How do you make money by giving it away? Phil and Kaja Foglio are living the answer.Better than that; in this interview at ICV2, Phil Foglio gets into the hardcore numbers of their studio (the 2 features he draws, money, print run, work schedule, number of unique visitors, distribution, etc.) and why they went from a monthly comic book schedule to putting it on the Web every week, with a physical, paper book of the comic produced about every year.
And by cutting out the production of a monthly comic book, Phil has more time to draw, producing 6 pages a week.
" ... [W]e figured we saved around $20,000 a year by not having to produce the individual comics. Production time… I’m not just talking about printing, but paying for our time and the time it took to format it. Because then we’d have to re-format the same material differently for graphic novel format, which was the final form.
"We’ve been doing it for four years now, and at a very conservative estimate, I’ve got 270,000 readers."
Hat tip to Comics Reporter!
They had me at counterintuitive.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, that's some great deep info that, unfortunately, will probably do little to quell the print vs. webcomics melee.
Hey, that's an idea for a video game! Print cartoonists vs/ web cartoonists in a fighting game called Artful Kombat!
FUN!