This originally appeared in my deviant art journal, but that’s not exactly a great place to post this and I thought it was one of the more poignant pieces I’ve ever written on what Webcomic readers can do to support their favorite comics without spending a dime. A lot of webcomic readers are young, and understandably don’t have a lot of cash, but when it comes to support, lifting your favorite comic up doesn’t have to require a credit card or even a bank account. If you are interested in seriously showing webcomic artists some appreciation, read on.

When you do a comic, especially a webcomic, there isn’t a lot of reward. You don’t get any money for it unless you really go out of your way to monetize your comic (and not everyone has the resources, business savvy, or discipline to do it.) and its not as easy as some people seem to think. People read webcomics largely because they are free, and people like free entertainment. Unfortunately a lot of people also equate free with worthless and free stuff holds less value in the minds of the people who consume it. Unless they actually set out at some point to do something like create a comic, they just don’t get how much suffering and work goes into making stuff. Most webcomic authors do it for the love of making comics, but you know what? Its really nice sometimes to get SOMETHING for all your hard work.

Now I also realize that a lot of webcomic readers are young people. Elementary school, high school, college. They don’t have a lot of money, so financial contribution is out of the question. Hey, that’s cool, I understand. I work and I STILL don’t have any money. I’m pretty sure a lot of people are nodding right about now. But there is still stuff you can do to show your love and support of a webcomic that won’t cost you a cent. Curious? Well read on.

1) Comment
This is probably the most direct thing you can do to show the comic author that you are reading and care. Do you like updates? Well comment on them! Most webcomics have some kind of comment feature these days. Many don’t even require you sign up with a membership, just post a message saying you like and appreciate them. its like giving your favorite webcomic a cookie.

A true story: I get the MOST comments when I *stop* updating. I’ve had more comments and stories about how people appreciated/loved/wanted Shifters AFTER I quit doing it. If I had heard those voices BEFORE I stopped, I might have felt it worth continuing despite the problems. But there is only negative voices or worse, nothing at all, its like a musician playing for an empty auditorium. Its depressing and kinda disheartening. So, because people seemed not to care, I decided ‘okay, no one will miss it if I go off and do what I need to do on my own time’.
Doesn’t it seem odd to you? That I get a ‘cookie’ when I stop doing something? Shouldn’t I get cookies when I do?

I’m not alone either. We only hear from you guys when you bitch. Its kind of disheartening honestly. If you really want more updating, you need to reward us when we DO update, and not slag us when we don’t.

So if you love your webcomics, COMMENT. Don’t be a lurker. Says something to let us know you are listening. Even if its just. “Thanks for the update!”

2) Vote and Fave!
Getting seen in the webcomics arena these days can be pretty competitive. For webcomics who can’t afford paid advertising we have to kinda do what we can with things like toplists. You might see vote buttons or links to comic directories (like onlinecomics.net for example). Take five seconds to click through the vote, every day you get a chance or every day it updates or whatever you feel is fair. Even if there is no vote incentive. If you think the comic is worth reading, give them a vote or a favorite.

3)Follow us!
A lot of artists these days often use social networking, like twitter, facebook, myspace, ustream, RSS, etc to try to spread the word of our works. If people are following us or friending us, then we know people are listening, but if we aren’t being followed or friended, we feel that our message isn’t getting out (which it isn’t) and no one is listening.

4)Share us!
Webcomics rely on ‘word of mouth’ advertising, especially in these times of social networking. If you see a comic has updated or you find a comic you like, share us with your friends! Re-tweet comic updates, link us on your website/blog/facebook/myspace. Digg us and Stumbleupon us. It doesn’t take a lot of effort on your part, but it shows you feel we are good enough that you are willing to share us with your friends. We can see when these numbers spike (most webcomic artists if they are freaks like me, do track referers. If we see we’ve been getting stumbled upon or digged or refered from various social sources, we know someone is giving us some love.)

5)Send us fanart.
Its probably the most time consuming on your part, but most webcomic people that aren’t enormous love to get fan art. Its really cool to see other people take on your characters, and that you inspired someone enough to draw your characters. Its flattering and super cool. We might be able to make our own art, but seriously, who doesn’t like presents? It doesn’t have to be art either, it could be a fan story, sculpture, plushie, hell even a picture of you cosplaying our characters at a con. Now that’s super awesome.

