V. How the hell do we pull this off?

Here's my idea of a "community agnostic" audience growth strategy.

May 17, 2024

JL —

Whatever constructive material is to be had from our criticism of toxic incentives online or the culture of our former community, I think has been fully extracted for the time being.

In other words (and I say this primarily to myself), enough whining. Now what?

I want to pick up on a point made in the first letter in our correspondence, where I expressed a commitment to continuing making comics outside of the social obligations of the comics community.1

But I realized that I hadn’t come up with a strategy yet.

Many independent comic careers are established by deft navigation of the community. That’s how you meet publishers, get readers, and make sales. So if I decide not to do that, what do I do instead?

What does this “community agnostic” strategy for building an audience look like? I’ve thought about it, and I’m going to take a stab at spelling it out.

I want to note, mostly for the readers following our correspondence, that I don’t know that this strategy will replicate for others. It’s custom-built based on my wholly unique desires, capabilities, and resources.

I don’t know if it will even work for me, much less anyone else.

But, if nothing else, it may show that there are other ways to approach audience building — other routes to take that are different from the status quo paths.

If any part of this shows another creator, who feels as similarly stifled as we do, a way of thinking outside the box and building a one-of-a-kind strategy, then I’ll be happy for it.

With that said, here goes nothing:

Step 1: Just post

I’ll be posting new pages of my webcomic Ronin Digital Express soon. Before the Great Divorce, here was my strategy:

Post new pages
Schedule promotional posts throughout the week
Share process content to show what a thoughtful and interesting craftsman I am
Reach out to large-audience friendlies to ask for a signal boost
Kick the tires of my media list to see if anyone wanted to review or host me
Hover over the various notifications tabs waiting for interaction opportunities

From now on, I’m going to do this:

Post new pages
~~Schedule promotional posts throughout the week~~
~~Share process content to show what a thoughtful and interesting craftsman I am~~
~~Reach out to large-audience friendlies to ask for a signal boost~~
~~Kick the tires of my media list to see if anyone wanted to review or host me~~
~~Hover over the various notifications tabs waiting for interaction opportunities~~

I’m not interested in engagement. I’m not trying to create followers, or go viral, or get shares and attaboys.

I’m saving all of my energy for one thing, and one thing only: building a body of work.

That’s it. That’s the goal.

Whatever new audience shows up will have to find me via word of mouth. I know this means I won’t see much traction for some time. But that’s okay. Traction isn’t the goal. The goal is building a body of work.

Sure, I’ll post to Instagram and the Substack Notes, and maybe even reddit from time to time. But only organically, when I really want to. Not with any sort of plan, and not with any regard to hashtags or networking.

I spent many years chasing engagement. I had some amazing wins, racked up 14,000 karma on reddit, and made friends with real industry pros who discovered my work when it went viral.

But the work always took a backseat to engagement.

No more.

I’m cutting out the engagement and doubling down on the work, in the hope that I will be more productive.

Step 2: Invest in my OTHER career

Much as we want to pretend that we’re independently wealthy creators, most of us have a day job.

I co-own a small digital marketing agency. While it has allowed me to work from home and enjoy a flexible schedule, the feast and famine cycle has been tough. Most times, I eke out a modest middle-class existence for my family. Sometimes, I’m effectively unemployed.

I take consulting gigs on the side, and my wife also works. With 3, sometimes 4 jobs between us (and all the other responsibilities) it has often been difficult to justify giving comics the time they demand.

I think I’ve had enough of this.

We’re usually comfortable, sure. But I want more. So I’m investing in my day job this year.

My partner and I are changing up our business to align more with our experiences, skills, and what we actually like doing. So far, our clients love it.

So we’re going to lean in all the way and try to make it a successful agency. In part, so my wife and I can quit all of our jobs, but also, to create more time for comics instead of taking what I can get in the early mornings, nights, and weekends. I want an open schedule that allows me to throw daytime working hours at pages.

There are myriad reasons I’ve been playing it safe with my day job for years. I won’t get into that now.

But I spent years moonlighting in the online comics community, trying to develop relationships, and trying to stay on the right side of whatever the blob was fighting about on a given day.

I’ve nothing to show for it.

14,000 reddit karma never paid a single bill. Going viral never gave me more freedom to do what I want. Industry connections have given me great feedback, but at the end of the day, they can only do so much. You need to build a body of work. They can’t make you do that.

What if I could have had more money, more freedom, and hundreds more pages published by now?

That’s what I want. So that’s what I will do.

Step 3: Reinvest

It will take a few years, but once we see success with the agency and my schedule is showing signs of slack, this is when I will start to worry about that 4-letter word “engagement.”

