Howard Tayler, creator of Schlock Mercenary, presents his ideas on how to be a successful cartoonist on the Internet to the 2013 Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in Salt Lake City, UT.

1. Successful Cartooning in the
Digital World
“successful” = “making money” “digital
world” = “the Internet”

2. Three Guideposts
• Own Your Content

3. Three Guideposts
• Own Your Audience

4. Three Guideposts
• Own Your Career

5. Who Owns These Now?
• Newspaper publishers own the audience.
• Syndicates may own the content.
• The person signing the paycheck you can’t
live without owns your career.

6. Taking Ownership of the Career
• Make sure no single paycheck (“revenue
stream”) is one you cannot live without.
• A good rule of thumb: no single source of
revenue should account for more than 40% of
what you make.
• Corollary: Have at least three.

7. Taking Ownership of the Content
• You need to be able to:
– Re-publish comics you’ve drawn once
they’re published in papers
– Host a gallery of your work on a site
you own
– Write and illustrate things not owned
by your paper or syndicate

8. Taking Ownership of the Audience
• Brand yourself with your name
• Own the dot-com of that name,
or a simple derivation
• Post regular content to the
website at that domain

9. Monetizing the Audience
• Point of order: “monetizing” is not a dirty
word. The people who have paid you in the
past used it, just maybe not around you. You
took their money.

10. Monetizing the Audience
• Sell things to them
• Sell access to them to other people, so that
those people can sell things to them

11. Monetizing the Audience
• Sell things to them
(MERCHANDISING)
• Sell access to them to other people, so that
those people can sell things to them
(ADVERTISING)

12. Advertising
• Turn-key Networks
– Google Adsense
– Pulsepoint
– Project Wonderful
– Amazon Affiliates
– About a zillion others
• Direct ad sales
– This is hard to set up and maintain.
– I’m an artist, not an ad salesman.

13. Ads
Content

14. Some Site Stats
Data from Google Analytics for schlockmercenary.com
for the period of May 26-June25, 2013

15. Those Numbers Distilled
• Four-point-eight million pages delivered
to browsers each month.
• At an average of three ads per page, that’s
15 million ads per month.
• I make an average of $4,000 per month on
ads.
• I make $0.0008 per page-view
– That’s $0.00026 per ad.

16. Merchandising
• POD Print collections (Print On Demand)
– Low risk, low profit margin
• Offset Print collections
– High risk, high profit margin
• Digital collections
– Low risk, high margin
• Subscriptions (paywall, premium content)
• T-Shirts
• Something Else. Something Awesome

17. In Order To Sell Things…
• You need to figure out what your audience
wants to buy
• You need a storefront
• You need to spend time filling orders and
doing other “customer service” stuff
• Yes, it is totally possible to outsource some of
this. But be sure you still own your career.

18. My Merchandising, Distilled
• We ship to about 2500 customers each year
• In 2012, store.schlockmercenary.com grossed
$139k in sales
– After shipping and manufacturing costs, the net
was $82k
• Each paying customer spent, on the average,
$55.60
– …contributing $32.80 to that net

19. Further Distilling…
• 134,000 monthly readers
• 2500 customers per year
• $180k company gross
– After paying postage, manufacturing, hosting,
warehousing, and my colorist…
– My wife and I take home about $75k
• Each reader yields an average of 55 cents per
year to my dinner-plate

20. The Key, Then, is a Big Audience
• If I had a guaranteed method for growing a
large audience on the web, you would have
paid a lot more money to hear me speak.

21. Growing an Audience*
• Create Engaging Content
– Deliver it where that audience hangs out: Facebook,
Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Google+
– Brand it so they come back to you. Your name and URL
go everywhere your work goes.
• Give them a reason to follow, friend, “like,” and
bookmark you
– Website exclusives
– Archived content
• Win the heart of a signal booster
*results not guaranteed

22. Summing Up
Own Your Content
Be able to do whatever
you want with it: Re-
post, re-publish, re-sell,
recycle…
Own Your Audience
Your name, your domain, your site
Sell them to advertisers
Sell them merchandise
Own Your Career
Start growing an audience now
Develop at least three revenue streams
Learn all of the things