Start A Small Business?? (part2)

So the decision had been made.
I was going to be a professional Artist.
Leave my dayjob behind to pursue my dream.
A dream of a better life.
But, Of course this brings a slew of questions with it.
The reality was I would still need an income, so how was I going to make that work? While still having enough time to dedicate to my family, friends and other commitments? What shape would my new business take?
What kind of Artist?
I had a few ideas, a few things I wanted to try. My best friend wanted me to help turn a story of his into a graphic novel (a massive undertaking, by itself) I had ideas for children’s books, slews of sketch ideas appropriate for T-shirt designs, and then of course Life in Heck, a strip still in its infancy and still finding it’s voice.
How to pull these together? Or at least pick and choose?
See it’s a big unfamiliar world out there, sure, I’d made the occasional CD cover or logo for friends, but this was a big step.

So here I was, an outsider, who was okay (but not great) at drawing, I’ve certainly never had any formal training. But more importantly, especially as a webcomic by very definition is on the web, I was going to have to get a whole lot more web savvy real quick. (Sure, I may be the person my family turns to with all their computer related questions, but I barely knew about CSS, let alone RSS)

Then comes questions of Trademark, copyright and associated issues, it seemed that the world was also filled with hairy stories about IP violations.

And then there is the whole, slightly fuzzy question about economics on the web.
Questions of Branding, Community building and so many other complex notions. (“Build it and they will come” only works in crappy Kevin Costner movies.)

But then there have also been a lot of good success stories out there, and that gave me hope, one of last years runaway hits was Perry Bible Fellowship, it’s creator has limited artistic talent (like myself), has an almost bare-bones site, and yet the first book he has published compiling his work has sold over $300,000 worth of copies. Not a bad years work, and if I achieved even a quarter of his success I’d be immensely proud.

I mean this was a mountain of ideas, a mountain of possibilities, and this meant a mountain of time to execute them. Which ideas were worth focusing on?
So again it all came back to how?

So far I’ve gone with what I know (which isn’t much) and the things that I’m passionate about (I tend to wake up with a burning idea in my head most mornings, this is then followed by a rush to execute it on paper. Thursday’s Vampire chicken is a classic example of this)

The funny thing is, the questions above don’t look all that big when represented as a short list on paper.

But I do seem to have taken a bit of space here today, so I’ll talk more about the conclusions I reached in my next post,

Thanks,
-K