This week we talked about navigating social media to promote your work and make money as a cartoonist—from networking and building your audience, to avoiding burnout and fielding harsh feedback.

The internet can be a lovely way to connect with friends and family, make new connections, support fellow cartoonists, and publish your comics. There are great benefits to serializing a webcomic or routinely sharing your work.

But social media can also be a source of pressure, discouragement, and creative doubt.

Do you need to move to NYC and gain a million followers on Instagram to be a commercially successful artist? Do you have to work tirelessly on gaming the algorithm to get your work seen? Do you have to monetize your comics at all?

Read on (or listen in) for answers to questions like these and more!

Episode 3 - On Early Drafts

We had THREE topics that were somewhat braided together:

1. A thought Jess had: Become more interested in DOING what you're doing than KNOWING what you're doing.

2. A quote I wrote down: "I often find myself writing long meandering first drafts, that drift around a bit before settling down into a state of baffling indecision." - George Saunders

The Terrible Anvil: Episode 2 - Lean into the worst. In the Comics FLOW + PUBLISH group we asked around: how do you lean in when the going gets weird? What parts are EXTRA UNFUN, and how do you navigate it?

We spoke on all these topics, as well as the role of ritual and community in answering these three questions. We cooked up ideas on how to make a home there in the ruins, being okay with badly-drawn hands, what to embrace when we're working.

Jess Ruliffson and I are starting our live discussion series, The Terrible Anvil, tomorrow , Jan 11, 2024 in the Sequential Artists Workshop Flow Community and this post is an invite (you can sign up for a free 2 week trial here: https://learn.sawcomics.org/courses/comics-flow-group )