Blog 1-1-16 – New New Years’ Setup

Wow, it’s another new year already. Each year is just better than the last in terms of the amount of people viewing and enjoying my content, my interactions with people, and my own satisfaction in my work. Still, this is the first New Year’s in a while where I won’t be incredibly increasing my workload by announcing a couple of new comics. Indeed, this is the first year where I feel like I’m in a worse creative position than I was the year before. Meaning my update here will be rather tame, and have some of both the good and the bad.

First things first: let’s talk about comics. This year I’ve put 3 on hiatus, which has helped me, but I feel like it’s not as much as I really want to be doing. So this year I will be rescheduling the way things will be done. Instead of having 1 comic on weekdays and 3 each weekend day I will be doing 2 every day. The missing slots will be filled by Walking the Roosters increasing from 5 to 7 comics a week, as well as adding in a larger-format comic every week that could be a part of one of many stories. Also my Editorial comics, which I have not really been keeping up with, should hopefully fill in the remaining spot (if not, there will be something there, though). This new schedule will be viewable on the “weekly posting schedule” page shortly.

And now for the stuff not about comics. I will be ceasing to use most of the social media accounts that Dragon Co. uses for a period of time until I feel like they are relevant or are polished enough that I can be happy to look at them. This won’t be affecting everything: the main Dragon Co. Twitter and Facebook account/page will still be operational during this time, but Tumbr, secondary Facebook pages, and Google+ will not be active until the problems I am having with them can be resolved or there is demand for them to exist (which at the moment there is none, and I don’t foresee there being much for any but Tumblr until I can get things straightened out).

I will also be changing the “reviews” I have been doing (or trying to do) in the middle of the week. Instead I will be doing more of a short “Blog” post about one or a few of the many varied items in my collection (this is part of a larger project that I’m hoping to get off the ground). This might take longer to go into effect, as I haven’t been able to catch up on my written material as much as I would have hoped entering the New Year. In fact, I am very much behind in that regard and I will be working as diligently as I can to get caught up (but as one of my teachers always said “it is easier to keep up than catch up”). This process, which I optimistically thought would be finished by this time, might now take until the end of February to get resolved. But I do have every intention of catching up.

And that’s about what I’ve got. As always I hope you have enjoyed and continue to enjoy what I put out, and that you had a wonderful New Year’s Eve and will have a wonderful new year.

-Austin

2014 Site Update – Stuff For the New year!

Yeah! It’s 2014! And that means… it’s 2014. Well for me, that means some changes. Some are good, and some are… well “I” think they’re all good, because they make things better for me, but some might cause some inconvenience for your viewing, for which I apologize.

But to start with the good, I’m going to be doing a new comic! Yes, that means there will be 13 a week for all tastes, and some extras here and there. The new strip will be called 万年筆(man’nen’hitu): The 10,000 year brush. It will be about fountain pens, which I admit is a niche market, but no other strip will be removed or paired down to accommodate it. This is a straight-up addition.  Also, I will be working on a comic in a large format that will be more serious, but less frequent. And don’t let the seriousness fool you, it’ll still be a lot of laughs hopefully, but no dates yet. (万年筆 Starts this friday)

Back in November I released five new books in the fifth wave of my collections. Most of them are available at the Antelope Lodge in Alpine, while a few are also available in other spots in the area. But for those of you who are not near me I also launched an online store, where you can buy my books and a few other goodies. I recommend checking it out, but of course I would.

Speaking of updates to the site, I had to move all of my video content over from Blip.tv to Youtube, I have a blog post explaining this, but it means I’m going to start placing ads on previously ads-free videos.  That shouldn’t be much of a big deal with the way most online videos work now. But I will make sure that the video is at least a certain length (6 minutes or more?) before placing any ads, so as not to waste too much time. Also, I am now going to be placing (relatively few) ads on the site. You can see one in the sidebar already, and I will be putting more out to see where they are the least intrusive over the coming months. I hope you understand that I do need to pay for this site eventually somehow, and right now I’m not cutting it.

Ads might also be going up on the next place I’m going to mention, The Dragon Funnies, which I upgraded to a full site this year, but right now I need to get them up andy working. As for my content on the site, the new comic won’t be added, and some of the other comics might be removed as well, but this does not mean the site is going away. For every comic I take off I will be looking into putting comics from other talented cartoonists up. I want the site to end up like the newspaper comic section I would make, and so I intend to find the best content possible for it. It is also possible to submit a comic for the site, though if I don’t have any personal contact with you at the moment the most I can offer is exposure, which isn’t the best thing to offer right now, so, yeah. I will be working on a better way to get new comics up on the site while properly compensating their creators.

Also, come this new year I will be attempting to use more social media, posting as much content as I can on Twitter and Facebook, so if you feel the subscribe system on the site is a bit clunky, then you can follow there and get the highlights.

Now for the only bad news. Due to the high volume of content I produce, I have already stopped posting on redundant sites like the individual blogs for each of my comics. And at the end of January I will be ceasing posts on the Dragon Company wordpress site and Art Supply Critic WordPress site. All of that content is already posted on my main site, so nothing is going away, I’m just making it less of a hassle for me to post the content, and like I said, links will be posted in social media if you don’t want to subscribe.

All in all, I hope 2014 will be a good year, and it looks like it will be, so I hope to see you all there, and I hope y’all have a great time.