Author Archives: Lars Martinson

[ Buy My Digital Comics for 99-cents in the iBookstore ]

My foray into the world of e-comics has been an experiment. I figured I’d give my books six months, and let my sales dictate what I did next:

1. If sales were terrible (like a few dozen books sold) I’d see the writing on the wall and give up on the whole thing.
2. If sales were okay (hundreds of books sold) I would keep experimenting with digital comics and see where they took me.
3. If sales were good (thousands) I would redouble my efforts, and make finishing new digital books a focus.
4. If sales were great (ten of thousands) I would seriously look into switching to a half-time job (as opposed to the full time day job I work now), so I could devote more time to cartooning.
5. And if sales were spectacular, (hundreds of thousands) I’d take another stab at cartooning full time and see if I could make it sustainable over the long haul.
6. And if sales were phenomenal (millions) I would buy a solid gold jet-pack and eat nothing but caviar for the rest of my life.

Okay okay, the latter half of the list are total long shots. But that’s probably for the best, since gold has a low melting point and I could get seriously injured if my jet-pack melted away while I was flying around in a caviar-induced stupor.

But I digress. Realistically, I figured six months of sales would fall somewhere between a few dozen books to maybe… I dunno, a couple thousand or so? That’s a huge range I know, but since the whole digital comics thing is new to me, I’m not really sure what to expect.

Now that May has come and gone, I have a full month of sales data under my belt. While there’s still another five months to go in my half-year time frame, I feel like I have enough info to draw a few tentative conclusions. So after one month, where on the sales spectrum did I fall?

I’m already firmly in the second tier, with 443 e-comics sold during the month of May.

I mean, okay, they’re not Harry Potter numbers or whatever, but not too shabby for a first attempt, I think! Even if I didn’t sell another e-book for the next five months, I’m already in the “provisionally keep at it” sales range.

So what will “keeping at it” entail, you might wonder? I have four main things in mind, which I cover in a blog entry next week. This will include a couple of totally thrilling announcements, so try not to get too excited, everyone!

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(This comic is available on the iBookstore. Click here to buy.)

Introduction
This is a bit belated, but let me briefly introduce this comic since I didn’t do so in the first installment of this preview.

Young Men of a Certain Mind is a 44-page comic I did in 2003 (just before I started work on my graphic novel Tonoharu). It is a account of the year I spent working at a four star hotel as a night bellman prior to coming to Japan to teach English.

Or I guess I should say a *fictionalized* account; I took tons of liberties with chronology, and generally exaggerated things for comedic reasons. For example, I’m not *quite* as much of a bitter crank as the main character of this comic (or at least that’s what I tell myself).

I’ll admit there’s really not much to Young Men of a Certain Mind in terms of story. It’s more supposed to be a slice-of-life type thing more than anything else. But for a comic that’s almost a decade old, I still think it holds up. It’s the oldest comic I’ve done that I can still read without cringing in embarrassment. (How’s that for a ringing endorsement! Buy it now, folks! Ha… ha…)

Well, I guess that’s enough foreplay. Here’s the second part of the preview:

Continue reading “Young Men of a Certain Mind” Preview (2/4)→

Introduction
My two new e-comics (available for 99-cents each on the iBookstore) were experiments on a few levels:

1. I wanted to see if I could create a worthwhile comic quickly, rather than endlessly laboring over it (like I do with the images in my graphic novel Tonoharu.)
2. I wanted to see if reading a comic could be a pleasant experience on a smart phone-sized screen, if you took the limitations of the device into consideration when you created the art work.
3. And finally, I was curious to see what effect offering the work online for free would have on sales.

I’d like to think that all of these experiments have been relatively successful, but the one that I’ve been the most pleasantly surprised by is the third one.

I started selling the two e-comics on the same day. For one of them, The Kameoka Diaries, I put almost 90% of it online for free beforehand. For the other, Young Men of a Certain Mind, I’ve never put any of it online at all.

I sort of figured that Young Men of a Certain Mind would outsell The Kameoka Diaries, since the former was 100% new material whereas the latter only offered a bit of original content. Much to my surprise (and delight) the opposite has happened. The shared comic has always outsold the unshared one.

Now I’ll admit this is hardly a scientific experiment, and that “correlation does not imply causation” and all that. But the thing is, I like to share my work. And to know that doing so doesn’t kill sales, and in fact may help them, is great.

So I’ve decided to try sharing Young Men of a Certain Mind as well. I’m going to put the majority of it—80%—online for free, and see if that helps/hurts/doesn’t affect sales. I’ll be doing it in four parts which will go up every week, the first part of which is this one.

So without further ado, here’s the first 20% of Young Men of a Certain Mind: Continue reading “Young Men of a Certain Mind” Preview (1/4)→