Stalled Trek 2012 —Finished!

[fae_alba]

I kind of went that route with The Wannabe Pirates and Greyhawk and the Starbucklers, Paul. The original sites were built ontop of Wordpress, using the comicpress plug-in. I did my advertising through Project Wonderful instead of Google Adwords, but the results were pretty much the same. Small page views equal small advertising returns.

 

Add into it they were mostly images (the comics themselves) and I found that I needed to go back and transcribe every strip in order to show up in search engines. I worried over it for awhile, using tools in Google Adsense to find keywords and terms to try to improve things, but the bottom line is you gotta' have lots of eyes on your page to make that model work and my stuff wasn't attracting them.

 

I tell you one thing that is frustrating, YouTube won't put ads on my Stalled Trek video because they don't believe I own the material. It's not so much the money, since it hasn't garnered that many views, it's that they are in a sense, accusing me of wrong-doing. I suppose I could try to push the matter with them, but it hasn't seemed like a high priority.

 

Instead of the comic strips, how about a true blog, posting articles/discussions on the creation, writing, whatever. Place adwords on those posts. On youtube, build a channel that links back to the blog, that way you drive traffic/pageviews. The comics can create a following, the blog entries generate the revenue. Create a facebook page for it, google+ authorship, etc. It's not easy or quick, but it can work.

[largento]

All true, except the comics never drew a following. :-) That one step breaks the whole chain. If The Wannabe Pirates had ever drawn a large audience, it wouldn't have been too hard to monetize it. The ads would have paid decent, I'd have gotten decent sales from the books and possible other merchandise.

 

I had lunch with a couple of other cartoonists last week and we were talking about that daily grind of creating a strip a day. We had all done it at one time or another and all of us had only lasted about a year to a year and a half. Hats off to Schulz for doing it for 50 years, but I don't have it in me. Plus, I like stories with beginnings, middles and ends. The idea of doing an open-ended story that just bounces from chapter to chapter, doesn't have a lot of appeal to me. It's fun at the beginning, but then you realize you are forever trapped in the middle of the story.

 

Right now, I'm focusing on finishing the Wobbling Dead. I've run into too many obstacles and now just need to forget about everything else until I reach the end.

 

After that, I'm going to take a long, hard look at what I want to do next. There are many things I've thought of doing and I'll be free to explore them. Right now, I'm feeling like one of those slaves chained to the oar of a ship. Every time my mind wanders off from the task at hand, I get a whip across my back. :-)

[largento]

So, more than three years later, Stalled Trek gets a movie poster! :-)

 

I decided to make a poster for this and The Wobbling Dead to hang up on my office wall. (If I ever get an office again.)

 

 

I haven't started the poster for The Wobbling Dead yet. I'm glad, though. I've got a new computer, which I think is going to make rendering high res images much easier. I just did a test render (Capitan Zach from the Extras DVD) and it took 1:34 on my old Mac Pro and 0:31 on my iMac. A giant improvement.

 

 

[itsjustme]

Great poster, Mark!

[robcat2075]

Excellent work!

[johnl3d]

Nice

[Rodney]

Ah, life is good again. Mark Largento back in the game... even if only for the posters!

 

Great poster... great characters! Great fun.

[largento]

Thanks, guys!

 

There's still a lot I want to do with A:M, but I've decided to focus on another bucket list item and am writing a novel. I optimistically think it'll take less than a year, but we'll see. Although the idea for it has been brewing in my brain since 1986, I've imagined so many different variations on it, that I'm having to weed through them all to find the version I'm going to tell. I'll likely only write one novel in my life, so I kinda' want to do it well.

[robcat2075]

I bet that will be a good novel.

[NancyGormezano]

If you are not already, now might be the time to do National Novel Writing Month

 

It is November ya know. From what I understand, you'll most likely not really have a finished version at the end of the month, but you'll have a version that is extremely editable.You've been thinking about this for 29 years, so those ideas should just plop onto the page no sweat.