Recharging 101

One of the problems with being a writer is that we have a dysfunctional relationship with the Well of Ideas. Sometimes it will overflow and we'll get frustrated because we have no way of keeping up with the flow; we'll take as many notes as we can in hopes of having something in the dry times. And the well of ideas will run dry, driving us crazy because we can't figure out how to reconnect to the flow.

It'd be great if it was a nice even flow. But let's get real: It doesn't work that way and probably never will. We can never really tell when inspiration will strike and for how long it will last. Because of this, we need to figure out ways to keep at it when we aren't under the effects of the inspiration. You've got to figure out how to deal with all that frustration while still writing.

Preparing For Famine

Here's where we get to take some inspiration from the Bible: A pharaoh once had a dream of seven fat cows and seven sick cows; once Joseph translated the dream, the dream was a vision of seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine. The pharaoh ended up putting him in charge of preparing for seven years of famine and so Egypt not only survived the famine but flourished. When it was over, Egypt was the most powerful nation thanks to its preparation.

 

When we're inspired, we tend to take a lot of notes. Between outlines, plot suggestions, character concepts, and even questions for research, we tend to do a lot of writing just to prepare to write. Here's the cool part: If we fully explore the idea then we have a lot of material we can use. Once we've written the story itself, we still have all of our notes; those notes become our preparation against the famine ahead. 

 

We can use those notes once we lose our steam to pick it up again.  Just as Joseph put grain and other foods in silos to ensure there was food during the famine, our notes ensure that there are ideas when we are not inspired. 

Taking A Break

We need to occasionally get away from the laptop and just essentially be us. This is why when you start talking to writers, you see a lot of them living in isolated areas. We love to be up at 6 AM in the morning because nobody's there. We know where all the really great ruins in a city are because no one is there. We love National Park, the Yellowstone Grand Canyon because there's lots of areas where no one is there.We thrive on loneliness.

We need to get away from other people and we need to be away from all the various distractions, and just meditate for a little while. Some of us meditate through action rather than peaceful thought, but the bottom line is that occasionally we need to get away from things and nothing gets us away from from everyone else than meditation. We need to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and that means getting away from other people and doing things that we enjoy. And don't think that you need to escape into the wilderness; a day spa, an out of the way bookstore, and even a steam room can do wonders for a person.

 
This is not to say that you should avoid people altogether. We all need that human touch, and that means that you should make an effort to spend some time with family and friends. Even just spending a few hours with family, even if it's just being there, is all you need. You need to link with actual people, and not just online; sometimes you need the actual physical touch of other humans in order to maintain your humanity, and nothing beats the hug of a parent or child. Sometimes a dinner with family or friends is empowering in its own right.

Returning To Basics

Lastly, you shouldn't be afraid to revisit the past. Sometimes you need to see how much you've changed; as we all evolve over time, it can be interesting to see exactly how we've changed. Sometimes it can be fun to look through old notes, seeing what stories still need to be told and which clues and details were never used to see if anything should be brought out into the light. Sometimes a trip down Nostalgia Lane can show us exactly how we've changed, for better or worse. 

There's also value to be had in re-reading favorite books and re-watching old shows. We're always going to find stuff that we didn't see below, and sometimes the new perspective of where we are now gives us additional insight into what we thought we know, showing us a new angle into old material. Finding that additional insight makes re-reading the book more than worth it, and any new discovery helps to recharge us, inspire us to try new things. 

So when you're feeling down, take some time off to get in touch with yourself. Make sure that when your inspiration is flowing you prepare for the drought, but remember to stop writing and enjoy life every so often. If you do nothing but writer it's going to wear you down after a while, and if you don't do something to regenerate, you'll wear away to nothing. So take some time off, spend some time with family, return to basics, even just watch some show you've always wanted to but haven't for whatever reason; find a way to take time time off and recharge.

 

Ultimately, if you don't take time off to recharge every so often you'll do nothing but wear yourself down to a mere stub. Take some time to recharge your batteries; you'll find that it keeps you going far longer and keep you sane at the same time. Take care of yourself and you will avoid burning yourself out, allowing you to pursue your writing life that much longer.

Being Social With Your Fans

Part of every comics marketing strategy should contain some space on social media. One of the great things about it being innocuous is that you can't beat it for advertising: Since everyone is doing it, it means that you can get the word out on pretty much anything quickly. Better yet, it's free, it helps build your SEO profile, and it helps you build a network. However, you need to use it right, and that means that you need some sort of actual idea of what you're doing. 

 

Make Some Choices

There's a number of different social media platforms out there and you need to decide which is best for you. This is a decision you'll need to make on your own; there's just too many options. You need to find a platform that you feel comfortable with, that you can go on for at least an hour every other day or so, and that you honestly enjoy. You should have one or two that you focus on and a couple that you occasionally post on. The Top Five are:
Facebook: Pretty much the default, but also can take the most work. Try to split your groups between those you post your work on, those you can learn from, and those you can have some fun with. 

Instagram: Great for posting your more visual stuff on. Great for not only advertising but also inspiration and seeing what everyone else is up to. 

