Reader feedback seems completely random to me. Sometimes I'll reach what I think is a fairly interesting point in the story and I'll get no comments from anyone whatsoever; other times a handful of people will chime in to discuss something I'm doing that I find completely mundane or irrelevant. I chalk it up to the fact that it's only a tiny percentage of your readers who ever bother to comment at all, so you shouldn't take them to be The Voice Of The Readership.yeahduff wrote:Mostly what I mean is this obsession the internet has that elevates reader comments as the most important thing…Basically putting your vision on the auction block to be bought with a kind word or two…There are some who open their mouths and they turn out to have something insightful to say, sure. But on the whole it's mostly just noise.
Obviously trolls—and their polar opposite, people who mindlessly heap praise on your work—are of little or no value (and should NEVER effect what you do), but I do believe you can get useful feedback from the 95% of people who fall in between those extremes. But it still can be difficult to make heads or tails of the feedback on a whole, so you gotta pick your spots.
An example: I've received e-mails from:
a) a woman who praises my attention to detail with regards to my female characters' outfits
b) another woman who finds the same outfits totally unrealistic to the point where it mars her enjoyment of the comic
c) a man who was convinced that I must be female due to the obvious care I lavish on the ladies' clothing
What to make of it? I took a few of the critical woman's suggestions (she was nice enough to actually give me some pointers) and went on my way… not because she was critical but because she seemed to grok the truth—I know nothing about women's fashions. Who knows where the other two were coming from.
Yeah, the notion of altering your vision to pander to the audience seems absurd to me as well. But I think of my webcomic (such as it is) as a personal creative statement… a piece of "Art", of all things. Not everybody who makes webcomics thinks of them that way… some just think of them as something fun and entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that. If you start a webcomic without a clear idea of where you're going to take it, and you're only in it for the yoks or whatever, maybe it makes sense to rely on your readers to point you in a direction.bustertheclown wrote:This isn't performance art; audience participation is not part of the deal…Relying on feedback to dictate the direction of your work is even stranger…Either way, it dilutes the expression.
Yeahduff, when I noticed recently that you started updating again (I hadn't checked your site in months, since it seemed like an eternity since the last update), I almost e-mailed you to let you know I was glad to see you updating again, and to let you know how much I enjoyed the new pages. But I didn't. Because all I probably would have said was "I'm glad to see you updating again, I sure enjoyed the new pages." Which I figured you needed like a hole in the head.
That's 95% of your readership. They'll read what you put out there, but they aren't going to trouble you to let you know about it. The other 5% gets to speak for them, and they probably don't really speak for them. It's too small a sample to be representative.