Your observations about engagement are insightful. I like the metaphor of the fence. It’s easy to locate your spot on the fence and try to play your role, whether on this side, that, or straddling the middle as “nuance guy” (fuck that guy, right?). But as we’ve discussed, we’re both coming to grips with the fact that we’ve never really liked that project. That’s why we’re stepping away from the fence altogether.

But I think there’s more to it.

I got stuck trying to master engagement to drive subscribers while neglecting my work, and as such, I pretty much sucked at all of the above. Though the occasional post would go viral and make me think I was onto something, I never felt like I’d cracked the code.

Some seem to have figured it out. But even as I looked at their success in playing the game, it still wasn’t something I actually wanted. It’s more than just an aversion to culture war stuff; I also don’t want to spend hours drawing pictures of Doctor Who when a new season comes out, commemorate dead celebrities, or make short comics and pinups for the hell of it.

Sure, with diligence, you will rack up likes, shares, followers, and engagement. But what are you known for? When’s the last time someone bought your book2?

Ultimately, everything I do has to be about one thing: driving subscriptions, which is driving revenue. The only two metrics I care about.

And yet, engagement is part of the puzzle. But the way I was pursuing it (and I would assume many others like me pursue it), I was focusing too much energy chasing a vanity metric. Bringing people to the door of a club that wouldn’t open for another six months.

So from now on, here is my relationship to engagement.

I’ll work hard to try and get the resources to invest in leveraging expertise.

This means hiring agencies to help with Instagram growth, building a store at rentonhawkey.com where I sell physical copies of my books, and engaging PR/marketing freelancers to help me create those six-figure Kickstarter campaigns (yes, dear reader, some of those are all organic luck, but the vast majority are highly coordinated and expensive investment efforts).

The big goal of all this, again, is to grow the subscriber base. If I can pull this off, I’ll never log into Instagram again. But Instagram will nonetheless drive a reliable conversion to Substack and my store.

I’m sure that I’ll want a presence on the convention scene as well. This is as deep as I’ll be willing to dip my toe back into the community, but it won’t be for a while. And to be honest, my goal, aside from meeting up with real fans and selling stuff in the flesh, will be to network with pros. I want the attention and mentorship of my heroes, not my peers.

The final picture

Success for me looks like this: Renton Hawkey Inc. is a fun but lucrative side hustle that I’ve managed to carve out by more or less hiring myself to make the kinds of comics I’d want to read.

I have a simple store where you can buy prints and copies of various books.

I have a modest convention scene presence (primarily C2E2 and other more local shows, but I would love to get to NY or SDCC someday).

I run the occasional Kickstarter with a team, mostly to leverage the crowdsourcing community to drive more subscribers.

I hire help to manage Instagram and whatever other channels I use (I plan to keep this limited to probably one or two channels that are great fits). I never doomscroll, I just send stuff to the agency and they have one order: convert engagement to subscriptions on Substack.

And as a bonus, I spend much more time in my real life.

Like you, I’ve been doing this more lately. Living in my real body, as it were.

I can’t remember when I stopped doing that and decided that I wanted to become a microcelebrity running a digital fief. I have little to show for that dream, so I’m abandoning it.

So, that’s my plan. That’s the “community agnostic” strategy for building a readership. But I don’t want to call it that. I want to refer back to my last essay here and call it a strategy for creating abundance.

In short, it works like this: get rich or die trying.

What do you think? And more importantly, what does your strategy for creating abundance look like?

I know you’ve been thinking about it as well. I’d love to get your feedback on this and to hear what you’re planning.

Until then.

JL Johnson and Renton Hawkey are independent comic creators, and friends. They’ve decided to begin a letter-writing correspondence here on Substack. Nothing is off limits, and they will always tell the truth.

If you want to follow along, follow the TCTAE tab in the navigation on either of their Substack publications.

Jeffrey Johnson Jr. is the writer, creator, and letterer of Ennead: The Rule of Nine and the epic fantasy world of Amashik. Outside of writing, he enjoys time with his wife Jess, their daughter Olive, and their pets Ruthie, Quinn, and Sansa.

Renton Hawkey is a comic creator who publishes the chanbara western webcomic Ronin Digital Express. He also publishes his newsletter rent*space and the forthcoming OGN Fistful of Yen, all right here on Substack. Take a look, and consider subscribing.

(Maybe that still makes me part of the community, technically, but the point is that I find its culture restrictive and stifle at its social obligations. At least those that exist online and among the publishers/critics/creators who are invested in them. So, I’m out.)

Engagement bait can indeed drive subscribers and sales, but the line is fuzzy, and in terms of your work habits, it’s a tricky balance to pull off. I’m happy to admit that I can’t do it. But I also think subscribers come to you for more of the same, so you have to be careful not to send mixed messages — to confuse the broader audience as to what you’re really about.