So you’re a professional now – your webcomic has a fan following, you post regularly, and you’ve quit your job to finally pursue your dream of being a webcomics artist!
… Now what?
You’re not syndicated by a newspaper, you don’t get paid a salary to post comics to the Web, how do you make a living on drawing webcomics?
Through selling yourself and your work on every possible medium. Social Media is a very effective outlet for this, if you brand yourself and your comic name, then when you produce content there will be people willing to buy it. And you can produce content other than webcomics, most of the more popular comics will start to sell merchandise: T-shirts, plushies, exclusive content, bags, you name it. Commercializing your comic is a good solution to funding yourself.
But not everyone wants to buy comic merchandise, especially not if your comic isn’t that well-known yet! So what else can you do?
Another common thing comic artists do is Patreon, a website that let’s people subscribe to a comic to get special incentives – such as reading comics early, draft drawings, doodle posts, all sorts of things. Webcomics also often have PayPal donation buttons so readers can directly pay any author they like.
Source: Patreon
Other funding websites include GoFundMe, or more commonly, Kickstarter. Kickstarter is usually used when an artist is trying to fund turning his webcomic into print for the first time – an expensive initial endeavor.
Turning a comic into print is the most common way of funding it. Even though distributing comics through a digital format is wonderful and open and creative, since the Internet is free it’s hard to support yourself through it.
