Part II: Defining the Concept
Starting off, I didn’t want this to be JUST a webcomic. I needed a plan. I needed something that would be strong, well defined, and easy to communicated. I needed to define my brand. I knew I had to have a clear idea of my brand BEFORE I got started. I couldn’t expect to ask an artist to contribute to the strip if I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted, and where I wanted to take it.
So I started from a concept I’d worked on long ago. The focus was on the humans, not on the faeries, and it wasn’t comedy. The first character was this knight with a perpetual hard-on trying to find a cure for his ailment. (We see much of that character in Sir Thane, though he was a serious knight, not a buffoon.) There were several other characters I’d thought of, so I knew I had something I could work with. The only problem with those was that they were linked to a fantasy world, which automatically put me in a niche. I wanted something more, something modern. That’s when my focus turned to the faeries. They were really little more than plot devices, but maybe I could make them the focus of the story, and at the same time give them a more modern edge.
So I set out to write my bible. It took me a week or so, but I was happy with the concept. In there, the faeries were originally vain women from today (21st Century) who were punished for their sins by being turned into magical creatures that tormented humans. (There was going to be a bit about redemption somewhere in there, but I never got to that part.) They also didn’t REALLY have wings, it was some kind of magical contraption that would attach itself to their backs. That also got tossed out over time — mostly because it just didn’t seem that necessary. The important part, however, was that faeries were the critical catalysts for the stories. They would be the unifying thread between everything, so if I ever got tired of a thread, I could just toss it out and start another.
As for the name, I wanted faeries to be in there. I also remembered a line from one of my all-time favorite movies: Legend. This peasant woman, Nell, was cursing at faeries (early in the story), saying “Bloomin’ Faeries!” I thought that’d be a GREAT name, so I checked to see if the domain name was available — it was! So I purchased the domain and I was ready to go.
The next step was writing… which was easier said than done.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part III: Visual Concepts
I know myself: I write best when I have some kind of visual stimuli to inspire me. Thus, before I could put a SINGLE word on paper, I had to define my first characters. I was going to start with a fantasy setting, just because it’s easier to get started with the fun & magical stuff without too much exposition. I wanted the male character to be this dashing, handsome Disney-like prince, with more looks than brains. His name was going to be Tristan Thane. I wasn’t too specific about the faerie (yet). A faerie’s a faerie, right?
Step 1: find an artist.
That’s easier said than done. I didn’t want to partner up with anyone in this. This was going to be my secret pet project, and I didn’t want to and couldn’t) have anyone else be involved. If this was going to be an adult thing, I was going to keep that discreet. So I Googled for freelance artists. After a week or so, I found a very talented artist (Justin) to do some character designs for me. This is how Thane and Attitude (then named Fiona) originally appeared:
Not a bad start. We iterated on this a little bit and ended up with more polished versions within a week or so. I could tell Justin was very talented and professional, and that it was going to be a fun collaboration process. I started writing a few scripts, intent on building a buffer, when the first brick wall hit me.
Justin declined to participate in the project after all.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part IV: Finding an Artist
Brick walls, as my hero Randy Pausch used to say, aren’t there to keep you out. They’re there to test how much you WANT something.
Justin had discussed his participation to the webcomic with his wife, and she was uncomfortable with the concept. He did not want to do this without her blessing, which is a choice I truly respect. So I set out to find another artist and that’s when I discovered RRPennell. He had energy, a larger-than-life personality, and he really REALLY wanted to do this. So just to test the waters, I contracted him for a single test strip. I wanted the strip to be very hot and erotic, and I hadn’t written enough strips of the Thane storyline to be there yet. So I made up this bitchy little princess (Heather) and her brother (Albert), and I was going to have something very embarrassing happen to her. At the same time, that strip was going to be “the line” I would not cross.
So the very first Bloomin’ Faeries! strip ever made looked like this:
I thought it looked fantastic. RR’s art style was wildly different from Justin. Where Justin was clean and very commercial, RR was “dirtier” in all the right ways. Sure, you could tell the princess was attractive, but she wasn’t drawn with the same precision and human-like proportions. She was more cartoonish, and I thought it was fantastic! I could also see that RR was going to be very good with balloons and fonts, and that was going to really add to the humor I was going to write.
So we sealed the deal, and that was that.
But wait! I didn’t have a logo! What was I EVER going to do?
But that’s a story for another time.
Part V: Quest for a Logo
Since I wanted the art to be somewhat consistent on the site, I asked RR if he could make me a logo. We exchanged a few emails about it, during which he asked if I had ANY ideas of what I wanted. Honestly, I had only ONE idea, and I thought it was juvenile and lame: I thought the two O’s in “Bloomin'” could be turned into a pair of boobs. RR loved it and ran with it. (That was my first lesson that you sometimes need to go with the obvious and simple stuff. It works!) And this is how the logo you now know was born.