6)Get involved
Interaction. We love it just as much as you do (well some of us do, I know I do, but some artists can be really weird about it). Reply to us on twitter, sign up and get involved on forums, ask questions, send an email, visit our Ustreams, come visit us at conventions. A lot of people get intimidated or feel weird about interacting with people they might look up to or like, but don’t. We are still people and usually like to talk about our projects and work. Some artists aren’t so good about it but some thrive on it. There are so many ways these days to interact, its crazy. I’ve got several fans that are now my friends because they got involved and talked to me.

Originally written by Kevin Kelly, the 1000 true fans theory states in a nutshell that if you want to make a living off your creative genious on the internet, you need to cultivate “1000 true fans”. A true fan being defined as someone who is so zealous about your work, they’d buy everything 10 times over, even your belly button lint if it was sold on Ebay. Basically someone who truely is ‘fanatical’ about what you are doing. This post turned out to be a pretty hot topic across many blogs, which even prompted further posts, against, defending, and comparing to similar theories, even some temperance from reality of doing it. Go ahead, read it, come back. You’ll need to know what I’m talking about for the rest of this post.

Although the vast majority of the examples and applications have been to music, its been put to other creative diciplines, from writing, to painting, to comics, to business. But I have to say, personally, as a webcomic artist, it intrigues me.

This is not to say I think this is the be all and and end all solution to the age old dilemma ‘how do I make money with my webcomic’, but rather a bridge. A goal to get from your day job to making your living on the web by providing direction and a target number.

The nice thing about this theory is that it sounds easy and friendly. Initially reading it, I caught myself going ’1000? that sounds doable’, especially on the internet right? I mean there’s millions of people on the internet. Finding and keeping 1000 people around who worship your stuff shouldn’t be too hard just on odds alone. But as I thought about it, and did some math in my head (although admittedly I suck in math.. so take it as you will), it became a little more… shall we say, challenging?

I’m only talking webcomics in this post, to be clear, my numbers are based on my experience in webcomics and being involved in the webcomic community.

A ‘True fan’ according to the principle, is someone who is SO crazy about your stuff, they will buy ANYTHING you put out. In the terms of a webcomic, they own every shirt, even book, ever button, the UNDERWEAR, win art auctions regularly enough you know their screen name, donate regularly, and hassle their friends to buy your stuff. They are the sort of fan that asks ‘when do I pay?’ when you are still talking about a hypothetical product. I’ll tell you right now, these people are RARE. Rare enough that when you’ve got one, you will come to know them as good friends or on the flipside someone you dread but smile for because they help pay your bills. At any rate, these people are your bread and butter, and collecting them is quite a challenge, because they have a pretty high upkeep, and there are all sorts of challenges involved in paying that upkeep. These people, at most are only going to make up maybe 1% of your total fanbase.

Now, with every true fan, comes a gaggle of what I like to call  just ‘fans’. People who like your work enough to follow it regularly, have probably saved every comic to their hard drive, and maybe have bought one thing here or there from your store, or are very patiently waiting for a product offering they feel is actually worth money. They participate in forums, polls, comment on your comics, etc. Overall they like you, they might follow your work for years, but they aren’t yet paying customers. Or at least not regularly paying customers.  These people aren’t a huge group either, but there are more of them. Say 5% of your fanbase.

Out side of THAT level, there is what I like to call ‘casual fans’. These are people who like your stuff enough to follow it, to read it, maybe not regularly, but they like what they see. You figure on their entertainment radar, but they are just not invested in you for whatever reason. They are the sort of fan that might check back every month, or couple of months, and read through whatever you’ve posted, or maybe even as little as once a year. They might not even remember the author’s name, or only sort of vaguely recall the actual work. But they remember they liked it.  However, you still have the foot in the door, in that they know your work, and they might like it, but something is holding them back from moving ‘inward’ towards being a ‘fan’. They are pretty much everyone else.

