One thing I have discovered this year is, that s much as I love designing and drawing, it doesn't feel quite the same when done for someone else, or because I 'have' to. Through this realisation, I have decided that trying to work for a company or freelance would not be the best of options for me.
If I had to pursue some kind of career in art, I think that something that allows me to create me own work and so have more freedom would be best. Things like Redbubble, although not very profitable, do help with this but if I was to go bigger, Self Publishing is probably the best thing for me to look at.
Self Publishing means more freedom, and working on your own terms, which is great. This does mean a lot more responsibility and risk though, as I would have to spend a lot of time and effort in advertising/marketing and physically creating the product.
The actual physical creation of a product may not actually be as big a problem in current times, with the rise of digital publications and comics. Digital products can be much easier for some people to access, faster and more convenient and means that things don't have to be created and posted which means less risk and more instant sales. The problem with this, is that not everyone wants to pay for a tiny file; if there is nothing physical that the customer is receiving, many do not feel that it is worth it (which I think is part of why comics sales are not suffering too much with the introduction of digital comics).
Many webcomic artists create their comic and mostly generate income via adverts, and then move on to merchandising once they have a decent sized following. This can include producing a finished webcomic as a printed comic/graphic novel, which has worked great for Noelle Stevenson's webcomic Nimona, which was then nominated for an Eisner award. This method slowly builds up a following over the years creating an instant market for the comic, even if that isn't necessarily as large a following as regular comic books. Stevenson's comic was published by HarperCollins, which does most of the work that someone would have to do while self publishing, but this shows that putting your work out there and creating something that could be self published may garner the attention of bigger names and companies that could help take away some of the stress of self publishing.
Being published by someone else does mean that if the comic is already online, it would have to be taken down, which could lessen the traffic to your website. Self publishing means that you can essentially do what you want, and in fact you may need to keep a comic online to ensure that people are aware of it, and if they already know the content of the finished product, they may be more willing to take the risk and buy it than if they couldn't read it before hand. I think that if I was to consider this method of creating a comic and self publishing, I would want to have the whole comic finished and online to lessen the stress of scheduled posting for a webcomic. This also makes it easier to ensure that the whole comic flows well both storywise and visually, as it is often too late to change things in a webcomic when some pages are already uploaded.
An important thing that I would need to get sales either way would be a way of of being noticed and heard, which s best done by building up a following on social media. Producing art that is similar to the sort of things I would like to sell is a good idea to keep the audience's interest, even if this includes some fan art, since that is easy to find and shared very often on social media sites.
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