Thursday, August 27, 2009

Disaster!

No, I didn't forget to put on pants this morning before going to work. I've only done that once. In Washington. This month. Honestly.

The disaster I'm referring to is the fact that Wayfarer's Moon has slipped to #58 on Top Web Comics! So, please, vote! When you're through reading the comic or a blog, just hit the vote button before navigating away.

The more votes we get, the lower our standing. The lower our standing, the more likely we are to be noticed by a big-time comics publisher who will offer us butt-loads of money to publish Wayfarer's Moon. This, in turn, will allow me to get that harem full of super-models I've always wanted.

So, obviously, voting is incredibly important!

As incentive, if you happen to meet me at a con or in public and tell me you vote regularly, I will not only write you a sentence, I will DRAW A PICTURE TO GO ALONG WITH IT!

Think of it! When I'm a famous writer and appearing on talk shows around the world, you can turn to a friend and say 'See that guy? He wrote a sentence just for me once. And he drew a . . . thing . . . next to it. I'm not really sure what it is. It could be a horse. Or a squid. Maybe a velocirator. I dunno, but he drew it just for me.'

You will be the envy of . . . someone. Maybe.

Anyhow, please vote. It will make us happy.

Cheers,
-Jason

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the big problem for you in the voting stakes is that you only update once a week.

It's hard to get truly enthusiastic about something that is gone from your mind for 6 out of 7 days a week, and since you have a regular publish schedule it doesn't encourage people to come back between updates.

Anonymous said...

One way you could get more people to vote would be if you put up voting incentives such as videos or doodles or parts of the daily blog, for instance if you have a top ten list on the blog you can make people vote to see the number 1.

TX_Val said...

The real disaster is my new monitors colors, because those flowers don't look 'purple' over here. I'm a little concerned about what might be going on in this scene, because this world doesn't have CPS.

Well I want a little cow next to my sentence. Now when is there a good con in Texas?

Jason Janicki said...

You have a good point, Anonymous #1. I hope the blog brings people back and encourages them to vote, but yeah, we only update once a week. Unfortunately, until one of us wins the lottery and Leigh can do WM full time, it's not going to happen.

That's not a bad idea, Anonymous #2. I could put the last part of Art the Wanderer up every week as a vote incentive. Or, even better, I could put up one sentence of Art every day! That way, you'd have to vote to read! (I'm not serious). But that is a good idea. I'll bring that up to Leigh and we'll figure something out.

I know there are 'color management utilities' out there TX_Val, we used to use them at work to ensure that everyone's monitors were calibrated the same.

And the next time we do a con in Texas, I'll draw you THREE cows (so you can have a herd).

Anonymous said...

You could say that his complaints have been herd.

I hear you on the updating; having had numerous projects on the side myself, and struggled to find the time and appropriate degree of effort to devote to them, I know exactly how that can be. Still, that doesn't change the reality of the situation though. The way I see it, you can either accept that your popularity will not be quite as high as other comics that update more often, yet be secure in the knowledge that you have a superior product - or you can devote more time and effort.

One possibility that you could consider is having only one full color page a week, but intersperse that with quicker, less demanding side art/comics that arent part of the main plot but feature your characters in situations they may have met in the past or that are purely non-canon. It's more effort, but just having something fresh on the page can be enough to get people coming back. The blog posts are good, I'll grant that, but they aren't really the comic, are they? I can't see people voting on the basis of the blog posts, but if you can find a way to get a little more content in the way of art up, that would definitely improve the situation.

Jason Janicki said...

Ouch. I took pun-damage.

Yeah, Anon, you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about possible projects I could do that will bring people back and get them to vote more. The best idea I've had so far is to do a 'Picnic With Ponies'-style, humor strip with the cast of WM, but only put it up as the vote incentive, with the first panel on Wednesday, 2nd on Thursday, and the last one on Friday. That way, people will need to vote each day to get the whole thing.

Downsides: a lot of work and people might be irritated at not getting a full strip when they vote. Plus, the humor might be lost with it spread out over three days. I suppose I could repost each strip, so the first one is on Wednesday, then the 1st and 2nd are on Thursday, etc, but then people will just vote on Fridays, to get the whole thing.

I think the strip idea is the right way to go, but I'm not quite sure how to implement it yet . . .

Anonymous said...

There is also the fact that you keep introducing new characters and the story goes reaaaaaaaaally sloooooooooow. I mean, it's already 150 pages and Iri hasn't crossed the forest yet!

I started reading it enthusiastically, but after a while it simply got boring. Now I only get back when I remember it, once every 2-3 weeks.

Jason Janicki said...

Yeah, we are aware of that as well :) We are picking up the pace, but at one page a week, it's still going to move slowly.

Again, we would love to do two or even three pages a week, but that's been covered :)

And it is a big forest :)