Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence » In Which I Make An Observation And Expect To Be Inundated By Comments Telling Me I’m A Simpleton

Okay, so weâ€™ve already established that the twenty webcomics I read on a weekly basis do not constitute a good statistical sample. And Iâ€™ve talked about update schedules â€“ both when to update and what happens when theyâ€™re not met. I guess this is the next in the continuing series of me talking about the methodology of webcomics and the readers who are creators weighing in. Really, I’m just feeling my way around in the dark.

I have a lot more webcomics that update on Mondays than I do any other day of the week. Some comics only update then. It may make sense, to use the week for planning, and the weekend to sit down and draw. But then there are the daily comics that update every weekday.

I love reading Patches because it updates on the funny days of the week that no one else seems to like: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And it gives me something absurd to read while I do. (Wednesday is definitely a well-used update day. Forgive my generalities.) I really like that Loserz, when itâ€™s sticking to its update schedule, has a full color Sunday comic.

So, what are the best days of the week? Is it important to plan update schedules so that they leave time to make each comic? What about the daily comics? This is what I ponder as a non-creator and observant person.

The best day of the week is Thursday.

We chose Tuesdays and Thursdays as update days specifically because they seemed underutilized.

I’m guessing that, even if an artist has a large buffer or prefers to draw comics in ‘batches’ rather than individually, he or she will gravitate towards an update schedule that paces out the comics most evenly; purely from an audience perspective, it allows the pacing to be more even and minimizes impatience with the artist.

Creators might also worry about not getting many visitors on a less common day, and might not be willing to risk publishing on a day where fewer people have gotten into the habit of checking webcomics, even if it would allow them to stand out.

Even though I’m planning on having a buffer when I launch my comic and will have more flexibility with creation time, I’m planning on updating on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (after a month of publishing comics on every weekday). Because I don’t think I’ll be able to regularly publish more than three comics a week, this schedule seemed to pace the comics better than the other possibilities, especially since it wouldn’t make sense to publish “school-themed” comics on weekends.

Anyone who doesn’t update every day is not a man.

As a creator I tend to use the buffer system and as I have a ‘tame’ techie to look after the site ( http://www.althought.com ).

He has set it up so that the buffers are loaded into a database that auto-updates the page.

I’m starting to think that a weekend update would be a good idea, especially for a once per weeker. People have a bit of free time and there isn’t much else that updates then.

I started by updating on Mondays and have since fallen behind. I don’t have a buffer, I just create the comic once a week and post it. Thanks to RSS feeds and aggregators, the actual update day is less important than it probably used to be. I used to stress about updating on the exact day, but I don’t want to sacrifice quality for the sake of a self-imposed deadline, and I think that’s better for comics in the long run.

I update every day. Sometimes I’ve got a gag already planned, sometimes I have to write one, rarely I pull one from my filler buffer. The only attention I pay to what day of the week it is, is that I usually draw more panels for Sunday because on Saturday I have the time to do that. I don’t pay attention to my hit stats for days of the week; as long as daily uniques and monthly uniques continue to be greater than last month – hell, as long as they continue to be greater than zero – I’m happy.

Seems like readers really dig the Monday / Thursday update. Unfairness of the real world can be a very tricky situation to deal with.

The drudgery of school or employment on a Monday morning triggers a cloud of fear, foreshadowing the coming week of work. Nothing like a shiny new comic to remedy some of that bitter Monday tension, or at least provide a brief kernel of joy until the next coffee break.

By the time Thursday rears its ugly head, most peopleâ€™s brains experience the sensation of feeling like ground beef. Luckily, new material from a favorite creator seems to glaze things donut style, and brighten up spirits to ease into the precious weekend.

I update Tuesday/Saturday because, well, almost nobody else does. Someday I’d like to be confident enough in my speed/skills to upgrade to Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, but I’m barely keeping my buffer up to a week ahead now and I’d like to get back to about two months before I start doing multi-week comics.

I do tend toward “bonus comics” on normally-ff days when I find idiocy on the internet though.

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In Which I Make An Observation And Expect To Be Inundated By Comments Telling Me I’m A Simpleton

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