Waffle

Today, for the first time in 2 years, "Previous comic" and "first comic" buttons appeared on the front page of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website. In part, this is just a convenience allowing new readers to page through the guest fortnight comics and the chapter that I left up for the benefit of incoming readers from the Clan of the Cats campaign.
But it reflects a more structural change in how ROCR is going to be published in the next year. A few months ago, Joey Manley changed the terms for Modern Tales family cartoonists to allow them to make free up to 10% of their total archives, and giving them the tools to do so. Soon enough, many cartoonists started freeing up the latest chapter of their comics, making it easier for non-subscribing readers to catch up as well as giving new readers a larger sample. I was against this at first, because I thought it diluted and complicated the "last one free, subscribe for the rest" model, but since starting the COTC campaign, I've come to realise that it is possible to bring in many new readers and hook them with such a reasonably-sized sample, and that should benefit me in the long run. It will add a little bit to my workload, because I will have to maintain and prune the archives more actively, but it will improve the comic's accessibility out of proportion to that.
When I return from my break in January, "Rásdondr" will be removed from the free archives, and "Grimborg" will become the free chapter (a few episodes of "Grimborg" are available now, but this is very much unofficial).
This introduces one other change to how ROCR is made: what with the 70 pages of Dolphins and Dragons being already free, I am very close to the 10% norm, and I will have to script chapters from beginning to end before publication, to ensure that they don't exceed my margin, which is about 20 pages. So you'll get more tightly-scripted comics as a result of this change. That's a good thing, trust me.