Pinterest: Pretty much the same. 

Twitter: All sorts of lightweight, but great for keeping in the loop and having fun. Also, remember to retweet and like to maintain your presence. 

Linkedin: A little old school, but worth it for the connections and career advice. Also, helps you keep track of industry news. 

Develop A Following

First off, make sure that you make an effort to fill out your profile as completely as possible. Make sure that all of the important information is there, and this is definitely the time to be serious. You need to keep in mind that this is something that you're doing for your business, and therefore the more serious you are the better. You may want to set up accounts for you and your company; this is not a bad idea, especially if your company has a number of different comics. 

 

Seriously debate setting  accounts for individual characters. While this can be a clever idea, it may be too clever; only do it if you're willing to put some serious effort into it. If you can put some serious effort into it then it can work, but you don't want to do it for more than one or two characters; as noted, it requires some serious work and without that work it's a waste of effort. Keep that in mind when you're debating setting up character accounts.

As far as the following, follow or send requests to 5-10 people each day. Also, make at least a few posts each day. Be helpful, play nice, and basically add to the conversation without being spamming; eventually, you should see your followers and friend requests start to increase.

Playing Nice With Others

The worst part of maintaining a social media account is interacting with others. Most writers are introverts; we hate having to deal with people when we don't absolutely have to. Making social media work, however, means having to deal with people. Worst, most of us wish we could be more Harlan Ellison when it comes to dealing with people: We would love to be the guy who's brutally honest and still loved for it, and if aren't then the person wasn't worth it in the first place.

 

People want to get to know you, and that's a good thing for you. People prefer to buy stuff from people they know; even if they hate the person, they prefer to buy from someone they hate rather than someone they don't know at all. This means that you need to post stuff that's important to you, no matter what others think. This is where you can post stuff that you find interesting, fun, or even important; this is an area where you have a voice beyond your art and you should take advantage of that.

 

With most forms of social media, this is pretty much limited to just posting new things every so often and reposting/replying to the posts of those you follow; basically, you're contributing by throwing things into the river of consciousness every so often. It sounds simple, but you need to keep in mind that you need to post more than just links to your stuff; you need to post something, anything that shows off your personality; people want to get to know you and this is your chance to do that. 

You also need to keep in mind that you can't afford to be diplomatic; you have to post things that are actually important to you. Too many people worry about offending others; you'll find that even if people hate you, they'll still friend and follow you if you have something interesting to say. As such, you can't afford to take the neutral ground; even if you're a moderate you need to take stands on things, something, and revel in it. If someone hates you and threatens you, then just block and/or report them; you don't have to listen to them. So if you want it to work, use social media to make a point, even if it's just that you like really bad movies.

What Does This Mean To You?
You want a way to market your comic and social media is a great to market it. You need to pick which platforms will work for and focus on them. Then you need to make sure that you use it to establish that you are an actual person; it may be cynical, but people will buy from people they know more than they will from they don't know and it's up to you to be one that they know, even if they hate you. Maintain your accounts by posting often and regularly, and you should be able to make social media work for you.

How Comickers Create A Business Plan

A lot of artists suck as businessmen. They just don’t want to deal with the business side of art; they don’t want to deal with the math and the rules, and it always makes them feel a little dirty.

Well, they need to get over that.

The first step is to create a business plan. You don’t have to make it really complicated and you don’t need a degree in economics to do it; it’s actually pretty straightforward. The plan just sets down what your basic goals are and how you’re trying to accomplish them. You don’t need to make it formal; you can set it up on a whiteboard.

[A whiteboard may actually be best for some people: It makes it all visible and allows you to check things off the list as you accomplish them. It also allows you to change things quickly, allowing you to adapt to changing situations as needed.]

At its simplest, a business identifies your goals, your marketing strategy, and any challenges you foresee. By setting these down on paper (or other medium) you are better able to plan ahead and deal with challenges as they come up. You should not be afraid to change this as you change your goals, how you do business, or if new challenges present themselves; this is your document so feel free to make changes as you see fit.

Business Plan Basics

The first thing you want to do is set basic goals. You don’t have to be grandiose; just make the goals straightforward, like how often you plan on putting out your comic on which days how big your buffer is going to be, and how long until you basically get enough strips together before you feel comfortable tying it all together and turning it into a trade paperback. Not everyone’s goals are going to be the same, but you need to set some sort of goals if you want to move forward.

You also need to set some sort of goals when it comes to how you want to get out the news that you have a comic and when it updates. This marketing plan. should include social media, but should also include comic ranking sites; even if you never really get high up into the rankings, it does help getting your name out there.

You want to figure out merch; this is how you plan on making money from your comic (advertising, shirts, a trade paperback, using it as a portfolio). You should also consider these prints and posters; too many great artists forget that their fans want to see what they can do and that means artwork. The key here is that you want to define how you plan on making money just so you basically have a detailed out what exactly you’re planning to do in order to make money.

