**::Weekly Update::**

There are a few things that I plan on covering today and to help keep things a little more organized in this post I’m going to list each topic that I plan on covering below:

Topics being covered:

1. Visual Novel Update
2. New Website Update
3. Bottled Prince’s New Location
4. Addressing comic update speed

Let’s get started okay ^^~

1. Visual Novel Update:

I’m happy to haven been able to get some more leg way with my visual novel artwork task list. I’ve been so busy with doing codes and art work request that it’s pushed back my chances to work on the cg scenes for the visual novel but out of the 14 chibi scenes that I have to do for the visual novel I was able to get 6 rough drafts done.

Here is the image gallery of the chibi scenes which can be found over on S.K.Y. Art and Designs:

Also I will no longer be posting visual novel update on S-Morishita Studio but I will be posting them up on their new official website. You can go to the new site to see the stop animations of the chibi scenes, which I have to tell you to becareful because they turned out kind of cute and really silly ^^ Which brings me to my next topic.

2. New Website Update:

After some hard and long months of coding and frustration I finally have S.K.Y. Art and Designs website up and running. S.K.Y. is the name of me and my sister growing company. Each of our middle initials spell out the word sky thus we decided to work together and have our own company called S.K.Y. and S.K.Y. Art and Design is the illustrative division of S.K.Y. Enterprise. There I will post up visual novel updates and later in the future actually game playing updates and I will also be posting up all of the new illustrations that I make over there. Right now I have my logo gallery and my illustration gallery already posted up and if some of you go over there to take a look at the portfolio you will see that I posted up some of the old gift art that I did for a few people in the past *Do any of you remember some of those images? You know who I’m talking to O.O* I really want S-Morishita Studio main focus to be on comic development and  the posting of my webcomics. Of course that mean’s that I now have to go in and take off a few words from the banner but that’s fine. Also the reason why I decided to give my art and visual novel work their own site is because I’ve been approached by a number of people in regards to me making logo’s for them and if I gave them s-morishita’s studio site url all they would see is my comic work and they would have to search to find my logo design work, so by separating the two this will better help me to filter those who are looking for graphic design work to go to S.K.Y. Art and Design and those who are looking for webcomics to read they can come to S-Morishita Studio. The two sites are sister sites of each other and I really have this idea that I want to try out when it comes to link exchange and affiliates but for now I’ll hold off from talking about that more because it’s still in the testing process.

3. Bottled Prince New Location:

As some of you might have already read but Bottled Prince will be moving out from Mangamagazine.net and its new home will be here on S-Morishitastudio.com. I also plan on moving it off of Smackjeeves kind of for the same reason. Now there are a few concerns that I want to address with that. So this might get a little long but bare with me.

First thing is that some have brought to my attention the fact that moving my comic off of sites like smackjeeves and Mangamagazine will really put a dent in my exposure. For me that’s a risk I’m willing to take and I have a reason why, of course I know very well that I am a grown woman who really doesn’t have to do anything but stay brown and die but I thought that if I talk about my situation and give an explanation about my reasoning this might help others who are in the situation that I’m in find a path that they feel most comfortable in.

Now Bottled Prince has been on Smackjeeves for a very long time, I believe I first posted it back in 2010 when I first started Bottled Prince as a contest entry to Manga-apps first comic contest. Since then I decided to put it on smackjeeves to help draw traffic and yes I was able to bring in traffic and it did help me during that time in my life when I need help from other comic hosting sites because I was still learning a lot about the comic world and didn’t have the resources or the drive or following to do my own website. Now after 3 years I see that the journey down the path of posting my comic to all sorts of comic hosting sites is coming to an end. I’ve seen some articles about how usually people don’t start to see your comic until after 6 years and I’ve seen some comic sites also get a good build up of readers after keeping up with a constant update schedule in about 2 years. So after looking back at the traffic and readership and feedback from Bottled Prince on Smackjeeves I started to notice how it wasn’t where it could have been if I started out on my own.

Of course that’s not saying that I didn’t have errors and flaws with the story but the way I see it, when I have my comic on other comic hosting sites with other comics trying to be seen as well it gets hard to get your work noticed in the crowd of work around you so moving on to my own personal spot and setting up shop there and doing my own advertisement has really help bring a boost to my exposures and reader interactions.

I decided to try this out back in about march of last year. I went ahead and started working on creating my own personal webcomic website and after I had a buffer of pages done and a visual novel demo ready for the deadline for NaNoReNo, I started my website launch on April 1st and I used the NaNoReNo contest to help bring in some traffic from there and with the free Google ad coupon that I had I started my little under a months ad campaign and that helped bring in traffic as well. My site was new and not a lot of people knew of it and since I closed out my DA account because I wanted to move on and do things on my own I lost a lot of the people that fanned me from there, but even with deviant art it gave me the same results as smackjeeves, little fish in a big and crowded pond.

So things did start off slow and quite for the first few months but after I kept with my updates and did some more free coupon ad advertisement *I was commissioned to do someones website layout and in return they let me have there google ad coupon so I was able to run another ad campaign without spending any money I just had to offer my services to them in exchange for that ^^* So for the month of April I ran my ad campaign and as you can see from the chart below that brought in a good chunk of people and once my ad’s ran out I saw a definite boost of new readers and visitors then back in March. Then I believe I had another ad campaign start for the month of August and that really brought in a lot more visitors on top of the ones I already had grown from the months before.

