See if someone makes a promise and doesn’t make it nor explain why he couldn’t, that’s enough for me to no longer feel I “got my money’s worth.”
But, then again, I didn’t give him any money, so I don’t really care. I just care that the comic is so slow, which makes it less pleasurable to read.
Oh, I do care that the comic is slow, and I would much prefer that it be more timely (or at least more regular). But I don’t feel entitled to a timely, regular comic.
I got four books and a refrigerator magnet, which is what I feel like I paid for. If I’d been paying specifically for him to do the bonus PDFs, I’d probably be more upset. I have stopped reading the strip for the time being and plan on just ordering the sixth collection when it’s done, if it’s ever done.
I still feel that he would be better served by getting a couple of comics ahead of himself, then releasing them at a more consistent schedule, even if that is slow, than this totally random schedule.
I think he is dragging out both the story and the schedule in order to sell more merchandise over all. Once the story is over, I would imagine the merchandise sales will slow down more and more.
But dragging out the story hurts sales. People stop reading it and stop ordering merch. When he gets done with this story, he can work on a different strip and make money off that.
I’m not sure he realizes this. A while ago he posted something to the effect that he usually has several things he can do on a given day and usually chooses one that will make money in the short term. Which is always something other than working on the story. That’s fine to an extent, but if the main story suffers because he does that too much, he’s going to lose money in the long run or even the intermediate run.
The same could be said of most webcomics. Some authors get it, and have the discipline to make it work (Howard Taylor, the Foglios), but most don’t.
I’m pretty sure that new columns generate traffic which generates sales. He’s obviously struggling to keep up, for reasons he hasn’t shared.
Internet critical mass is a weird thing. Burlew is proving that he is not an exception to the rule of online content creators. This happens all the damned time - an artist/writer/whomever struggles for years and then, suddenly, is making money hand over fist. Content almost inevitably suffers.
Content creators don’t have any special affinity for business, and there comes a point in any successful online endeavor when you either have to learn it or else hire somebody who can do it for you (as always, see Penny Arcade for the best-case scenario). Rich has done neither. He’s just a regular dude whose hobby turned into an internet juggernaut that has people throwing money at him.
He’s figured out that so long as he puts out just enough online content to keep his fans around, they’ll keep throwing money at him for physical stuff. He’s not a jerk - it’s just operant conditioning. If anything, it speaks well of him that he hasn’t done another Kickstarter.
Howard Taylor is justifiably proud that his seven-a-week Schlock Mercenary web comic has not missed a day since it started in June, 2000.* There was a time or two he commented that he was worried the hopper was less than four but not recently. I read it for the humor and some good science-fictional concepts of his.
*If you start at the beginning instead of jumping to book ten like he suggests, it takes about nine months for the artwork to improve.
I don’t think this is the case. If anything, I feel the content has gotten better.
I think what’s happening is a lot of readers don’t take their own reading habits into account. Burlew has been producing strips since 2003. A reader who discovered the strip around 2010 had a seven year archive of strips to read. He could read them one after another right up to 2010 and then suddenly he had to start waiting for the next strip to appear. A reader summarizing the strip in retrospect in 2017 might claim that the first half of the story moved along rapidly but the second half of the story slowed down.
I dunno, if you’re doing a strip every couple of weeks (or once a week, at best), then you have to think about pacing. The crew has been on the airship after the extended fight with Durkon at the Godsmoot for a year now, real time. And the current random encounter has been going on since, maybe, August of 2016, during which, half of the strips have just involved the NPC crew of the Mechana arguing amongst themselves. So that’s about two years of drawn out fights with no actual plot advancement. It really does feel like we’ve lost the thread here.
But that’s just a result of the production time for the strips. The pacing problems you’re describing don’t exist in the story itself. Nobody complains about the pacing being off if they’re reading one of the books. The current scene, with two separate fights and a mutiny occurring within it, has been contained in twenty strips.
Which, I guess, would be OK if I was guaranteed to live long enough to read the eventual book, I guess. But I’m fast approaching 60, so I’d like to see where this is heading, already.
Bad enough I only have a 60-40 chance of reading the final chapters to Rothfuss and R.R. Martin.
It’s back.
I don’t have the numbers so maybe each recent strip has been bringing in the same traffic as ever. Maybe more. I do know that the strip these days ("these days being a year now) only get a few responses in this thread where they used to get a page or more of chatter. On other forums I visit, the OotS threads are all but abandoned. Someone, every couple of weeks, says “New strip” and there’s maybe one response. Partially because there just isn’t much to talk about when nothing happens and partially because it feels as though people have written off trying to follow it.
Again, maybe my impression is way off and these strips are as popular as ever, but it doesn’t feel anything like that. At the end (whenever that comes) when we read them as a finalized work maybe it won’t seem so bad but right now it seems to be breeding apathy and loss of interest.
Woo hoo! The O-Chul PDF is out.
<happy>
That’s great! I had been wondering when he was going to be getting the next update for the comic. It has been quite a while, so I thought perhaps he was injured again. I decided to look for his twitter page, which is something I never do. I found his page, only to see that he just posted about the O-Chul PDF 7 minutes earlier.
So, yay! Hopefully a regular update very shortly!
He says in the accompanying email, that his plan is to work on the free comic for a while, now. So I’m hopeful that will pick up.
Just finished reading the O-Chul story. Loved it! I’ll have to read it once or twice more to pick up all the nuances though, no doubt.