Feb 2016
4 / 6
Feb 2016
Feb 2016
donathinfrye
Feb '16

@Michaelson mentioned something in another thread, and my follow-up to the community feels like it should be in its own thread.

Definitely! I actually like Patreon quite a bit. I just haven't figured out a good way to roll out vertical-style mobile-friendly comics on Patreon, so knowing that I'll probably be relying on Patreon for my primary monetization path informs me to write/design in a page format style ...

Unless some folks have figured out how to do the vertical scroll style comics well on Patreon, in which case I'd love to see some of them in action!

So, in short, is there an effective way to use Patreon to present and publish vertical scroll comics? Any tips? Any examples of vertical scroll comics that do it well? Designing vertically is new to me, and very exciting, but making smart business decisions is a big part of creating a new comic (or so I hear!)

I'm beginning to realize that choosing the right platform and executing your design properly is one of the most critical decisions that you can make if you're just starting to break into writing comic books online.

  • created

    Feb '16

  • last reply

    Feb '16
  • 5

    replies

  • 2.8k

    views

  • 1

    user

  • 7

    likes

  • 3

    links

AnnaLandin
Feb '16

It's fairly simple - unlike Tapastic, who encourage you to break very long vertical comics up in chunks, on Patreon you can only upload one image per post, so you simply.... make a vertically scrolling comic and post it on Patreon. It will make scrolling through your archive of posts on Patreon a bit time-consuming, especially since Patreon doesn't have a search-function for posts, or any way to organise posts in a folder-system, but it works.

I do my Q&A-comics and my between-chapter sketch-comics in a vertical format and post them on Patreon, and it's been working out okay so far. I can't link you to any of them, unfortunately, because they're all locked for backers.

A few things to keep in mind generally for vertically scrolling comics, regardless of platform:

1.) Try to format your panels in such a way that I as the reader can see the top and the bottom of the panel without having to scroll down. Unless you're trying to do an intentional vertical camera sweep (to show, say, someone falling off a cliff, or something dropping down a hole, or falling from the sky, or whatever), you're going to want your readers to be able to scan an entire panel in one go.

2.) Try to not make the episode/comic strip too long. Scrolling is fine, but readers won't want to scroll forever to get to the comment field/author's note.

3.) As always, study other vertical format-comics, and see what works and what doesn't. Find ones you like, and try to figure out what makes them work. In my experience, humour-based comics usually do better in vertical format than more drama-based ones, but there are some great vertical-format drama-comics too, so it's all a matter of figuring out how to make them work.

donathinfrye
Feb '16

Really interesting and helpful, thanks! : ) Do you have a suggested length for Patreon vertical scroll images that you've found balances your needs and keeps the image from getting so large that it's sloggish to load? 4k? Longer?

What I love about Tapastic, for vertical, is that scrolling/swiping downward will load up the next comic in chronological order automatically, which makes for a very nice user experience with vertical scroll. The Patreon user experience, I worry, is just more clunky with vertical.

Would knowing that you were going to rely on Patreon for monetizing a new comic book push you away from vertical and towards page format? Or do you feel like vertical can be just as successful on Patreon as it is on Tapastic?

AnnaLandin
Feb '16

I've found that anything longer than, say, 2500 pixels starts feeling a bit too big. It loads fairly quickly, but anything bigger than that will make navigating your archive feel clunky.

Here's quick crop of what the Creator Posts-view of my Patreon looks like:

As you can see, the Q&A-post is taller than the regular pages, on the left, so it requires scrolling down a lot more to find the clickable link to the post itself - it's about 3500-pixels tall, and stretches for the height of about two and a half regular pages.

Definitely! Patreon is NOT optimised for webcomics, so I don't use it as any kind of main platform. I just use it for extra material. The archiving system is NOT a good equivalent to Tapastic's scrolling system.

My comic4 is page-format because that's what I've always drawn, and I always intended to collect it in print to sell at cons. Patreon has always been a way to fuel all my creative endeavours - comics, illustration, etc., etc - so it's quite separate from my main site and from Tapastic. My formatting decision has nothing to do with Patreon.

As I said, the format of your comic matters less than what content you put on Patreon. People seem most interested in sketches and concept art, extra comics (I do Q&A-comics monthly, and post one extra black and white comic between chapters), and early access to upcoming pages, in that order.

fanyart
Feb '16

I had a big problem with this too! I had patron early access for my vertical format series Trivia from Nature5, where episodes are literally seamless paintings some 40 000 pixels long when resized for web. It really made my Patreon archive chaotic, so I soon started to just post a preview/teaser image with a link where patrons could download the comic in PDF. Now with the new Patreon design the archive is just one scrolling column (used to be two side by side), so I really recommend posting just previews with download links like these, or else scrolling through your post archive will become hard, especially if your comics are long like mine.
I also recommend saving the comics into PDF instead of JPG for download because most default image viewers aren't comfortable for scroll-reading.

Good luck! ^^