After seeing how well I could do on my own this got me thinking, I know that with large companies like Smackjeeves and Deviantart and others they have that revenue to back up their ability to reach out to a lot of people and bring in a lot of traffic and income but my objective isn’t to be big like them. I have a story that I want to tell, well multiple stories and after seeing this I also have the tools, though they are smaller than devaint art and smackjeeves but they are still tools none the less, to be able to reach out and be noticed by people like minded. Those big sites aren’t the only ones who can get advertisement or aren’t the only ones who can bring in traffic. They didn’t start out big and famous. They started out with nothing but an idea just like everyone else. Behind their big numbers and big money is still a human that eats, breaths and pops just like everyone else. So why should I let the fear of not having a big company support me or be a channel of traffic for me? Why can’t I do this on my own? Well I can and I have and I see the result of it.

Don’t be afraid because you might not have the support of big companies, to go out and start things on your own. You have the chance to make a name for yourself on your own and build that certain site that you want to have with your own two hands. Of course that’s not saying that you don’t need any help because you will. I couldn’t have did all of this so quickly without using big sites like Google to advertise so I’m not saying get on a boat like a lone soldier and go attack the world on your own. I’m saying that for me I was getting tired of having to stretch out my efforts between all of these different channels and I was starting to lose focus on what my main goal was. So taking matters into my own hands I decided to handle the distribution of my comic on my own terms and the way I wanted to. I decided to focus just on one main channel and that channel is me and my site.

You shouldn’t always be afraid to go out there and start walking on your own two feet because know one will notice you. Not everyone is going to notice everything. Like even when I’m walking through walmart or outside there are a lot of things I don’t notice but oh well that’s life and don’t scare yourself with that because you might miss out on a chance to be the best you can be. Of course that doesn’t mean that you can’t be your best while being under those big sites because you can and there are people that have and are strong enough to handle going down that path or doing things that way just fits them best. Just for me I’ve discovered that it’s not the right path for me and doesn’t fit what I want to be.

I know that being on Deviantart and Smackjeeves and every other comic site has really helped me to learn a lot of this and has also helped me get noticed or get comic’s started but it’s time for me to move on and I see that I can handle being on my own. It does get a little quite and sad sometimes but that’s to be expected but I’m still happy with the decision that I made. Those where good stepping stones for me but I want to move down a different path now.

So that is why Bottled Prince will be only on here and for those that want to read it just follow the link in the words Bottled Prince or just click the comic button above to find the link there as well.

4. Addressing comic update speed:

Now I realize that there is a bit of an issue or….desire to have more comic pages more often through out the week and when I first started my kickstarter one of my plans was that if I meet my stretch goal then for the rest of that year I would update 2 times a week but since the site was still very new and didn’t have that big of a following and the story was still starting up I wasn’t able to reach my goal but that’s alright because it was a good way for me to test the waters and to learn what I can do better for next time. Now with that said I do plan on doing another kickstart but that won’t be till sometime after my sites 1 year anniversary and with that I plan on having one of the stretch goals be for an increases in the comic page update schedule. So say if I’m able to raise enough money over what the goal is then I will increase the page updates for the rest of that year.

Now of course this doesn’t really help with the situation of wanting more pages now so I did some thinking and I saw that some comic artist have a donation bar meter where if they reach a certain goal they will update such amount of pages. This could also be a much faster alternative to getting more comic pages. With bills and children and pretty soon my lack of funds from working with Mangamagazine this donation bar meter might help me afford to sit down and work only on the comic and not have to go out and try to find a second job to help my husband pay bills and take care of the kids. I’m not saying this to guilt trip anyone into doing anything and I know how hard it can be with getting an income because we all have bills and other responsibilities but for those who might be getting a little frustrated with my one week updates and who are will to donate to help pay for the cost for me to work on another page then this might be a good compromise. This is of course just a thought and I’ve tried adding advertisement on the site but with a lot of mess that’s going on out there and being advertised and with the limit on how many categories that I can block for advertisement being to small I decided to keep ad’s off my site.

I want my site to be as child friendly as possible and having an ad with some persons personal body part exposed or a subject matter that goes against what my site is about being shown, really doesn’t help. So let me know for, those who are interested in the donation bar meter for more pages, what you think about this. Again I really want to stress that I don’t want anyone having to feel bad that they can’t donate to read the comic because I don’t want you to at all. I’m still able to handle updating once a week on my own and as long as you keep coming to read that and show your support by reading or voting then I’m happy and grateful. I bring this up more so for the people who really want more updates and are willing to make a small contribution to help to bring more page updates.

Ending Notes:

This post turned out kind of long but I do appreciate you all stick through it and reading this all. Feel free to let me know your thoughts and concerns about all that I covered today. It really helps me to see things differently if I brainstorm or discuss them with others so go ahead and leave a comment below or contact me through the contact form if you’d rather speak to me in private about this ^^