(There’s actually a bit more history around that. Justin had originally tried to make one, but that hadn’t gone so well. This is what it looked like:)
(Yes, that’s Attitude up there.)
So things were moving. We were in January of 2010, I had my artist, I had my logo, I had some scripts getting illustrated, and I was building a small buffer. RR was working out great and I was getting really excited about the project. Now all I needed was some kind of delivery system to put the comics out there. I needed a CMS (Content Management System) and I knew nothing about WordPress. Heck, I didn’t even know it existed!
I also didn’t have an internet host, and that was going to be a problem.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part VI: My First Hosting Service
Google is wonderful. If you’re looking for anything, you just Google the question, and answers appear. So in this case, I wanted the best hosting service out there. My search yielded a list of Top 10 providers for 2009, and InMotionHosting.com was at the top of the list. In fact, they’d been at the top of that list for a few years in a row. I got in touch with them, they helped me get set up, and that was that. It was REALLY easy! (Little did I know that their Terms of Service excluded adult content. What can I say, I was young and naive at the time…)
The service at IMH is fantastic and I would heartily recommend them to anyone. Any time you have problems or question, there’s always someone available (24/7) to answer the phone. They are professional, courteous, and efficient. And patient. Moving my hosting to these new servers wasn’t too difficult, and with their help I was good to go pretty quickly.
My first CMS was ComicCMS. It was childishly simple to setup, but unless you’re a CSS expert, it doesn’t look like much. Not being a graphics guy, I needed another solution, but I wouldn’t find that until a few weeks later.
With a sufficient buffer and a system in place, I decided it was time for me to launch. I chose to do it on the Monday, mostly because I was ready to publish on the Sunday. I also figured it’d be a good thing for people to start the week with: a fresh dose of Bloomin’ Faeries! when coming to work. I wasn’t quite so liberal with naked boobs in the beginning (in fact, you’ll notice RRPennell took great pains NOT to show any, at my request, and much to his chagrin). That (obviously) changed over time.
And so, on April 10, 2010, Bloomin’ Faeries! published its first strip! All I needed was readers.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part VII: Project Wonderful
As always when I’m stuck, Google came to the rescue. I searched for a cheap alternative to advertise my site, and found that Project Wonderful provide a… well, wonderful solution to this problem. Become a member and you can offer & purchase advertisement using their endless auction system. Great! I apply, only to be summarily rejected. The reason? I need to have at least 30 posts of quality (i.e. not 1-2 liners) so that I offer enough content to be eligible for PW.
Quick math: 1 strip (1 post) a week, x30 weeks, and we’re talking waiting almost 8 months before I can make ANY advertising.
Anyone who knows me also knows I’m not very patient. I tend to be ambitious and favor aggressive strategies. 8 months of just sitting around was not an acceptable scenario, so I started looking for ways around it. That’s when it dawned on me that 30 posts didn’t mean 30 comic strips. It meant just that: 30 posts. I confirmed it with Project Wonderful administrators, and they agreed. So long as the posts were good content, I was fine. So then, blog entries would be just as good as strips.
Great. I couldn’t draw, but I knew I could write. And so I did. I decided on the spur of the moment that Jaycee would be more than just me blabbing about stuff — he’d be an actual character, living in a world where faeries existed, and THINGS would happen to him and his friends. I started typing furiously, and at precisely 30 posts, I reapplied to Project Wonderful. I was accepted, and started investing around $50 to $100 a month in advertising.
And the readers came. At least, it looked like they did. I really didn’t have much in terms of tools for traffic/readership management, and I realized I needed to have some kind of measuring system. So I started Googling for that.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part VIII: ComicRank
I found several sites that offered ranking systems for comics, but they often felt inaccurate and could be “bought” through incentive viewing. I wanted something that would give me the time of day, not stroke my ego. Thankfully, I found ComicRank.com, which is dedicated to measuring readership, not traffic. I’m still not sure how it actually does it, but I’ve watched my numbers over the years, and it seemed to react properly to the flux that I was getting.
I started using ComicRank.com around May or June 2010, and watched my readership grow from a few hundred people to a few thousand people pretty quickly. In the section on Highest Moving Comics, I quickly found myself to be in the Top 3 every week, and in fact stayed in the top spot for many weeks in a row. I couldn’t believe how quickly people flocked to the comic, and my conversion rate was (and still is) well above 40% (considered a great rate).
My estimates were telling me that at this rate, I should be hitting 10k readers before New Year of 2011. That was really exciting. For some reason, a readership of 10,000 was a magical number in my head. If I could get to that, I had made it. Of course, the “big guys” have numbers that are WAY bigger, but hey, I was just a dilettante, right?
