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Happy Lunar New Year!

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greeting

 

 

Hey everyone!

First things first – Happy Lunar New Year – here’s hoping for some good fortune for all in the Year of the Monkey!

Now, there isn’t going to be a page update today – Aimo is on travel for the holidays, but we did want to offer all of our readers and supporters a link to our Patreon where you can download free wallpapers of various sizes based on the lovely image above.  Yes, I suppose it is possible to outmonkey a fox. Gideon seems rather intrigued, anyway.  I love this image – it feels like a tarot card, doesn’t it? Seven of Monkeys?

At any rate, just a quick thanks again to everyone for reading our story over the last few years – we really appreciate it, and thanks for continuing to support us in any way you can – word of mouth, social media shout-outs, donations on Patreon, clicking on ads over at Tapastic – all are great ways to help us out – we couldn’t do it without you!

~~ Allison & Aimo

On Creating Webcomics

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frontv3We’ve had a few emails over the last couple of weeks from curious readers asking what’s involved with creating a webcomic, so rather than write some *very* long emails, we figured we could just answer it all here. Now obviously, this sort of advice is subjective, so what works for us may not work for you, etc. So here goes:

Content. Sort of a big ‘duh’ – since if you don’t have content, you don’t have a comic – but more importantly, you need to decide the format and also how frequently you plan to update. Fox & Willow is a long form/manga thing. It’s also done traditionally – meaning real paper, inks, copics and then scanned and adjusted as needed. (Sometimes the pages are done digitally if Aimo is traveling and we have no other way of getting the pages done.) There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but that’s something you’ll have to determine on your own.

We update two days a week, most of the time. In hindsight, this sort of story is probably really hard to tell this way, since in some cases the pages themselves have very little dialogue.

I know some readers hit us up once a month to get a chunk of pages and I suppose we could update that way as well, but we find the two page a week thing keeps us honest – otherwise it is far too easy to just push them off for the end of the month and then suddenly there are eight pages due and it becomes overwhelming. Whatever you decide to do – STICK with it. Readers can get frustrated very quickly when promised updates don’t happen – if you’re sporadic in your updates, your readership will also become sporadic and can become difficult to sustain.  On the other hand, if you need to take a break, let your readers know. Most of the time, they understand just fine, especially if you give them a date you’re coming back. 🙂

 

Decide who does what. If you’re the writer and the artist, that makes things simple – everything falls on you. In our case, we’re a team, so things can be a bit more tricky. Now, in all fairness, Aimo takes the brunt of the weekly comic creation – and I try to do everything in my power to make things easier on her, so she can focus on the art. Essentially, though – as collaborators, we do create the story together. We have a loose outline for the overall story arc, and one we discuss rather frequently.

We’re at least twelve hours apart around the world, so although we do try to schedule one on-line meeting a week, most of our communication is done via text and shared files in Dropbox. When it comes to the actual writing, I do a chapter at a time, usually about a month before the last chapter is finished. (Or sometimes when we’re doing the epilogue.)

This is usually because so much can change in that year or so that the previous chapter is being made. Sometimes we change things based on reader input, sometimes we have an ‘a-ha’ moment along the way and that gets added to a future chapter, or we make a modification on the spot. (This is the fun thing about webcomics – we can pretty much do whatever we want, whenever we want to.)

What else is there besides the writing/art? All those other things that I do, including website maintenance, weekly updates at Tapastic (where we also host F&W), updates at Patreon, running the social media sites (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook) as well as other marketing, convention swag/business cards/bookmarks/whatever. Aimo will do most of the layout, but I do the legwork for the conventions, figure out the requirements, and come up with the written content.

Also, I keep an eye on general deadlines and poke Aimo with a stick (a gentle one) from time to time. This can be tricky because as an artistic team, we have to have a professional confidence in each other that we WILL get our work done and meet our deadlines.  (Usually, it’s more of a hey, we need to have this order in by this date, can we get a rough layout done this weekend?) There’s a fine line sometimes between a respectful nudge and being a hovering helicopter and it doesn’t do anyone any good if we fall into that. Nothing dampens the creative side of a project faster then resentment – and at the end of the day, Fox & Willow is a labor of love. We make very little money from it (though hopefully that will change someday!) and both of us have full time and secondary jobs and family that really do need to come first.

 

Sounds great? What next? Well, once you have your content and schedule figured out, you need a place to host your comic. You can host it yourself, or you can go with a third party like Tapastic. We do both because 1) I know how to create/develop websites okay and 2) I’m paranoid as hell.  Though we do get ad revenue through Tapastic, which is nice – and a readership that is at least 8500 subscribers and growing every day – even nicer – third party sites can and do go down. There is something very comforting knowing that even if Tapastic goes belly up, all of our content is still here and available.

If you’re curious as to what we’re using here – it is a WordPress installation, with the Webcomic plug-in and a modified Inkblot theme. Everything else is standard stuff – it’s mostly just getting the RSS feed to auto push to Facebook or Twitter, etc.

 

Getting the word out. Okay, the webcomic is up…how do you get readers? Well, if you’re on something like Tapastic, there’s a nice advantage there since nearly all the visitors are webcomic readers. On the other hand, you’re also competing with a lot of other webcomics, but at least you’re in the right overall area.  If you’re hosting by yourself, you’re a bit of an island, so it’s up to you to start marketing – and that means social media. You can also submit your RSS feed to third party webcomic collecting groups, like Top Web Comics or The Webcomic List. You can take out ads on those sites as well, or via Project Wonderful. (We have not done that, so I can’t give much advice on the ad thing. Hell, we don’t even have ads here, and we probably should…) You can also do link exchanges or affiliate with other webcomics that are similar to yours – it’s a great way to share readership. If you can get your webcomic reviewed by some of the sites out there, that can also give you a boost.

