Welcome to Part Two of my arts
practice blog post where I’ll navigate through my experiences over the last
6-10 months in establishing and running an independent comic studio. So this
post should hopefully help anyone looking to start up a new artistic endeavour
regardless of what category you fall into be it comics, illustration,
photography or whatever you’re into.
I guess I’ll keep the legal focus
on the steps I had to go through to set up my studio in Australia but I’ll also
be talking more generally about the things that have come up that I have and
haven’t anticipated as well as the whole financial/marketing side of everything
I have to do to keep it all running.
The first thing I wanted to do
was create a name, or what my lecturers called a ‘brand identity’. With the
name finally chosen I had to secure it by applying for an ABN and then
officially registering the business name. When building my website I decided to
do it myself under the belief that it there were already 30,000 people doing
webcomics around the world then why couldn’t I be one more of them? I spent
about 2 weeks learning Wordpress and the Comic Easel parent theme but I had
some previous experience with their control panel when I maintained a project
blog site for an animation class at uni. If you’re considering Wordpress I’d
recommend the same thing by trialling their free online blog software at www.wordpress.com (not to be confused with wordpress.org
with which you’ll need a paid-for web hosting service).
I don’t know any coding so my
efforts in getting everything to look the way I wanted was largely an
experiment and trial and error. The forum that Frumph (the developer of
wordpress and the Comic Easel theme) maintains was a great help and he’d get
back to me within several days with the answer to my problems. Click here if you’re stuck and you’ll be
redirected to where I found everything I needed to get my webcomic site off the
ground.
My desk can look pretty crazy with
the deadlines that I keep so anything to help my creative process along really
helps (post-it notes!). To the right is a general day for me drawing page
layouts and trying to finalise my final pencils.
Keeping a blog is hard work and
making sure the pages update correctly and on time takes a lot of discipline.
What I did at the beginning was counter-productive but I only found this out a
while later. I used to write a blog post every week and once it was done I
would post it online. I kept this up for maybe 3-4 weeks before realising that
it was too much of a strain on my time and what would end up happening was that
I’d leave it to the last minute and just upload what I had at the time. After a
while I learnt it was better for me to write down everything that would be
happening over the next few weeks schedule them accordingly up on the site so
that they would update automatically. This helps free up my mind to think about
other things and now the process is far more enjoyable for me even if there’s only
a few loyal people reading each week. I still have yet to figure out what my
actual reach is on a week to week basis.
As much as I’d like to believe
it’s all about the comics, sometimes (well most times) it really isn’t. There’s
promotional material to be made, posts to write and updates to be done that are
just as much work as the actual creative process you need to go through. In my
opinion they are definitely a constant and ever-present drain on my ability to
work consistently. I factor it in so that when I don’t feel like drawing I’ll
write or design something commercial instead like a new business card, logo
redesign or online banner ad for my Facebook. It’s worth noting that I based
all the promotional materials I made around what I would need to have with me
at a comic convention exhibition so I knew everything I did would be used
somewhere down the line at some point.
I’ve had ups and downs in terms
of my abilities sure but that’s the nature of the game I guess and jumping into
deep water never really phased me (even though in my real adult life I am a
very poor swimmer). One way that I was able to plan out my future goals was to
apply for grants and fill out their giant application packages in the hopes of
receiving funding. I applied twice, once in September 2012 and then again in
February 2013 – neither was successful. I put a lot of time into these
proposals and even though I was unsuccessful I still ended up with a refined
plan that I’ll be following for the next year and a half so I encourage
everyone to at least try and depending what happens you’ll be glad you did or
you’ll be that much more focused an determined. Besides if and when you make it
big it will all make for an interesting autobiography.
Now we come to the part where
I’ll explain just how the heck you plan a book for print all by yourself within
4 months for your first convention... I won’t lie, it’s freaking hard. I have
neglected so many friends and daylight in order to get The Darkening Issue #1
out on time. One solution I was willing to try was to pay for studio space in
which to conduct my work. Being able to make what I do feel more like a 9-5 job
made me that much more productive. I rented a space out at Marcel Studio in Mt
Lawley (http://marcelstudio.com.au/)
for three months and during that time illustrated, inked and toned all the
interior pages you see in the book.
The
technical side of putting a physical book together is pretty daunting
especially when you have no idea how it will print. I had to go back to the
first story, The Face of Death and reformat it to fit the correct template
settings and just make sure everything would follow the guidelines set out by
my printer. For those wanting to know who I went with and why, I chose Lulu.com
as my printer because of the wholesale cost price per book, community service
and customer support plus the fact that the turn-around time for 50 copies was
3 days plus a week to ship compared to 2-4 weeks to print and anywhere between
2-6 weeks to ship from the competitors I looked at.
Financially
I’ll just say that until the book was ready for print I had no income and
supported everything I did with the money earned from my regular day job, and
even now this is largely unchanged. A benefit to registering my business name
properly is that everything I do for it is tax deductible and it gives me some
time to develop what I’ve already created and turn it into something more. I
keep my finances separate from my personal ones and I have a business
transaction account to keep track of things and when it comes time for tax you
can be sure I’ll be hiring an accountant to look over my books because I have
more important things to write and draw and do!
But this post has rambled on for
a while longer than I thought so again if I’ve left anything out let me know
via email at marcus[at]dichosis.com and I’ll be more than happy to help. I’ll
end by saying that the future is looking bright and there are a few deals and
opportunities that are hovering around the place that will be announced as
details are confirmed. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading and don’t forget to check
back at www.dichosis.com as it updates Tuesdays and Thursdays
and as always I can be reached through www.facebook.com/dichosis.
- Marcus
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