How to work on your comic full time?

[Darth_Biomech]

I've read many posts touching the subject, but so far it all seems to be rather cruel Catch 22.
You need for your comic to earn you pretty serious buck so that you could spend all your time on it. But you need to spend all your time on it in order to get good quality, consistence of updates, and all other things that gets and keeps the audience's interest, and therefore money.
And at the same time everybody repeats that the comic industry, and webcomic niche specifically, is basically an oversaturated landslide of content, competition is extremely fierce, getting noticed at all is an impossibly hard task, and you can forget about earning any sort of revenue from your comic until your reader count won't start to be measured in tens of thousands. And only the most popular of the most popular can brag about their webcomic being a legitimate putting-bread-on-the-table work.

So you MUST work on your comic full-time if you want it to ever become popular and gain enough revenue.
But you can't work on your comic full-time if it isn't generating enough revenue.
And the only hope is to become a fluke and get trending and basically become popular by accident.
So what can you do?

[snowy]

It's not that there's nothing to do but work hard and hope for the best.
It's just that every time there's a roadmap to success, it instantly becomes so crowded it no longer works. I've long since given up trying to discern a pattern or method.

I have heard some sink-or-swim stories that ended well, but if I did somehow manage to live on ramen for half a year and worked on nothing but my comic, and then it STILL didn't fly.....I dunno, but that might be pretty damn depressing.

[Darth_Biomech]

I have heard some sink-or-swim stories that ended well, but if I did somehow manage to live on ramen for half a year and worked on nothing but my comic, and then it STILL didn't fly.....I dunno, but that might be pretty damn depressing.

Yeah, those stories are almost always a survivor bias type of thing - for that guy it worked, and we will never learn about thousands of guys that didn't make it.

[JeanGuillet]

the roadmap to indie comic $$$ success looks like it's now kickstarter/indiegogo. Build your skill slowly as you build your audience. When you do a print run, do the livestream circuit. Bring something to the entertainment table. This all takes time, but you can do it part time.

I heard something recently from the webcomics.com guys (great resource) that doing your own print run is the new savvy financial thing and getting a traditional publishing contract is the new vanity press. I thought that was profound. Sky's the limit now, brb building aeroplane...

[JRHoch]

You pretty much summed it up. Have you considered helping out at a soup kitchen?

[SleepingPoppy]

So you MUST work on your comic full-time if you want it to ever become popular and gain enough revenue.

This isn't true and it's not the advice I see most people give. By in large, most of us have full or part time jobs outside of our comic. You shouldn't work on your comic full time unless you have the monetary support to make that possible. It's true, though, many of use spend all of our available time outside of work/necessary duties, on our comic, to keep up the content and the grind.

I would always suggest each person has to assess their life and decide for themselves how much time they can dedicate to their comic. You will need to work hard at it, and your art/writing, if you're aiming at eventually being a full time creator, but you still have to behave responsibly and take care of your regular life responsibilities.

Even if you're working a day job full time, you just work out what comic schedule you can manage, and do that. As long as you're consistent and you make an effort, you'll be on the path.

[HomeBrewComics]

If anyone is a Dwarf Fortress fan, you guys might have seen a guy called Kruggsmash around. He basically draws what is happening to his Dwarves in the game, since its main text and random symbols.

I remember watching his videos waaaay before he started to draw, when it was just him editing his videos and telling a story as he played. Very fun to watch. He didn't have much of a following at the time (if you see how Dwarf Fortress looks, you can understand the niche fan base it has), but he kept doing his thing.
Later he started to add little doodles of what has happened, his fort, the Dwarves and monsters that interacted with it and so on. Just something to add a little more interest into his videos that he enjoyed doing. This later became very popular, and he started focusing on doing more drawings for his game, as well as upping his story telling.

A year or two later, he is making something like $4,000 dollars a month on Patreon. It has dropped to $3,000 now days, but that is the fickle beast that is Patreon. But from a guy who had zero intention of making it big (as in wasn't begging for subscriptions or spamming us with ads), he has done amazingly well for himself.

The moral of this story? This guy played a game that he loved, and drew things for his own enjoyment. He kept to a schedule, but didn't treat it as a job or came into making these videos with the goal of making money off it.
But because it is niche community and literally no one days a Dwarf Fortress Let's Play better then him, he got popular. He didn't chase the money or a career, he saw the opportunity and took it when presented.

[ble]

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[Dreams-of-Gaia]

As the others have said, it is hard to know what makes a comic successful and what not.
I'm with @Kazsup on that one: the comic I am publishing right now is already my third one and I'm still not making any money of it. I've sold copies of a one-shot for $2 each, but haven't made more than $30 maybe.

I find the most frustrating part of it not knowing what is actually not working: like Kazsup said, is it the quality of the art? The story? Socializing with others is not enough? Is it because we don't spend too much time on social media? Maybe a youtube channel would help? I wish I could know.
People sometimes say: "Your work is so good! You are so talented!" But still it doesn't seem to be "good enough" (maybe?) because no matter how hard I try, nobody actually reads it or follows it.

I don't know if it is a matter of just "doing what you love and not caring at all", because I've done than for many years and still seem pretty lost. I just hope it has nothing to do with luck because I pretty much suck at it hahahaha xD

So, the thing is, it is not a good idea to try to do comics full time until it is already paying off the effort. In the meantime, and in order to balance everything, it is possible to make a simpler comic with less pages, simpler lines and colors, easy to follow story, so it doesn't take much time and still keep the updates consistent.

[OttoGruenwald]

Unless you're one of the lucky few to be able to make more than pocket change off of webcomics, you don't. You treat it as a hobby.