Success in Comics: Girls with Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto

Alan Gardner February 28, 2012 1 minute 5 comments

Girls with Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto represented the webcomics model at the Success in Comics seminar. She started her strip in 2004 when few were living off their webcomics. Her original intent was to follow her childhood dream of creating a comic strip for syndication, but as she developed and posted her strip online she found that she enjoyed writing material that wasn’t appropriate for a newspaper audience.

Notes:

Started posting the strip only 2-3x a week in 2004
She didn’t make a lot of money at first, mostly at conventions. She had no advertising or idea how to monetize website
By 2005 she had a decent daily following and by 2007 she decided to take a leap and make it her full-time endeavor
She tallied up the barest of minimum she’d need to earn to live and asked her fans to support her with the promise of increase to 5x a week
Her fans came through but after a while those dwindled
She started to monetize her work through book collections – first through print-on-demand and then to a larger publisher
She makes posters from art story-lines that resonate with her readers
She was invited to join Blind Ferret – a web syndicate that handles merchandise orders, fulfillment, storage, etc. that allows her to concentrate on her art
To make it on the web you have to be an entrepreneur, entertainer and a storyteller
There is no standard model to monetize your comics. Listen to your readers and find ways to allow your readers to throw money at you
Business cards are vital. Make them creative. Have your URL – make that memorable and a dotcom and put it on everything
Tip: look at your site’s web analytics and look for geographic areas with high concentration of fans – plan book tours in those areas
She shared which conventions are profitable for her
She adds a lot of extras in her books to help them sell

Follow her on Twitter

Comments ⁵

Sandy Debreuil

Plus she’s a really really talented cartoonist. That part is kind of important, too (although I get why she didn’t lead off her talk with that).

Patti Hart

Plus plus … she is friggin adorable! (Sorry, Alan, is frigging swearing?)

Steve Broome

Definitely agree about there not being one way to do it. One thing that’s interesting about the comic audience is that they seem to care a lot less about the quality of art, as evidenced by some of the terrible stick figure comics that succeed, so I’m not exactly sure how much they cherish good art versus print fans.

Rich Diesslin

I agree with all of the above and she gave some very useful tips and advice. One on monetizing your web site with project wonderful, even though now she’s using another approach, she said this was a good one for her.

Karl Dixon

Girls with slingshots, yes, one of the first web comics I discovered. She has such a wonderful way with words and the characters flow so effortlessly through their wonderful situations

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