Fake it Till You FAKE IT?

"Fake it till you make it" used to mean acting confident until you felt confident.

It never met acting like a snob, a celebrity or any other swaggering big shot.

The trouble seemed to start when Scott Kurtz recommended it in his book without providing a clear explanation of what he meant.

Maybe he did mean be a big, arrogant phony until you become one.

Maybe he did mean getting by on cartooning skills until artistic talent descended from the sky.

While these seem plausible, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

So why have webcomic creators spent the past year evolving from whiners and brats into Twitter micro-celebrities and fan-snubbing jerks? I don't think it's from reading Kurtz's book.

I have wondered about this so much, I must have written several draft posts over the last few months trying to tackle it. But I never found the answer.

I still haven't found the answer, but I may have found *an* answer.

Desperation.

I have, as I've mentioned, started businesses in many fields, lost some, done well with others. Tens of thousands of customers, vendors, contractors and employees later, I can smell it.

Webcomics people are, with numerous exceptions, lousy business operators, poor marketers, and lazy. Especially those graced with family money, the greatest destroyer of initiative since rain.

We have some excellent hucksters who could sell you your own elbow and charge you for bronzing it. But these are paycheck-to-paycheck operators, never advancing and always in danger of falling back.

We have a pile of people who have been around for years, and who are getting by, but aren't getting anywhere. Once, they banded together to help each other. Now they band to circle the wagons.

It sounds like a variation of those old ads about not quitting school:

You quit/skipped/learned nothing at college...

You have no resume...

You have limited skills...

There are no jobs to be had...

Your reported income is poverty level...

You depend on the spouse to put shirts in envelopes...

Expenses keep rising...

It's not fun anymore...

The folks want you to pick up and start over...

Your comic is nothing really that great...

That's right. Desperation.

The cure du jour? FAKE IT. Fake your Twitter popularity. Fake your analytics. Fake your income. Fake your connections. Fake your interest in your readers. Fake your way into conventions. Fake your statistics. Fake your indie cred, your street smarts, your internet hipness.

Win by trickery what you can't obtain by fact.

Yeah, that'll work.


Tomorrow or thereabouts: Fakes by Numbers
(What's delaying the piece, promised last weekend, is negotiations about it appearing in another location besides this one. I don't generally do that, but I owe these folks a listen. Thanks for your patience.)