However, I am going to say that you’re probably looking at two to three years before you start building up a decent readership. It is possible to “get lucky” or hit up a timely topic that may get you there faster, but don’t go into a project expecting that. Also? Smut sells. Many of the more popular webcomics that I’ve seen tend to be heavier on the adult content. (Not all of them.) But don’t go there unless you WANT to. See labor of love, above. If your enthusiasm wanes because really, no, you don’t enjoy drawing elf peen*, chances are you aren’t going to keep working on it.

We had a little bit of a starter advantage as I already had a readership following from my urban fantasy books, and Aimo…well, she’s probably got about 60k followers on Deviant Art alone for her fan art. (But you know what? Fans of fan art usually stay that way – you can be a great fanfic writer or fanartist and get tons of hits for them and crickets for original content. Don’t get disheartened – that’s just the way it is until you’ve got a fanbase of your own.)

 

Is that all? Yeah, I guess it is – at least everything I can think of at the moment, but feel free to post questions below and we’ll be happy to answer.

 

 

 

*Elf peen? Yes. Did I mention that’s how Aimo and I decided we could work together? Well it was. I wrote her smutty fanfic and she texted me dirty illustrations, many of which popped up on my phone during meetings.  There may or may not have been elf peen involved. Not that we’re drawing fox peen in F&W, but still. There’s always potential.

New Chapter Next Week

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fox13 Just a quick note to say we’ll be back next week with the new chapter of Fox & Willow.

 

We apologize for the delays – vacations and holidays sorta got in the way 😉

(Plus I ended up writing the script, hating it and RE-writing it, so you know. Creative issues.)

Anyway, thanks so much for continuing to stick with us – we appreciate it so much!

 

(Also, we may need a couple of hard core fans to volunteer a little time in the next month or so for a sekret project, so be on the lookout!)

Late Post This Week

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Hey guys – just a heads up that the pages this week are going to run late. Aimo has come down with a really nasty stomach bug, poor thing. But in the meantime we’re looking for new wallpaper ideas, so if anyone has any thoughts as to what they’d like to see, feel free to list them here.

Thanks for your patience and we’ll be back soon!

~~ Sad Sausage Dogs

Patreon

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patreonHey guys! Just a heads up to let you all know that Sad Sausage Dogs now has a Patreon account!

What does that mean?

Well, it means you have the power to help support this comic!

 

The long and short of it is that creating traditional comics can be pretty expensive – we’ve been doing this for nearly 2 years without any sort of monetary recompense or ads on the site. Unfortunately, our operating costs are getting a little high, and so we’re looking to our fans and readers for some help.

By becoming a patron, you will help us continue to tell this story the way we need to tell it. Simply choose a reward tier and commit to paying that monthly amount for however long  you wish.

(And we’re looking for reward suggestions too! If there’s something you’d like to see, please drop us a line and let us know.)

Thanks for your support. 🙂

Redbubble Store

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redbubbleHey guys – so based on a number of comments we received about the last few pages (publicly and privately) we’ve gone ahead and opened a Redbubble store where you can buy some of those pages as prints and other goodies, along with additional Fox & Willow artwork.

Please check it out and let us know what you think and don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s something else you’d like to see!

 

~~ Aimo & Allison

Fox & Willow on Tapastic

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f&b-buttonIn an effort to give our readers additional options, we’re happy to announce that we are now making page updates on Tapastic.

Now – we’re in the process of catching up to where we are on the website, but once we’ve got all the pages uploaded, we will be updating the Tapastic site with two pages a week  every Friday.

The beauty of Tapastic is that there is an app – both for iDevices and Android – it formats the pages pretty nicely and if you create a Tapastic account and subscribe, you’ll be notified when the comic is updated.

Yay convenience! 🙂

RSS Feed Update

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rssA little site update here about our RSS feeds and email subscriptions.

I’m sure many of you are aware that Google will be discontinuing its Feed Reader as of July 1. This is a major bummer for a number of reasons, but particularly for readers of web comics who might not have time to go to all their favorites every day.  So, for those of you who use a feed reader, you might want to look at an alternate like Feedly.

For a web-comic specific reader, I’ve heard Comic Rocket is pretty good – Fox & Willow does feed into it, so that might be a good alternative.

This brings me to the second part of this post, which is that I’ve changed our RSS feeds from Feedburner to Feedblitz.

So bear with me if you are a subscriber and you get duplicates for a day or so – hopefully not. >_<

I’m giving a mega shout-out to Phil over at Feedblitz for 1) having perfect directions set up and 2) helping me to troubleshoot when I had some issues. I think this is going to be a great product and I’m very appreciative at having such great response time.

Anyway, I’ve got some redirections in place, but should you wish to move over on your own power, this is the new RSS feed URL: https://feeds.feedblitz.com/sadsausagedogs

Mail subscribers should have been moved over to the new list already, but if not, here’s where you need to go: https://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=887819

Eventually I will be turning the Feedburner feeds off, so please update your feed readers accordingly.

Thanks!