Publishing Schedules

[William Satterwhite]

Due to various reasons (school, work, laziness, etc...) I've never been able to stick to any kind of a regular schedule but hope to do so for 2009. Does anyone have any ideas or experiences for what works best? I like Freakangels format and for what I do that would probably be ideal but I know I can't pull off 4-6 pages a week doing everything myself. I've thought about one page a week but feel that may be too little so I'm throwing the question out there to see what some of your thoughts/suggestions and get a general conversatio going to hopefully help guide me.

[Rachel Keslensky]

Hey now, I do one page a week and even that's hard to keep up sometimes!

This said, ANY sort of a regular schedule is ideal to an irregular schedule. My advice is to announce it as once a week, then try to work as far ahead as possible; you can always make it twice a week or more later on if you discover you can keep up that sort of pace.

[William Satterwhite]

Trust me, I don't envision a page a week to be easy at all :)

I really meant storywise, is one page a week enough to keep people coming back or do you find readers maybe take a break every so often to let things build up a bit?

[Rachel Keslensky]

I get fairly regular traffic coming back to the comic each week; if people take breaks, it's not showing up very well in the statistics.

What little feedback I get is that so far my work seems "too slow, yet too fast"; i.e. that the updates are slow but the pacing of the comic is a bit too quick to try and counter this. Of course, my main complaint is that I get very little feedback in general... I blame the whole starting-out problem, but still.

[D.C. White]

One thing I've tried, and seems to work over the last 10 years of dabbling in web comics. When I'm doing something longer than a single page strip I like to try and release them in 3-4 page blocks. Granted that also means you kind of have to work the writing to where it would make sense in the context you post it in, but I've generally have gotten positive feedback from readers that way.

On the downside it does leave gaps in updates, however to offset that I usually threw in sketches, pencilled story pages (in a preview sense), and written updates (blurbs, blogs, whatever) to keep the die-hard viewers coming back with new content of sorts. This way when you complete a sequence you won't have to worry as much about pacing issues.

I mean there are plenty of cool web comics out there that have weekly to random updates ( http://www.leadsalad.com , http://www.drmcninja.com ), but as a reader I usually wait a few months inbetween visits so I can sit and enjoy the stories a chunk at a time.

Another thing I tried to do was always stay at least a month ahead. It sounds like a bit, but if you have to place focus on other areas of your life (work, school, drama), or get sick..... you can fall behind pretty quickly. I can use a few of those reasons for my defunct strip Roth and Earl..... (wich made me think of)........ also if you do happen to work with someone else (writer, artist) they have to be as devoted to it as you are... if not you might as well look for a new collaborator.

[Greg Carter]

Many of my readers tend to not visit every update even when we update twice a week exactly on schedule. They visit weekly or every two weeks. Monday always has a lot of traffic even though we NEVER update on Monday. But mine is written to be a comic book and is more satisfying in chunks. But I'd rather release a page at a time closer together rather than wait and release several at once. With RSS feeds and several sites that track updates it's not as big of a deal-breaker as it used to be. I say that we shoot for Tuesdays and Thursdays but definitely two pages a week. Of course, even that has gone out the window for the holidays.

[D.C. White]

Yeah, Mondays through Wednesdays were always the prime traffic day for the sites I worked with (the weekends were always slim pickings). It always amazes me how different sites put simular format comics, but get a different reaction from viewers. When I did update 1-2 time a week, I actually recieved quite a few emails complaining about the gaps of time between pages. I guess it boils down to: do whatever it takes to keep people interested, and coming back.... results may vary

lol, the holidays are always the hardest to keeps schedules of any sorts. I used to hate trying to keep up with updated then since it really wasn't happening.

[Greg Carter]

Heh. People complain that it's only twice a week. They also say they are happy with whatever they can get. It's a cool feeling knowing that people are saying MOAR PLZ.

[D.C. White]

No kidding, I used to love the validation of people asking for more, or giving feedback in general. I think that's what makes me miss the web comic now that I'm doing paper books. It's a lot more hands on, and "can do" to me.

[Gina Biggs]

People complain to me that Red String is only three times a week ^^; I think if I posted five times a week I would hear the same thing. That's one of those big things to overcome when doing long-story format. People want the whole store right now ^_^