On the very outskirts of your ‘circle of influence’ as it were, there’s the rest of the whole damn internet and planet, just waiting for you to tap.

This basically boils the 1000 fans theory down to the general consensus that, of ANY fan base, only about 1% is going to reliably spend money on something. And of that only a percentage again is going to buy everything you do. Its a really tiny number, and its REALLY freaking hard to get exact numbers of fans over the internet. You can get a clue, but never really know every life you’ve touched.

Here’s an actual example of the above math:

With comic rank, I get an idea of how many readers I have for my comic, Brymstone. My highest number was about 1400 or so. With that number, the amount that are ‘fans’ that might spend money is 70.  The amount of people who probably WOULD spend money is approximately 14.  If I was making a sales projection for  merchandise this would tell me ‘don’t make a lot of it’.

You know, this type of math makes things more depressing. However, this does provide me with a sort of target number, and working in the marketing industry, I really like target numbers.

In terms of a webcomic, this generally means steady traffic of numbers in the 100,000s on a daily basis. If you are getting over 100,000 uniques a day (or better), the chances of you actually having 1000 true fans in the mix, is pretty good. And even if your true fans are a little scarce, the ability to ‘convert’ from the fans to true fans, is better the more fans and casual fans you have. But you do have to work on that whole ‘conversion’ process. Matthew Ebel is champion at this. You have to make people CARE about not only the work, but you as a person as well. People help people they like, and your true fans, you have to treat them like friends. Good friends. Special friends. Personal friends.

This is a very important part of this theory. It is based a lot on new media making this possible through facebook, twitter, blogging, whatever. These people have to feel close to you to spend money 0n you. Cultivating these fans is like growing a garden, they must be tended lovingly, gently, and often with frequent nutruring of webcomicy (in our case) goodness. You can’t let them forget, and you can’t disappoint them too much, or they will cease to be true fans.

This is sort of part of the catch 22 of this. It takes a lot of time and effort to cultivate these fans. How do you find time for this if one of the secondary key points to this theory of success is creating new content? And as often as humanly possible.

Let’s face it. Content is king. The way people come to your site, the whole REASON they come is your content. Be it writing, comics, music, or whatever, the people come when you update. So in order to keep people coming, to keep their interest high, and nuture the want to buy shit from you, there has to be a regular stream of content flowing out of your website. Not only THAT, but a regular stream of merchandise too. If you want to keep the true fans spending, you have to keep coming up with new things to spend stuff on! No one wants 12 of the same shirt. Also, not every thing you make is going to be consumer gold. You’re going to have a lot of misses to your hits, so you have to be prolific. If you look at those who are succeeding in this theory, the are, for the most part, extremely prolific. We’re talking weekly content here people. AT THE VERY LEAST.

For webcomics, this isn’t entirely bad news. We are kind of used to putting out on a weekly, bi-weekly, or tri-weekly basis, some people are daily, or 5x a week. The more you update, the more people come back, the more your stuff gets known. In my experience, anything less than 1X a week, and you’ll be struggling. Regularity is also a huge key for the webcomic industry, you need to hit those update days if you are serious about growing your fanbase.

Although that’s not obviously the ONLY thing you need to do, as Robert Rich points out in his letter to Kevin Kelly, you can’t limit yourself to only fishing in one pond for fans. You can’t pander to one group forever, or even one set of tastes forever or you are setting yourself up for a sort of creative suicide. For webcomics, a lot of creators don’t reach past existing webcomic readers, cannibalizing over and over otherwebcomic’s audiences. The comics that really succeed have to bridge the gaps between subcultures, and into untapped markets. Webcomic creators that see opportunity in non-webcomic places and seize that are the ones who usually blaze their way to some kind of quazi success. Daily funny type comics tend to do this more easily that serial manga, which is probably why one sees more success with the daily. I’ll write more on that bitch later.

But on a whole, the theory, if you can wrangle and convert 1000 people into being true fans, you can make money. Maybe not enough to make a luxurious living, but a living. And obviously once you’ve got the first 1000, you have to continue adding and converting, because ultimate people on the internet have attention spans that are about the equivalent to that of a ferret with ADD on speed and drowning in coffee.