People write to me all the time asking for advice. They reach out through email or Facebook mostly. I am going to share some of the more interesting questions and comments when they come up. Here is one.
To Tom: Loving your work, I have been trying to get something similar off the ground- toonerisms. Not of your standard, but really struggling to generate any interest! Any top tips?
My Response:
I think you should just do it. Pick a day to start and publish on a schedule, do it daily, weekly, three times a week, whatever, but get on a schedule and do it. You might want to build up a buffer of a bunch of cartoons before you start, so if you can’t think of ideas you’ll have back up. A lot has been made of Comic Press and Comic Easel, which could be hard to set up, but to tell you the truth, I always consider just going back to blogger.com or Tumblr, etc. so you don’t need a special program, I think the thing is to just get the work out there and publish on schedule.
This is me talking now:
I feel that this is true with anything. Just do it!
A few years back, I had a friend who wanted to start a Miami Beach blog, something that would deal with their daily news and politics, but to this day, there is no blog. Why? Because he never made the first step. He could not just publish a story, he was too picky. He wasn’t sure if he talked to everyone involved with the story, he wasn’t sure if he got the correct quote. In once instance, he wanted to talk to a rape victim who was in hiding. Can you imagine this? He would not publish because he could not get the rape victim’s side of a story, which I found offensive and stupid, but he felt it was important.
To this day, about six years later, there never has been word one from his blog because he could not take the first step. I used to tell him that a blog is a live thing, that it can be updated at will, so he could always just correct or add to a story. But again, he could never publish the first story, which was the first step and so no one has ever seen the blog or his ideas since they have never been published.
This is the case with comics and so many other things. People delay because they feel they are not ready, but time moves on and before you know it, years have passed. So do it now!
You can follow me on Facebook here or Twitter here. Let’s interact!
