—Thomas Ross, Rockford Ill.
A: The tricky thing about the new model for making a living as a cartoonist-which is to sell your work through an online cartoon database-is that a database requires the existence of a lot of cartoons on a lot of topics.
The first part of the answer to your question about becoming a pro cartoonist is that you need to create a lot of good cartoons. 'Good' in this case means the cartoons you are creating are on the topics that have most appeal to your potential customers.
Based on my experience as a licensing director, these topics would include a number of business related subjects, such as change management, customer service and conflict resolution. Education related subjects are also popular with clients, especially cartoons on various aspects of teaching.
These topics are most popular because a sizable percent of the buying public for online cartoons are made up of business people and educators who need visuals for their print and presentation materials, especially for Powerpoint.
If your interest as a cartoonist is to create and sell a feature, such as a cartoon strip in the vein of a newspaper comic, then the internet offers a mixed blessing. The good news is that you can publish your cartoon on your own website for very little money-only the cost of paying a web host such as Earthlink for a site that can house your comic strips as you create them.
The bad news is that the internet is so full of cartoons and comic strips that are being offered for free by amateur cartoonists that customers must perceive of your work as having some inherent higher entertainment value in order to pay you to publish your cartoon on their site or to link to your site.
To this point, the only online comics that are perceived as having higher entertainment value are those that have established their appeal offline, in the print edition of newspapers or in magazines such as the New Yorker.
In order to draw readers to your online comic and have them come back over and over, even when they have to pay a subscription fee to read new installments, you will want to focus on characters and story. Create a roster of characters for your comic who are specific to your life and imagination, and not copies of characters who are already popular in the mainstream. Take the same original approach with your art style and your story lines.
And then market your brains out. On the web, marketing starts with showing your work to those you already know-your friends on Facebook, those who follow you on Twitter, family members. Use their feedback to refine your work. Ask them for input on story lines and laugh lines.
As you accumulate a number of finished strips that are entertaining to your core followers, begin to send links to possible new readers-people recommended by your friends, posters on community boards who comment on comics, art directors on professional comic sites. Keep creating and linking. Build up the web traffic to your website.
The first money you can look to make will be from advertisers. When your site reaches a high enough level of traffic-at least 30,000 visitors a month-you will have enough 'eyeballs' to appeal to advertising outlets, such as Google Ad Sense.
The next way to make money from your comic is to collect the installments into book form, using an inexpensive local printer. There remains a market for hard copy comic collections among fans of web comics.
--Send your questions about launching and managing a content database business to andrew@andrewgrossman.net.