Hi, Everyone!

Vacation week is going great, and I’m painting the cover to issue 9 today, and updating the art on its interior pages.  Really, what did you expect me to do on my vacation—art is fun, and trips cost a lot of money.

Today, I’d like to focus the attention on you, dear readers.  Do you vote for this comic’s updates with Stumbleupon, Digg, or Reddit?  These are few services, and they could help us grow immensely!

Let me put it this way.  We get about ten to twelve stumbles on Stumbleupon per episode.  That’s nice, and it’s enough to get us into rotation on the random Stumbling some people do.  But, if we had a hundred or so stumbles a day, we would probably reach front page status as popular and bring in huge amounts of traffic.  Right now, about fifteen hundred actual people visit this site every day, even on non-update days; if even 10% of those hit the thumbs up and stumbled us that would be about 150 stumbles!  That would warrant a lot of attention, a lot of growth.

Why do we need more readers?  Shouldn’t I be happy that so many people read the comic?  Well, yes, I’m elated by the volume of readers, and Benita and I like the regular commenters a great deal.  But, traffic will determine the success of this comic in various ways.  For example, the more traffic that comes by, the greater volume of books I am likely to sell.  The more traffic that comes by, our advertiser pays us more.  In other words, Benita and I would like to make an income off this comic!  To be honest, I feel that this comic should be monetarily worthwhile to continue.  We’re not asking to get rich, just a reasonable revenue stream.

I think that many of you don’t stumble us because you don’t know anything about Stumbleupon.  It’s very easy, and it offers some excellent side benefits.

First, go to Stumbleupon and sign up for an account.  Then, download the Stumbleupon Toolbar.  From this, you can easily give us the thumbs up every update.  A few words of advice: Make sure you stumble the actual episode, not the homepage or the thumbnail of an episode.  Second, on Stumbleupon, befriend as many people as you can, and subscribe to their feeds, and encourage them to do the same back at you.

If you want to make it super easy, and you use an RSS reader (I’m quite pleased with Google Reader), simply follow the image in your reader to the correct page on our site and stumble.  RSS readers save a huge amount of time on the web for you in any case.

The setup is minimal, and the benefit to us is considerable.

Thanks! Scott.