July 2018 Update (Patreon)

It's been a while since I've made about post about the direction of Dawn Somewhere, so here we go:

First up, the comics are doing alright. They aren't growing explosively, but every new post is drawing a few more views and subscribers on Webtoons, which implies we're getting people and keeping them. Simiantelligent is our current leader, but Stebe is also doing surprisingly well.

I think the main appeal of Stebe has to be the weirdness, and of course Pencils' fantastic artistic skill really makes Simiantelligent work. Kit's Orphanage is lagging currently, but I took a very conservative approach to the writing for fear of overloading pages with dialogue. As we get nearer to actual points of conflict within the story, I've been seeing Kit performing better as well.

Pencils is nearly done with Simiantelligent - he hadn't been working on it for a few months, relying on a large buffer he put together before the comic's launch. Now that he's wrapped his work for IDW, he's back to the monkeys and also back to doing his own APA comic. That seemed to work out, so once this Simiantelligent comic is done, we'll take some time to set up another buffer for a second issue. The next comic will be about Rae trying to get a job at a movie theater, only to find the process a bit more convoluted and mystical than she expected.

"McSoys" is an adaptation from a screen play, so I'll try to write the second comic more with the comic format in mind, which should cut down on the number of pages absolutely crammed with words, words, words! There'll also be more action in the second issue, seeing as how I'm not restricted by the cost of animation.

In the real world, my wife Claudia is due to give birth to our son in less than two months. We may have a new life on our hands any time in the next few weeks! Originally, I believed I could finish two Stebes a week and still have plenty of time for other projects, but my artistic skill really wasn't up to that projection, so in anticipation of life changes I'm going to scale Stebe back to one post per week. I've been pretty busy lately, but with any luck I'll be able to build a buffer that may run past the age when a baby only sleeps two hours at a time. Maybe.

This is uncharted territory for me in life, and to be honest I'm pretty nervous.

In strange news, there's been a dramatic and sudden rise in viewership on our animation Youtube channel. Within three days, Youtube's recommendation algorithm launched viewership from a dwindling 6k viewers per day, to 12k. It seems the rise has simply plateaued now. What could it mean? I don't know. The channel hasn't seen viewership growth for more than three years, so it's a pretty unexpected thing to be seeing now. We're not being shared anywhere new, so I can only conclude Youtube themselves decided to make a change.

It might be a good time to float a new animation out there as a test, but it's pretty difficult to guess at what, specifically, the bot finds in us right now. Most of the promotion is focused on our Rainbow Dash Presents videos.

As for our financials, it's not looking like we'll be able to pay Pencils nor Copy full time any time terribly soon. The Patreon has been very gradually declining since July last year. The majority of our pony videos on Youtube have been demonetized as well. Put simply, I can say it's owed to not doing much of anything with My Little Pony for a year, but them's the breaks. Trying to build up original ideas is hard, especially when working with such few resources.

We're not throwing in the towel yet, though! While growing creative ventures is tough on a post-algorithmic internet, we've been bouncing ideas around regarding other revenue sources. Merchandise stuff, mainly, but we were also thinking about publishing the Simiantelligent book and seeing if we could get a few buyers.

As an aside, I also pitched myself as a prospective writer at IDW to see what they'd say about that. Pencils would like to do a proper comic together with me, and while it's still an unfamiliar medium to me, nothing ventured, nothing gained! I'm actually not sure how excited I'd be to write for most of the decades old properties out there right now, but they asked me for a sample of my work.

I sent them Stebe - heh. Don't get me wrong, I sent them some of the better comic stuff too, though little of it forms an especially powerful portfolio for me.

I would have turned me down too, but I'm sad to say I didn't learn a dang thing. I figured if I was given any reason for rejection, I'd get a bit of insight into what I was doing wrong and would have something to focus on while working independently, but it wound up being more of a polite deflection than a denial, which I understand is common in the creative industry since a lot of artists are sensitive. Plus it's not like you want to tell a guy his work is awful only to have him turn things around in a few years and land on someone else's doorstep.

So that's that! At the current trajectory, it is going to be important for me to think about what's next if Dawn Somewhere doesn't work out, or if I wind up needing more income. We've still got months if not at least a year still ahead of us, so don't panic! But it's a low point and some climbing needs to be done. Regardless, work continues and I feel like I've made some progress with my artistic skill. It'll take a bit for the comics to perform well - I'm fairly certain I ran the Youtube channel for at least a couple years before it felt sustainable, and I can't even say what the channel is doing right now, so with any luck, we may be on our way up yet!