Super Seed #13- Zuda Wrap Up

Well, the Zuda contest has concluded. Super Seed found itself in 4th place for all but a few days of the April competition, and that's where it ended up. What follows are my reflections from competing in the Zuda experience.

• The first few days of the competition are AWFUL! It's completely nerve wracking, as you are constantly checking out your page views and comments, and those of your competition, with no idea how you are doing over all. I honestly thought that there was no way I'd make it through a whole month like that.

• The butterflies calm after the first ranking. Maybe I'm speaking only for my experience, but once the first rankings came through, I pretty much resigned myself that winning was a long shot, and the competition should now become an effort to position Super Seed appropriately for my post Zuda plans. Granted I still was planning a number of marketing moves, but as previous contests showed, things don't change a whole lot from the beginning of the month to the end.

• The one thing that is COMPLETELY under the creator's control is page views. Fact is, if can create a decent banner ad, a comic's page views is a factor simply of how much money you want to spend on internet advertising, and time you want to spend plastering your comic around the internet.
  

• Your work needs to do the heavy lifting. Yes, production blogs, youtube videos, support websites, contests, etc. all help. But I think this month's victory going to Melody showed that at the end of the day more important is that the eight page submission be really good, and the creator already has a decent following. Creating a groundswell of support and supporters from scratch is damn hard.

• Zuda is not the be all and end all of webcomics. I don't say this as a slight to Zuda in anyway. It's just that getting involved in this contest and trying to figure out ways to get people to look at my comic exposed me to the realization of just how vast the world of webcomics truly is, and how many different, and successful approaches creators are taking to building audiences and share their work with the interweb. So, mourn not, fellow competitors who have come up short, your comics can still find their place.