Around January 2nd or 3rd of 2011, I finally passed the 10k mark and I celebrated!
The celebration was short lived: on January 5, at 4:02 PM, I received the following notice from Project Wonderful management:
We are writing you to inform you that your ad boxes on Bloomin’ Faeries! have been marked for deletion in 5 days.
During a routine review of our publishers, this site was found to contain adult content, which is not permitted under our Terms of Service and publisher standards, so it will therefore be removed from our network. Any funds you’ve made with your ad boxes remain yours, of course! Once the ad box has been deleted, no future funds will be earned from it.
This notice is to provide you time to remove the ad box code from your pages in advance, so that blank ad boxes aren’t displayed after the ad box is deleted from our system.
Again, we apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you for being a Project Wonderful publisher. Please feel free to contact us at service@projectwonderful.com if you have any questions about this matter.
Signed,
Project Wonderful
http://www.projectwonderful.com/
That was the nicest “go to hell” letter I’ve ever received. You can tell the PW people are Canadians. We exchanged a few (very courteous) emails afterwards, and they felt really bad that they had to kick me out.They told me that according to the Terms of Service (TOS) with Paypal, they couldn’t allow adult content to publish ads. When I pointed out that other sites (such as MenageA3.net and Oglaf.com) had adult content and yet were allowed to keep on publishing ads, they explained to me that they were protected by a grandfather clause that had been agreed-upon with Paypal, and that after that agreement, they would no longer accept any adult-content publishers. Thus — I was out. And they genuinely felt really bad about it. They said they’d keep trying to find ways to fix that, but at that time, there was nothing they could do.
As a side note, at the time of this writing (April 2012), there were still no options for me to re-join Project Wonderful. I re-checked a few weeks ago, and while there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s still not much to go on.
Returning to ComicRank.com… A few weeks after that, I received a notice from ComicRank management that I had adult content, which was not allowed, so I would be taken off the boards. By that time, I had made the Top 15 in Most Popular Comics, which was fantastic! Of course, many of the “big guys” aren’t listed there (in fact, most aren’t), so that doesn’t say much. But there were a lot more people below me than above me, so that was really comforting.
But numbers are numbers, and they’re just a cold metric. Nothing is as exciting as hearing from someone you admire who gets in touch with you, and tells you he likes your work.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part IX: Exiern & Drowemos
I’ve mentioned before that Exiern (made by Drowemos) was one of the comics that inspired me in starting my own. As a regular follower of the site, I got to appreciate the (sexy) characters and their interactions. To keep advertising running, the comic stayed pretty clean and all nudity was censored with black bars, or cleverly placed speech balloons. If you wanted to see the higher-rez, uncensored strips, you just had to get a membership and get access to that, plus a bunch of exclusive content (bonus long-form comics, for starters). I thought this was an excellent idea, and I set out to create my own members area.
The plugin I opted to choose was s2Member, an excellent membership management system. There might be better ones out there, but I’ve been happy with this one.
I didn’t have much content initially, so I made the membership a meager $10 per year. After 2-3 months, I bumped that up to around $25 per year, which is still (I think) pretty cheap.
Then, one day (late Summer 2010, I think), a letter drops in my mailbox. It’s from Drowemos, creator and owner of Exiern, who comments that he’s seen my site, likes my stuff “and my hustle,” and wants us to talk about some kind of collaboration.
Wow. When you’re operating all by yourself and just look at some cold numbers in a spreadsheet, you’re never quite convinced that anyone is reading your material. To have confirmation, and from someone who’s been running a site like Exiern for years, that just made my day (heck, it made my week!!!). Honestly, I was overjoyed. I was noticed!
We exchanged a few emails, both of us meaning really well and hoping to collaborate on something, but it didn’t work out. Nothing bad, I just found myself struggling with how to approach creating a script with someone else (trickier than you might think), and fell mostly silent for a few weeks. Drowemos is a great guy and to this day, I feel really guilty that I couldn’t dedicate enough brain cycles to making this work — bud, if you’re out there and reading this, I’m really sorry!
At any rate, Exiern was a major influence in how I managed to monetize my site, and to this day we still have a good relationship. Heck, we’ve been trading banners for 1+ year, now, and I think we’ve both forgotten that it’s there. 🙂
Speaking of monetization, it’s a pretty tricky thing to do when you’re doing adult content.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part X: Managing Adult Content
After losing Project Wonderful, I began wondering how I’d be able to place ads on my site. I turned toward AdSense, which seemed to be at the top of everyone’s list, and I decided to take the plunge. It was pretty easy to setup and pretty soon, some money was coming in.
