You want a better example? Girl Genius, a financially successful print comic that switched to a web comic and immediately TRIPLED ITS SALES. If that isn’t a wake-up call, nothing is.

This is cool stuff, this is.

There’s a LOT of sites out there dedicated to -how- to write, or how to write well, or even just how to write better… but not nearly enough discussion about how writers can make their work accessible AND be paid a fair shake for it, without getting multiple layers of businessfolk involved…

I was greatly surprised to learn just that some authors (not publishers or editors, but authors) object to self-publishing of any kind on principle, under the idea that there’s no “professional eye” filtering the material for quality and it results in “the public being forced to wade through the crap to find the gems.”

My opinion? These people really have no idea how the internet works. The chance of finding any one piece of crap among the crap is pretty slim… but the gems stick out. Quality calls attention to itself.

Look at webcomics! For every one that’s a professional quality Goin’ Concern, generating a living for one or two or more people, there’s a thousand and one kids with a cracked copy of Photoshop they don’t know how to use or–God help us–MS Paint… and yet… it doesn’t matter how many of the “bottom rung” strips there are, it doesn’t prevent one person from finding their way to Schlock Mercenary.

As an allegorical example, I mentioned on my blog the other day that I was surprised to find that the number of garage bands on MySpace didn’t make it any harder to find my seats for the symphony.

Another thing authors can learn from webcomics: PEOPLE WILL PAY TO BUY A BOOK THEY JUST GOT TO READ FOR FREE. A lot of the mid-level publishers are getting in on the “give away for free to get people to buy” model by letting people download free e-books of selected works, but they’re only vaguely in the right neighborhood. Forcing people to download a file eliminates a lot of casual browsers who only know “downloading files is bad, mmmkay?” and runs into the problem of forcing people to sit at a screen with a big chunk o’ text for a long period of time. Also, they’ve navigated away from your site.

Book blogging just makes more sense. It gives people nice digestible chunks, it’s easy to navigate, you can have a tip jar off to the side so that if people decide to reward you for your work they don’t have to come back to do so, and people who scoff at the thought of reading a book online might already spend hours reading blogs.

That’s to say nothing of ad impressions you can generate as new readers click through the chapters in the archive.