The time has come for me to admit once again that a little side project of mine has to go. Since January, I have been writing about comics in Charlotte for examiner.com. It was fun, and I got to be useful to several great artists, but not as useful as I would have liked.
There was about a month where my first examiner article was in limbo and getting someone to approve it was impossible. When Google news stopped considering examiner.com articles news, my hits dropped off by 50-75%, which meant getting paid at all would be hard to do. Payment depended upon hits to my articles, and quite frankly, not enough people were visiting to make up for the time it took to write articles, much less code them for links. I had some damn fine articles, too, which essentially went unread. Even when examiner highlighted my articles, the traffic increase was negligible, which really made me question examiner's value.
Add to that the restrictions put upon me by examiner. Articles could not be too long, articles needed to have local interest, I could not write in the first person. When the review team ruled that an article on HeroesCon wasn't local and my category editor wouldn't get back to me despite me contacting him directly, the writing was on the wall for me. This seems very familiar to me that I really want to do comics, but I need to have that time and with this distraction, I can't get it done. I'm also just not enjoying it anymore. It's become a chore, and to have made the equivalent of $1.00 and hour to do this, it's just not fun enough for a hobby anymore. I've been enjoying blogging about the DC Relaunch, and I look forward to uploading a new Jet-Pack Jenny comic soon.