Around Spring 2011, however, I began receiving notices from InMotionHosting that my site was using too much CPU and I should consider moving to a larger one. Not long after that, I connected to the site, only to find it shut down. I contacted IMH tech support, and they told me that since I was on a shared server, there were certain limits to how much CPU power could be dedicated to my site, and that to maintain good performance for every other site on that server, mine had to be shut down until I could resolve the issue.
I tinkered around the site, streamlined a few things, shut down some less-than-optimal plugins, and the site was restored.
A few days later, that happened all over again. Further investigations (which led me to understand a bit more about the traffic management tools in CPanel) revealed that a big chunk of that CPU was due to high-traffic coming from a particular location. I blocked the IP, notified IMH tech services, and they restored me.
And again, not long after, it happened all over. We went through the whole process again. In the interest of full disclosure, I felt I had to let them know that this might be some kind of cyber-attack, possibly because the content of my site might offend some people. I explained that my site had some content that could be considered a bit adult, and that by the way it might contravene the TOS of IMH, but that it might explain the “attack.” To this day, I don’t know if this WAS an attack (it’s since stopped happening), but the technician I spoke to at InMotionHosting thanked me for being honest about my content. And shortly thereafter, I received a confirmation notice that I would have to find another hosting service since I was in violation of their TOS. I had about 10 days to get this done.
The first 6 months of 2011 had been pretty tough. I’d lost Project Wonderful. I’d been hidden from ComicRank.com (though I could still measure my audience with their counter). I was now forced to find a new home for the site. I did a lot of searching, and many of the hosting services that once allowed adult content had changed their TOS and now disallowed it. Finally, I found Arvixe.com.
The service at Arvixe wasn’t quite as prompt as on IMH, but they were amazingly helpful when it came to transferring the site to their servers. I was highly stressed, not to say panicked, at the thought of anything going wrong during the transfer. As a matter of fact, in an attempt to save a few user comments on a strip, I actually destroyed my entire database (wiped CLEAN) and gave them yet another panicked call pleading for assistance. They re-restored the site (minus the lost user comments), and I did the server switch. Users probably didn’t notice much of what happened. For me, it was a week of incredible stress.
Not long after, my AdSense ads stopped appearing on my site. After 6 months of problems with sensitive content, I decided not to take any more chances and switched to Black Label Ads, which turned out to be too adult for my taste. I then discovered JuicyAds, which were more to my taste, and saw some nice revenues come in (in fact, I was surprised by the initial numbers, which eventually dwindled to something more reasonable). I figured I’d stick with that from now on, but decided to give AdSense another shot in late 2011. That went well enough, until the predictable “eviction notice” from Google. I was in violation of Google’s TOS, so I had to remove all my ads, or risk having my account terminated. I promptly returned to JuicyAds, but also opened the possibility of handling advertisement directly instead of through a third party.
So today, I’d say about 85% of my revenues come from memberships, and 15% from advertisement. I don’t have much in terms of products to sell. I’ve tried using CafePress, but that’s been a total dud. I’m not sure anyone is very willing to wear or display merchandise about an adult webcomic, at least not without sufficient marketing efforts (which are skills I really lack at this stage).
I’d say I’m now fairly self-sufficient and the site is breaking even. After these first six months of 2011, it looked like I was into smooth waters once more and could keep things running for a good while at a steady pace. No more growth, but also no more major troubles.
That is, until I took a vacation in Cuba and all hell broke loose.
But that’s a story for another time.
Part XI: Hell From Cuba
May 2012. I’d gone through a rough project in real life and needed some time off pretty badly. Taking a vacation is supposed to be a relaxing experience. Due to some bad time management on my part, however, I was a little behind on sending Wondollar some scripts, so the latest comic wasn’t ready by time I left for Cuba. No worries, I thought, they have internet there and I should be able to do everything I do at home.
I hit my first snag when I realized how far behind North America Cuba actually is. The internet at the resort wasn’t WiFi, it was two little dinky machines from the 90’s that were blocked against any usage but browsing. I couldn’t even save a file locally, which meant I wasn’t able to update the comic on time. A few moments of panic later, I worked things out with Wondollar, giving him proper access and instructions to do it in my place. Everything turned out great and the comic was updated in the nick of time.
I should have left things at that and count my blessings. But somehow, I got curious about my Paypal account balance and decided to log in for a quick check.
I could not have made a more HORRIBLE mistake.
See, I’m not an American citizen, so I wasn’t raised in the hatred and fear of communist Cuba. It never occurred to me that checking my Paypal account from Cuba could trigger any kind of risk. Call me an idiot, I deserve it. Now I know. The moment I got to the main Paypal page, I received a very alarming