Surl, Busalonium, Roy Blumenthal & Andy Brown for taking the time to enter. I think I might have had a few more entries if I’d managed to not confuse you all with a pun that only a few people would understand. Evan gets a free print of one of my cartoons for his efforts, but I hope to be able to offer them to you all (to buy), just as soon as I figure out the best way to go about this. If there are any webcomic artists who sell prints reading this, I’d love to hear any advice you might have.
I’m also planning on taking part in 24 Hour Comics Day on Saturday October 3rd. You’re supposed to produce a 24 page comic from scratch, but I think I’ll combine internet ideas and use the time to attempt the 200 Bad Comics Challenge which artists like Nedroid & KC Green have already done. I got the idea from ChannelAte and he’s already made a start on his. Any other webcomic artists fancy joining us? I’ll be on Twitter for the day and posting the results both to Twitter and my blog. Should be fun. (And given that I’m a 40+ dad with kids, I reckon mine will be more like a 16-18 Hour Comics Day)
Finally, the webcomic I reckon you should direct your seeing orbs towards this week is the delightful Cowbirds in Love.
@evan:
Congrats Evan! I didn’t know anyone could pun worse than me!
@DJBogTrotter:
Re selling prints via your site… Hmm… The holy fricking grail! There’s a WordPress free ecommerce plugin that allows you to turn selected pages into active shop pages. So basically, what I’d do in your shoes is…
1. Get the plugin. (I *think* it’s called WP-ecommerce plugin. It’s from a New Zealand-based company.)
2. Set up a price for each page that contains a cartoon.
3. Get yourself some sort of payment account to allow you to receive money. If you’ve got access to PayPal, you’re a winner! (I’m in South Africa, and PayPal doesn’t allow me to receive payments here. Blah.)
4. Work out a consistent workflow once you receive an order. You need to be able to action it *fast*! *Every time*. The closer you’re able to come to a ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ (SOP), the better poised you’ll be to scale this into a business later on if it proves immeasureably successful.
Start with the end in mind… What *should* happen if you find that you’re getting ten or fifteen orders a day? How should you be printing? How do you get the pics to the printer? How do you get them back? How do you ship? Do you have a covering letter? Do you have stationery? A publicity pack? Mailmerge personalisation?
5. You’ve got to be *certain* you’re not being defrauded before you release a print. There are gangs who place a small order, then follow it up with a moderately sized order, and then a third massive order. All three being fraudulent, the first two of which are simply a test to see what sort of defenses your site has.
Hope this helps!
Blue skies
Roy
Haha, my lame sense of humor actually paid off. And sense I just finished a sentence with a prepositions, I choose the Grammar Nazis. Thanks for the contest. I am inspired to have a contest myself. Maybe a kiriban.
BTW I feel badly for Joe’s Hardware