Awhile back I posted that one of my cyberpunk short stories got picked up by an anarchist fiction zine. I was excited because I had this related-but-sort-of-mutually-non-canonical photobash comic ready to go, about a stolen secret service protoptype and the endangered deer it thinks is the president. I don’t want to spam this community with my weekly updates, so I figured I’d just share the still panels, spaced out whenever I get to them in the posting schedule. They’re just quiet bits of art between the jokes.
There are a bunch of spots like this around my home towns. Not necessarily a business, not a house, just some kind of sandpit with an old workshop or metal building and some old vehicles in it. Probably if I really dug in to county records I’d find a registered business, likely defunct, in a local family name. Perhaps several. But usually they’re pretty quiet spots, at least until someone new buys them. I’d wanted to do the cyberpunk version of one of those.
(I’d like to extend a huge thanks to the ham radio community over on reddit, who were great sports about looking over an early draft of the building and the antennas, and who helped me with scale and even which antennas to include. The only one that came up as a possible issue was the discone on the back, and there was some debate on whether to scale it down to make it more ‘as expected’ or to leave it as an unusually large one, until someone settled it by mentioning that their mentor had had one about this size, which came from the Swedish military. I’m making a rural cyberpunk webcomic, so I will 100% include European military surplus equipment in the backgrounds if I get that opportunity.)
I absolutely love this, also found Harbour very interesting. In terms of promotion for your work is Lemmy a serious part of that? I'm very interested in the idea of mastadon and Lemmy over mainstream coercial media as a way to share art, but I don't feel I know how this should be done. Any tips?
I'm so glad! And I'm glad you took a look at Harbour!
I'm not sure how seriously I'm going about promoting my work, exactly. I'm not trying to make money or anything, but I do want it to reach any audience that seems like a good fit, and I've found Lemmy and Mastodon to be great and encouraging spaces so far! I use a mix of federated and corporate sites for sharing the stuff I make. I've found that I have good conversations on both, but the corporate sites are much more aggressive at getting my stuff to the top of the search engine results. Some of them seem to have much less community though.
When I was regularly working on my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future series, I was very much trying to hit as many solarpunk communities as I could, as well as influence the first impressions people from outside the movement get of the genre, if possible, so I posted all over the place, my wordpress site, reddit, imgur, artstation, deviantart, as well as Lemmy, mastodon, and pixelfed. Even discord, occasionally. When you search relevant keywords, the reddit, deviantart, and artstation posts pop right up.
For ol' President Deer, I'm not as aggressive about trying to get it seen, it was more just a for-fun project. I post it weekly on my wordpress website, deviantart, Mastodon, and pixelfed, and occasionally to Lemmy and reddit when it seems like a good fit for a specific community, but that's not too often. It seems to be finding it's audience (some old pages recently got some interest from a bunch of folks on Mastodon) though it's obvious still quite small.
I'm not sure if that helps, but I hope it does. I'd say from what I've seen, I feel like I get more real interactions with other people on federated spaces, and I appreciate that I don't feel like I'm getting buried by the whims of the algorithm. Though on the small subreddits I still use (/r/solarpunk and /r/CoreCyberpunk) it still seems okay?
Thanks so much for such a detailed reply.
I hate the promotion part of being a writer the most, but find federated spaces quite organic feeling and generally nicer spaces to spend time in. I only have limited time so I don't use corporate social media to promote my work as I don't want to waste what time I have to spare on Instagram, for example. I also feel that the pressure to please the algorithm and post all the time can really lead to the enshittification of your work/interactions. Above all... I want there to be another way! I really want the fediverse to be enough for artists of all forms.I don't want to be rich, I just want a few more readers.
But... So far I don't think I've mastered it. I'm going to keep trying though.
Anyway, you've got another fan. I'll follow you on Mastadon.