Dan Goldman talks about the various incarnations of his Red Light Properties webcomic that have led to its new home at MonkeyBrain Comics:
There’s been waves of incredible excitement and incredible disappointment. Like I said, be nimble and keep changing when something isn’t working: I’ve worked with a sponsor (Tor.com), I’ve produced free daily webcomics (redlightproperties.com). Last year, I switched off of the webcomic free model and I opened up a storefront on my site to sell digital issues in CBR and PDF formats. That was not as successful, but that opened my thinking up to having the series available on the Kindle Fire and Nook and Kobo stores using Graphicly’s distribution system. Again, it all sounded like a great idea, a great experiment. Also not one that yielded fantastic results.
See, the hardest thing for me is that I love to write and I love to draw and I love to tell stories, but marketing yourself and promoting yourself and building a community around it is a whole other job, and it’s not a job I really enjoy doing. I don’t want to hawk what I’ve done when my brain’s already thinking about the new stuff. If I’m going to take away any lesson from the past two years, it would be that it’s okay to have help. Where I need that help is getting the word out there, engaging with the community of readers that would be interested in what I’m doing if they knew it existed.
RLP is something that feels like it’s been on the fringes of comic culture for a long time (It launched on Tor a few years back, to my recollection), which is a shame; Goldman’s a particular talent, and one deserving of a lot more attention than he’s gotten historically. I really hope that the move to MonkeyBrain – The first issues of RLP are released through them on ComiXology today – works out for everyone involved.
(And don’t forget; it’s still November, so all MonkeyBrain profits from purchases are still going to the Hero Initiative.)
