Catching up with Matt (Patreon)

Hey dudes! Matt wrote up a thing for you guys, which you'll see below, but first! A reminder that our book release party is NEXT WEEK!

Oh Joy Sex Toy: Volume Three LAUNCH PARTY
6-9 pm, November 9th,  2016
Books With Pictures
1100 SE Division Street,
Portland, Oregon 97202

Ok, now on to Matt's update for you :D It's some Real Talk about making OJST and evaluating what needs to freshen up after three years....
-------------------------

Winter’s finally coming around and with it work is starting to settle down a bit (albeit for a brief period). The Kickstarter books are being sent out, our work with Limerence is minimal demanding, and with our ramp up toward a vacation we're packed with guest comics. It’s a good time to take stock and reflect.

Something that's been praying on my mind this past year has been how formulaic Oh Joy Sex Toy is becoming for us. We KNOW how to write a review and how it ought to read and be drawn. We feel like we have the recipe well and truly mastered. It’s GREAT, but also a bit dangerous: the comic can fall prey to being repetitive and stale.

Our hits have been on a steady small decline this past year. There's no concrete reason for it. We attract A LOT of visitors and people are still really enjoying the content: they send us lovely notes and still buy sex toys. But it’s not something we can overlook as a statistical blip: our readers don't visit every week any more, they only pop in for something that really grabs their attention.

It's hard to know exactly why this is happening and that's really that important too: it’s OK to be grey and fuzzy about these things, it helps us look at and analyze more of the comic than just focusing on what might be the immediate problem. It makes us look at the whole of the comic.

I think one of the best online comics around is Girls With SlingShots. I say this because Danielle worked on updating it for 11 or so years and her readership climbed and climbed. It’s a huge success in my mind, and I think a great reason for this is how -invested- we all became with her characters and their stories. Each post was great in its own, but we all checked in each week to see the characters live for another moment. We wanted to be a part of their lives.

Oh Joy Sex Toy has, by design always been a bit removed from character development and story. We wanted to step AWAY from over-sharing autobio because (as I think Erika’s discussed before) of some of the threats we started to receive during DAR!. OJST is a very curated snippet of our lives, its an emphasis on our thoughts on any given item, not an emphasis on us as people. I mean it’s unique in that regard: we REVIEW things, we educate, but we don't have a 'story' that you see in most other comics. I still think people can feel quiet connected to us through all this, but it lacks that hook, it lacks development: even if we DID share more of our lives we're not THAT exciting any more, we're 30-something work-a-holics!

So recently we've been discussing new things to try on OJST. I don't think we've come up with any decisions. It’s all just food for thought, like all good things it needs to brew. We want to change something in the OJST recipe to inspire more investment.

We're not really looking to fictionalize our lives or over-share ourselves. That side of things feels good. But I think we want to find ways to have more 'US' on display. I personally think some of our best comics are the adventure ones: http://www.ohjoysextoy.com/category/comic/adventures/

But they are also some of the hardest ones to do: they take more than a week to do!

Things I’m tossing around my head at the moment:

- We could do a semi monthly update, or check-in comic. A moment with Erika and Matt where we talk about US and OJST, and just the shit we've been up to. Maybe we talk about the trials of our month. Maybe we just have a 'coffee chat' about nothing. Maybe it’s just us talking about US?

- Maybe we do more silly comics, slices-of-life that are devoid of meaning but are silly fun. Stuff like 'that one time I sharted on a bus' or bullshit like that.

- Erika and I could force ourselves every month to go outside and do SOMETHING and the make a comic about it. Like forcing ourselves to a strip club or swingers club. Even if we're not in the mood, we can do a comic about the experience. It might lend itself to seeing our personalities.

- Perhaps we just try to change our reviews a bit. So it’s half story and half review: really cut down on the toy and talk about US around the toy. Like 3 pages of the comic could be us on the couch, or biking about town, with the last 2 pages talking about our actual thoughts on the toy.

- We could maybe expand what we share? But that's something we are wanting to avoid.

There's also stuff I’m not adding to the list: like adding fiction to the comic, or new characters, or others. That stuff just isn't inline with OJST. We're a comic about Erika and Matt: two relatable sex toy reviewing folks. We don't need to move away from that.

There’s also the option that I just out to more aggressively market and advertise OJST. That the recipe doesn't need tweaking, we just need to get the word out. While this might be true, I do think it’s healthy to consider changes to the formate and develop what we have. It keeps the job interesting for me and Erika. You gotta remember we do this EVERY week, gotta find ways to keep it fresh for us too!

Anyway, This post isn't a call our for advice or feedback. It’s just a post for you fine folk to see what's going on through our heads. We want to encourage people's investment into OJST. Im hoping 2017 will be a different and feel creative and new for us and the readers.

--Matt