Endless Monday Monthly 3 Commentary and Email Distro Talk (Patreon)

(note: I accidentally deleted this patreon post and some really cool people were able to save me by sending me their email copy. score another for email. Sorry for the duplicate notification though.....)

The third issue of the Endless Monday Monthly has landed! You can read it here, if you haven't already.

I'm now working on packing the orders to ship out, hopefully tomorrow. People still buy the physical copies! Wow, they're so cool. I printed them all out and folded and stapled them before orders came in, and I only had the sales of the previous issues to go off of, so I hope I didn't make too many. Imagine me crying, sitting in a room alone with a pile of unsold zines. Might be a good Skye moment for a future comic.

It took a long time to make and it was hard work, but I had a lot of fun making it. It has more illusts and comics than previous issues. It was less focused on a particular topic, but I like each different part individually. The Tiger-chan interlude was stupidly fun to make. It doesn't make any damn sense. I think she's my favorite character now lol

The coffee shop in the cover was trac-err- based on a photo I took at my favorite local coffee shop.  I think it looks pretty cool, though. There is not a void into outer space on the floor. That part is made up.

As far as the ugly topic of "making money" goes, though, the zine is way more work for way less money overall than doing commissions. But I've accepted the fact that I'll be looking for another full time job again soon anyway, so I guess I'm no longer that worried about it. I'd rather continue working on my own material than spend time trying to maximize income and turn my passion into another job I burn out from. Maybe something cool will happen someday.

Email distro talk

TL;DR: Go here and subscribe to the Endless Monday email distro if you want! :D

You might have noticed the link at the start of the post to read Issue 3 was not to Gumroad like before, but to Substack instead. I've been thinking about other ways to distribute this thing, because Gumroad is clunky for actually reading it (although I do like the ability to pay-what-you-want), and it still requires me constantly posting on twitter that a new issue is out so people are aware (at the risk of annoying people who don't care).

I ended up sending out an "email blast" through Gumroad to people who had previously downloaded previous issues of the zine informing them that issue 3 was out, but I felt so bad afterwards that I decided I'll never do that again, because it feels like a tremendous breach of trust with Gumroad readers never having explicitly opted in to email spam from me (even though it's technically allowed due to the agreements of the TOS, etc etc, blah blah blah).

But it reminded me that I've previously flirted with the idea of an email newsletter, and upon doing some research I've found that a fair number of comics actually do distribute using email subscriptions through newsletter platforms (like Substack), and it includes paid subscription options for support and exclusive content. So I set up a Substack page, and people can subscribe there for every EMM issue to be beamed into their inboxes whenever it releases! And they agreed to it explicitly, so I don't have to feel guilty about being in their email inboxes! You can check it out here! Please feel free to subscribe if you like EMM!

As for the paid subscription content, I haven't really decided on it, but I'll probably post an exclusive comic every week, and a digest of weekly art and commentary. Basically the stuff that's already here in the Patreon, so there won't be anything there that's not already here. Unless you want to support me there too, which is like, very amazing and cool.

I'm a bit concerned that I'll lose people buying the pdf on Gumroad through the pay what you want thing, but most of my readers don't actually pay anything anyway, and I'm hoping that income from paid subs and generous supporters will remain consistent with the previous issues even with the email list. Whatever. I should think about the content before I think about monetizing it.

Anyway, it's also a good way to keep people who really care about my work updated in a platform agnostic way, because I can take the mailing list anywhere and email is probably not going to die out any time soon. Just looking towards the future, you know?

Next up, I want to draw more Tiger-chan.

Thanks for your support, as always!