Weekly Update - 63 (Patreon)

Happy Monday everyone!  There is internet, the builders are slowly getting around to fixing everything else that's still covered under warranty.  I'm getting back into an art routine.  All is well.

Comic this week - It seems likely, but I'm going to have to crunch pretty hard today and tomorrow to get it done.

Poster Progress:

Kiera - Still just needs some finishing touches.

Max - Needs lines.

Riley - Done and posted!

Drawing - Page 102 and Kiera poster, it's so close, I might as well get it done.

Playing - Cyberpunk 2077

Rambling (and oh what a ramble today is):

I dunno... feel free to skip this one.

I've been thinking a lot lately about feedback.  I've said before that sometimes it feels like creation is a very lonely process.  I spend a lot of time in my own head, with my own thoughts, slaving over conversations and dialogue structure and plot and trying to come up with important character moments that feel meaningful and impactful when they occur.  Effectively, it's all just a lot of talking to myself, spending all my time in my own head, for hours and hours for months and years... but I'm just a person, nothing special.  I'm flawed and I'm kind of dumb and I'm forgetful and I make a lot of mistakes.  The plot is multi-faceted, and I might be writing while focused on one element of the plot while failing to keep in mind another element that has been, until this point in the story, far more visible and important to my readers.  Bringing in some outside thoughts and opinions can help remind me of the things I SHOULD be keeping in mind, even as my focus constantly shifts towards telling the story I intend to tell.

Feedback is essential for a creator to create the best product they can.  Some of you might be aware I have a background in the video games industry.  During that time I learned just how crucial it is to gather tons and tons of player feedback during the game development process. Creators often spend a lot of their time laser focused on specific elements, exhaustively working to make some specific element perfect.  It is a rare kind of person that can produce a masterpiece in a vacuum. Even those who make games solo are usually constantly gathering feedback from the people close to them, such as their friends and family, to keep them on the right track.  But solicited feedback has a very different result than unsolicited feedback.  Friends and family will tailor their responses to answer targeted questions, or they will sugarcoat negative feedback.  Unsolicited feedback is raw, unfiltered, sometimes cruel, but often it is incredibly valuable.  Sometimes someone who isn't as absorbed in the project can come along, look at the creation with fresh eyes, and point out that sure, this new enchanted sword the developer made IS super awesome, but maybe it doesn't even make sense for the hero to have a sword at all.

Knowing all of this, I've been making efforts in various places to solicit feedback while I work on God Slayers, but there's a lot of different kinds of feedback.  We track reader statistics on the main site via google analytics, and in all my postings across the internet my effort has largely been to sort of funnel all my readers to godslayerscomic.com.  (Not only because we track statistics, but because my husband made the site from scratch, and it gives us the greatest potential of providing the best reader experience because we have total control over how the site displays across all devices and aren't beholden to any other sites' formatting.)  Based on the stats alone, I can estimate that we have a slowly growing following of a couple of hundred readers.  The numbers ebb and they flow, but over time, it continues to trickle in a positive direction, and we can see that while a large chunk of those readers are finding the site for the first time, many of them are returning again and again.

But numbers... are one thing.  I'm almost certain that of these two hundred or so readers, they have opinions and thoughts about what they are reading... And yet... I don't know how to hear their voices.

I was whining a little bit on my private Twitter this week about how my efforts to solicit feedback so far have gone largely ignored. Especially during this move, this past month feeling overwhelmed and distracted, I've been craving someone to come in and kickstart my train of thought by asking a question about this story I've not thought about before.  I can ask targeted questions of my friends and family, but their responses will only ever focus on the thing I'm asking, which is the thing I'M already thinking too much about. I need someone to come in and hit me with questions out of the blue and get me thinking about the parts of my lore I've NOT spent hours and hours worth of thought on already. To force me to answer questions I've left unanswered or forgotten.  Only in that way can I flesh out the peripherals of the story more than I would in isolation.

The "simple" solution would be to open up comments on the main site, where most of my readers dwell.  Ack, what a nightmare that would be, though.  Not only would it be a huge headache for my husband, but instantly the site would be assaulted by bots and spammers galore, comments would require moderation, costing my time and energy, and even still, most readers probably would not take the time to type out a sentence or two's worth of opinion because of the effort involved.  And when I say effort, I'm not trying to imply anyone is lazy.  How many times I have spent an hour or more typing out a comment on a youtube video I liked only to get it perfectly right and then chicken out and not submit it.  Posting a comment or asking a question is, on a slightly smaller scale, just as stressful as posting a creative work.  You are emerging from the safety of the shadows and opening yourself up to scrutiny from strangers.  So I get why most people don't want to say anything.  Even just hitting a like button on social media is signaling to all your friends and family that you like something... and maybe in the case of a dark, gritty furry webcomic called God Slayers where the very first chapter contains copious amounts of profanity and not one but two instances of fecal humor, maybe you'd rather they didn't know.

On that note though, we could maybe add something simple like a little +like or a heart button at the bottom of each page on the main site, to help track which parts of the story people like more than others, but we already kind of see those trends as I watch the ebb and flow of reader numbers and return visitors swell any time Max is "on screen," so it's really questionable if the value obtained from such a thing would be worth the effort for my husband to implement it.

So this is getting too long, and I don't even know what I'm saying any more.  It's too long for me to even go back and try and reorganize in a better, more coherent way.  Maybe I shouldn't post it.  Maybe no one will read it.  Maybe my time is better spent drawing instead.
This is all just a long-winded way of venting about the frustrations of gathering meaningful reader feedback.  I guess I shouldn't feel too bad... webcomics that have tens of thousands of readers seem to still only get like, 7 comments at most, consistently.  Doing some quick math (note: I'm bad at math), based on the number of readers I estimate that we currently have, I probably earn approximately one comment every 14 posts or something like that.  ... I think I'm ahead of that curve at least.

It took me two hours to write this.  I should have been drawing instead.  Thanks for reading.