Lots happening in Funzietown. I finished the first webcomic this weekend and posted it.
It is B & W at the moment, but I plan to "colorize" it later. I think I'll offer both versions. I like B & W, but so far every kid I show it to asks when I plan to add the color...
I'm pretty happy with the results. It is the first thing I have ever done like this. The art isn't great, but it is far better than I thought I could do. Basically at this point I believe that with practice I can get better.
My plans for the site are beginning to gel as well. I have a cast of characters now and lots of ideas for how to use them. What was initially a game site is rapidly becoming a learning site that contains webcomics, chapter-books, worksheets and games.
Thanks to Amazon's CreateSpace, I plan to collect the webcomics into actual books that I can sell via the site or directly from Amazon. Same goes for the chapter-books. I'm not sure if it is cost effective to publish workbooks, because there are minimum costs for each book, and I'm not sure I can hit a price point someone would want to pay for a workbook.
The other revenue stream I'm trying is Google's Adsense. Man, what a mixed bag! For anyone who doesn't know how it works, here's a quick summary. You place code on your webpages and Google reads all the words on the page and determines what ads to display. To my shock and horror, I found that if you use the word "comics" on a page you get some ads that are far from kid-friendly. One of my son's friends brought this to my attention. You see, each viewer may see different ads, so the publisher may never know what was shown to a given visitor. Yikes!
Google has a new system that allows you to preview ads before they run, more or less. You have 24 hours to reject an ad. If you don't, it will go through. Down side is this kind of makes me a paranoid, Google-checker. Upside, is I can hopefully stop anything really offensive from making it through. Not sure how well it works. So far it hasn't shown me anything that needs approval. Not sure why. I'm also trying to use the code they gave that tells their system to ignore certain sections of your page. Hopefully I can isolate the words that generate such interesting ads... Unfortunately it can take several days for those changes to filter through their system...