Page #5
As you’re probably aware, our webcomic The Road to Jove is up and running, and we’re about halfway through the Prologue: In Crow Country.
I’m getting a lot of questions about it and I thought it was probably time to shed some light on a few of the recurring ones. Firstly, thank you if you’ve been reading and enjoying it so far. The feedback’s been awesome considering how new it is, and how little we’ve promoted it through traditional webcomic channels.
Here’s where we’re at right now.
- The Website. We know, we know, it’s very bare bones, but the fact it exists at all is an engineering marvel. I wanted to say thanks to a surprising number of people who’ve come forward and offered to do us a website for free. That’s incredibly generous and super-humbling. The prologue was a soft opening so we could get our wheels spinning, and we’ve got a new site in the making by the wonderful gentlemen at 49th Floor. Everything should be ready for y’all when Chapter One: Black Feathers goes live in about a month or so.
- Physical Copies. The intention was always for RTJ to be a webcomic, but there’s a constant stream of requests for physical copies – and that’s something a lot of webcomics do at various points in their run, too. We’re looking into it. It’ll definitely happen at some point, in some form, but we want it to be great. Throwing up a temporary website for the prologue is one thing. Releasing and distributing physical copies of something like this will need a fair amount of work. tl;dr – Yes, at some point.
- Is It Free? We’ve both had various friends in marketing shout at us about this, as well as other artists and writers saying we’re insane for doing this for free. Not because any of those guys and girls are tools, but because it’s taking a lot of work and a lot of our time, as well. We’ve even had interest already from traditional comics publishers, which is sort of scary. David and I went into this as endearingly naive as you can imagine about the whole process, which is probably understandable, so we had no idea just what a bitch it was going to be on our free time. I mentioned elsewhere that we now have over 100 reference images and a novel-and-a-half’s worth of notes for the project (about 150,000 words at this point). The prologue going online first like this was our canary down the coal mine to see how everything worked in reality. That means it’s free, but it’s also very, very slow. We can’t sustain more than one page a week with all our other work commitments, so we’re looking into the possibility of monetising it in order to speed the hell up. That may take any number of forms since we’ve got a few decent options on the cards, but the most likely angle will be Patreon, like X-million other webcomics. If we do that, RTJ will still be coming out for free but voluntary monthly patronage will speed us up significantly, and come with a bunch of extra rewards. More on that later, if and when we do it.
- How Much Do You Bring It Up? Not very much. Weekly update links and links to interviews, as you’d expect. Recent changes at BL have a tighter lid on current projects so I share my novel stuff a lot less on social media, but I have a personal rule of keeping self-promotion to only about 25% of blog posts or Facebook/Twitter updates at maximum. (Yes, I’m aware this is much less than a lot of writers. Shut up. I’m shy.)
For the record, here’s our first RTJ interview with Liam Salt at The Cult Den, and I keep forgetting to mention that David’s doing commissions for kicks as a change of pace, so hit him up if you want something done.