[Even if you’re doing this a writer, this is important. Just as an illustrator is looking at print-on-demand sites, you should be looking at freelancer sites and blogging, as well as how to monetize your blog. Even a Youtube channel can work if you have something interesting to say.]

And then you want to look at your challenges. This can be a lack of money, resources, legal issues, pretty much any potential issue that can come up. This can be your need to pay for convention passes, printer ink, even allowing for software or hardware upgrades; anything that can possibly be a problem needs to noted here so that you can better deal with it.

So…What Do You Need Again?

Ultimately, a business plan is your pathway to the success of your comic. You need to establish goals, how you plan to make money from it, and what challenges you foresee; the business plan establishes these and how you plan to conquer them all. So even if it’s just something on your whiteboard or it never leaves your computer, you need to establish some sort of plan to succeed. You can’t succeed without a plan, so make sure that you have one.

How To Find Inspiration

Here’s he deal: I can tell you what inspires me or I can tell you a lot of inspirational sources. It’s easy to tell you what has inspired me, but it’s almost impossible to tell you what’s going to inspire you; every writer is different and has their own different perspective and point of view on things. Because of that the stuff that you find really interesting won’t be the same thing someone else finds interesting.

So realize that just because something inspires me it may not inspire you. In fact, what inspires me could actually create a block in you. Nonetheless, let’s look at what inspires people and hope something in my approach helps you.

The Places to Find Some Gold

There are some places where everyone finds some inspiration. The first places you should try are having a conversation with someone or reading a book. You should be doing a lot of those anyway. Conversations are important because the best way to learn dialogue is to listen to what other people are saying. You also need to be reading books in the first place, not just for your own personal enlightenment and education but because it’s necessary to see what everybody else is doing and how they deal with whatever problems they encounter.

Conversations help inspire us because sometimes we get into a cool groove and start exploring things, be it philosophical questions or interesting situations. Those conversations exploring what people would do in specific situations and how they would deal with them sometimes inspire us, as writers, to see what would happen. We do that by taking the ground covered in the conversation as the starting point and go from there, and then write about the problem is solved.

Reading is always going to be a great source of inspiration, and not just fiction. Sometimes when we read we get curious about how we would handle something, if we could have done it better or explored it further. It becomes a challenge to us to do better than the other writer. Other times we will read something that arouses our sense of curiosity or sense of wonder and we feel the need to explore that. If we read an article on octopus intelligence, for example, we may be curious what an octopoid civilization would look like or even what they could create. This is why so many writers read history and science books and articles; there’s a lot of inspiration to be found there.

Some of My Inspirations

If you can find inspiration in a book then you can find inspiration in the movies, and I’m lucky in that I’m child of the 1980s; there’s a lot of great inspiration that canbe found there. One of the things you see in a lot of 1980s movies was the dreaded strip poker scene. The only problem is that you saw the beginning of the game, you saw the ending of the game, and sometimes you you saw a little bit as middle but you never actually saw the whole thing. Well, that’s what inspired me to do a strip poker script where you actually followed all the way through the entire game, and where the players actually discover something about themselves.

Remeber what I said about conversations? On a discussion board we were discussing “titles that would never be made into comics” and somebody suggested a really obnoxious title: “Sex Percussions”. I decided that this would be really cool name for something and it would eventually become the script for a web comic involving three elemental mages each of whom had power over a different element, a local forensics mage, and a hermetic mage. So you know, weirdness.

My person favorite idea is based on a throw-away concept in a role-playing rule book: It pointed out that a psychic detective would be able to put a group of supers in their place if they got out of control just by doing his job. I used that as the basis, had the collected secrets dispersed in order to distract the heroes from a crime going down, threw in a sibling rivalry, and just went with it.

And Then There’s Los Lobos Rojos….

Then there’s when you combine different sources of inspiration. “Love and Rockets” is arguably one of the best independant comics there will ever be. I sincerely love looking up anything by Los Bros Hernandez and that comic is definitely something you should try at some point. However, and this is the important part here, is that it’s grounded heavily in the Mexican origins of Los Bros Hernandez.

There’s a lot of really cool movies all about bands. So at some point it sort of clicked that I can do this really cool script about this rock and roll band that is just beginning; for some reason I decided to use “The Chipmunks Movie” because the idea of two bands going at it felt sort of natural. And I decided that certain scenes had to happen, scenes based on certain movie scenes or band stories. And then I gave it a Mexican twist. And a sweat lodge scene.

I never said you had to stick to one source of inspiration per work. If you have all sorts of ideas that may not work on their own, just throw them together and see what happens.

As you can see, you can get inspired by just about anything. Sometimes it’ll be a walk on the beach where you overhear something and that something will stick in your head until you do something about it. Sometimes you’ll read a newspaper article that hits you in the right way. So when you think you’re lost and have no idea what to write about, just step back and go do something else. You’ll be surprised just how quickly you’ll find something.

PS: Always keep a notebook on hand. Since you’re never sure when inspiration will hit, it’s always useful to have a way of recording the magic when it happens so you don’t need to recreate it later. That notebook will save a lot of frustration later on.