How to plan a long-term creative project for serial publication:
1. Make a firm decision about how big a single update is going to be, and estimate your sustainable update frequency based on that. This estimate should be based solely on your own demonstrated performance; you may anticipate that future productivity will exceed past productivity, but never make long-range plans on the assumption that future productivity will exceed past productivity. That is called the Planning Fallacy, and it will eat you alive.
2. Estimate how often youâre likely to miss updates. As a rough guideline, if youâre physically and mentally healthy and have no major commitments that would interfere with your ability to work on the project, figure that youâll miss about 10% of your updates for various reasons. If you have health issues or frequent Real Life commitments, make it 20%. If 20% sounds low to you, you werenât being honest with yourself about your sustainable update frequency; return to step 1 and re-assess.
3. Figure that youâve got about two years before you lose interest in the project, gain some new commitment that will preclude continuing to work on it, or your art style evolves enough to make creative continuity impractical. If thereâs some upcoming major life change that youâre able to anticipate â like, say, graduating from school â use either two years or that event as your soft deadline, whichever is less.
4. Use the figures from steps 1-3 to estimate how many updates youâre likely to be able to squeeze into this project, and write your outline/script based on that. You donât need to wrap up every tiny little loose thread by that point, but ideally it needs to reach a point where you could stop and be satisfied with whatever conclusion has been reached. If you get there and youâre still enthusiastic about continuing, fantastic â return to step 1 and re-assess.
So, as a simple example: if youâre planning a webcomic, you figure you can reasonably manage about 1 page a week, and youâve got a lot going on thatâs likely to get in your way, thatâs (2 years * 52 weeks/year * 1 update/week * 80% success rate on updates) = around 83 pages to work with, or about the length of a four-issue miniseries. What kind of story can you tell in 80-odd pages?
(Hint: itâs not a story that involves fifty-page combat scenes!)
This is great advice.
When I was making Lunar Maladies (my 464 page webcomicâI will never make a comic that long ever again, it truly could have been a tight 250 if Iâd know anything about editing at the time⌠but what can I say I started it when I was 19) I knew I could reliably take 3 pages from thumbnails to final art every week. So I only updated the comic with 1 page a week. I had over a year of buffer at one point. Because I had built in that security for myself. I know Iâm a fallible human & I try to set up my workflow in such a way that I donât feel bad/guilty/beat myself up about being a normal person with normal obligations that sometimes eclipse drawing comics.
Anyways, working within your limitations is great & allows you to create for longer without having a disastrous level of burnout.
