During this break I’ve been thinking some deep thoughts about what I want for Adrastus this year. One of the things that I really would like is to connect with my readers and turn Adrastus in to a community. I’d love to have great conversations here on the site and get to know those of you who stop by every day to spend time with my little project.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is keeping me from starting conversations is actually something that I thought was going to help me in the long run, and now I’m trying to figure out how to balance things and not make this too much of a hardship so that I can’t keep up with it. With that in mind, I wanted to ask a question to you the readers.
I’ve found that having a large buffer is very helpful to me, of course. But I’ve also found that perhaps uploading that entire buffer and letting it auto-update is not the best way to go about the updates. At least not on a day-to-day basis. It makes me lazy and I end up with just the little generic “Drawn in Manga Studio EX4” comment in all the blog posts. My idea was to have that and then start a discussion up in the comments, much like what Thom over at Shadowbinders does on their pages. But that doesn’t happen often, because the pages auto-post when I’m in bed and I don’t get to the comments in the morning usually because I forget about it.
So what I’m thinking is that I need to stop auto-queuing the pages. I can put them up either before I go to bed or first thing in the morning, but that is going to mean a change in the schedule and that the updates aren’t going to be up at the same time all the time.
Here’s my question, my little mecha-heads. Would you rather have a closer community, with conversations and more information from me, along with timely news, or would you rather have mechanical-precision updates that you can rely on all the time and you know for a fact that they will be up at exactly the same time, every day? I know what I’m leaning toward, but I want to know if you guys have any preference on this.
Honestly, I do not like the auto update. I just read comics from twitter and if I’m not engaged with the person, I tend to miss it. I scroll my timeline as far as I can but 99 perecent of the time I don’t see yours on there. I update at the same time every morning (auto 6am) but I don’t post it to social media until I am awake and ready to engage people in conversation about it. (not that many, lol, I don’t have the readership you have) No schedule is gonna really mesh, we all have different ideas, opinions and times we do things but..hmm I don’t know that’s just my thoughts. I hope that kinda helps.
It does help, thank you for the input! I have the auto-updater there because I always forget to post to my social media, but maybe if I’m putting the page up fresh in the mornings it will be more “in my mind” to promote it too.
I favor the commentary. I never pay close attention to update schedules anyway, since reading pages as they come via RSS is so much more convenient.
Good to know that someone’s using RSS, that’s how I favor to read my comics as well.
You of course need to do what’s best for you and the growth of your comic.
I don’t think I could do without the auto-updater personally. I have so much going on in my head day to day that I would completely forget to update a comic if the system didn’t do it for me. (especially with two full time comics to keep track of)
Of course to make it more “finger on the pulse” I tend to wait on the news portion of the update until the week before it goes live so I can get the latest and greatest news, updates, thoughts onto the news.
This helps me personalize it more.
I also use “Intense Debate” for my commenting system which emails me when people comment on my work and allows me to be notified so I can stay engaged with my readers.
Again, this works for me, but I can understand your dilemma with it, and the reasoning behind what you want to do.
I’ve never been a “update nazi” anyway. I enjoy the comic whenever it updates. Often times I do exactly what I’m doing this morning, checking my RSS feed to see which of the comics I follow has put an update in.
I (usually) get emails when there’s new comments through WP/ComicPress. Usually. Sometimes it hasn’t sent me an email, but those incidents are pretty few and far between. Again though, good to know that there are people using the RSS to check in! I never quite “know” how many people are actually looking or reading.
My name has been invoked!
My personal feeling on this is that the old mantra of updating at 12:01 AM doesn’t really apply much these days. Many of the biggest comics update at haphazard times, and it hasn’t affected their readership.
With social media, dedicated readers will know when you update. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Me? I like seeing the immediate reaction when we post a page… whenever that is.
I never get immediate comments so I guess that doesn’t matter much to me. XD
Can you do a mix of the two solutions? Like Darwin, I don’t think I could do page updates manually, but I completely understand how hard it is to talk about a page that’s been out of your mind for months. So I’d keep making the backlog, but maybe only queue the three pages you’re going to post for the week, and make it update a little after you wake up in the morning. Then you can start formulating what discussions you want to start that are relevant to the plot for each update.
I also kind of agree with Carlo that your midnight Twitter updates are kind of missable. If you were going to manually do anything, I would take that back, and give your tweet a little bit more of a flair than “New page of Adrastus”.
This might be the best solution, to queue only for the upcoming week and change the post time so that I can edit with some news/discussion if I haven’t already got something up in the blog post for the page. Definitely something to consider as a good “compromise”!