Hey check out this banner thumbnail image I made to promote the comic on other places on the internet. I just think it’s neat.
Comment
Wow, this is a big deal. I’ve never actually shown my face on the internet before, not so much as a photograph, so if you’ve ever wondered what I look like and what I sound like, now’s your chance.
I was interviewed for the YouTube show Attack of Opportunity. We had a lovely time talking about Terry Pratchett, PvP, unexpected Canadian/American/English culture clashes, how I got started in webcomics and geek culture, the origins of my weird Twitter handle, and all kinds of other topics. I also kept bringing up embarrassing moments from my childhood for some reason (!!!), so if you want to know my origin story, now is your chance to slake your thirst for my deep mysteries.
Go watch it and do me a favour while you’re there — leave a great big like on that video so Jeff knows how cool and awesome you are. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jeff!
After I die my surviving family members are going to unlock my phone and find it full of self-portraits taken whilst drawing for facial reference, most of them taken early in the morning or late at night. Then they’ll come to the heartbreaking realisation that they don’t have a lot of photos of me doing anything else.
“What was your Great-granddad Bishop like?”
“Well, son, I was fairly young when he died but I like to look at these old photo albums and picture what his day-to-day life must have been like. Not a fan of showering, no sir, but he did like sitting in the dark in his pyjamas, taking selfies and making weird monster faces.”
“Uh… forget I asked.”
Uh-oh. I’ve just realised something. Well, the robot butler that lives inside Google Analytics realised… I’m getting some good traffic from TopWebComics.com.
For those of you unfamiliar with the TWC site, it’s basically a ranked list of webcomics and you can vote for your favourite comics to increase their ranking.
Now before I go any further I have to say that as a fan of webcomics, personally, I don’t give a crap about how popular they are or how well they do compared to other comics. And when cartoonists get too hung up on this or that aspect of the webcomic community, whatever that means, it just comes across as petty. For this reason the idea of a site that categorises, compares and ranks webcomics doesn’t appeal to me. Sorry, to be honest, I should say it doesn’t appeal to me anymore. There have been times in the past when I’ve fallen into that trap. It was many years ago, it wasn’t a good colour on me and I’d prefer to leave that in the past.
So to recap, yours truly is ambivalent about TopWebComics.com, ambivalent about becoming internet famous.
However, if you’re a fan of the comic you should care about how many other fans I have, even if I don’t. Rather, you should care about how many fans all the comics you read have, especially if (like this one) the author is still working a day job. More fans mean more success. More success mean less time wasted on the day job, more time devoted to the comic and more frequent updates.
A webcomic made by a part-time or hobbyist cartoonist lives or dies by its fans. I’m not talking about readers, I’m talking about fans. You can have a lot of the former but none of the latter and still fail. Fans are readers who like the comic so much they want to see more of it. Fans will go out of their way to support a comic, they will help it reach more fans so it can grow and update more.
So when I say I’m getting good traffic from TopWebComics.com, I’m not getting a lot of visitors from that site, but the ones who are visiting are the good kind, the kind that stick around and become fans.
Do you realise what this means? How many votes a comic gets on TopWebComics.com does make a difference, and isn’t just petty nonsense for stupid-heads. I take it all back, TWC! Wait, it’s possible I never publicly said that in the first place. Well, I took it back before I even said it. I pretracted it.
Now, this doesn’t mean whatever comic is at the top of the list is the best in the world. But even though my position is far from the top, I’m already benefiting in a small way from being on the site, and I’ve largely ignored TWC for the 12 years my webcomic has been running.
It’s actually a useful marketing platform. And I’ve ignored it for 12 years. Oops.
So how am I doing on there? Well, at time of writing I’m ranked at number 2558 on the list. To put that in perspective, number 2557 is a Comic Genesis comic that hasn’t updated since 2011.
So the higher a cartoonist can get himself on this list, the more opportunities to reach new readers he has. It wouldn’t even be about reaching the top 100 list — just doing a little better could potentially have a massive impact, especially for unsung masterpieces still waiting to find their audience. I’m being coy — I am of course talking about the 2011 Comic Genesis guy. His material about Obama’s first term has never been more relevant.
Now, I’m not going to start shamelessly grubbing for votes like this shit is the most important thing ever. But this thing is important, more important than I gave it credit for. So if you could vote for me as often as possible that would be a tremendous help. I’d be very grateful and you would be helping to support the site in a way that has real monetary value to me whilst costing you nothing. So, cheaper than throwing a dollar into the tip jar but potentially just as valuable.
For my part, I’m going to start posting voting incentives. Right now, if you vote for the strip on TWC you can see a high-quality sneak preview of the next strip, but please let me know in the comments what incentives you’d like to see. You can also reach me on Twitter and Facebook. I’m always happy to chat. If you want more frequent incentives or different incentives, just let me know.
You can vote once per device per day. So I’m going to vote for myself on my phone and my laptop once a day — that’s 60 votes a month right there. Let’s see how far we can take this. I appreciate the help.
Peace out. Much love. Many thanks.
On April first of this year, with no fanfare, Life on the Fourth Floor started updating twice a month. From now on the comic will update on the 1st and the 15th of every month. We’re coming to the end of the current storyline, which will wrap up this summer. If you’ve been following along this whole time, first of all: thank you. Second of all, you may have noticed that the current story arc is more like a series of stand-alone gag strips that go together to form a narrative when viewed as a whole. At least, that’s the shape I was going for. This structure, combined with the fact that the art has never looked better, means that there’s never been a better time to tell people about the strip.
If you know somebody who would like what we’re doing here, please let them know today and tell them this is their jumping-on point. I’m still working the day job and doing this in my spare time, so any help you can give me in reaching a wider audience would be greatly appreciated.