This post is probably much longer than it needs to be, filled with anecdotes and reminiscences. For those of you who don't want to bother with the buildup, the summary is that I'm running out of money, and as a result I may have to take down EvisceratiNet (eviscerati.net, ubersoft.net, evsicerati.org) for a while until I can afford to resume publishing. There are ways out of this predicament--a sudden influx of money from enthusiastic supporters, a sudden offer of a decent job, a sudden winning lottery ticket--but given the current economic climate I'm thinking the lottery ticket is my best shot.

I go into more detail after the break.

Just before my Junior year of college I was a door-to-door cutlery salesman. I had a kit with samples of various cutlery products--knives, scissors, etc.--that I used to demonstrate the product, then I tried to convince my customers to order those very same products. The company that marketed the knives had the entire thing down to a science. They had a pitch that usually came across as very low-pressure to potential customers, but was actually crafted to make it harder for a customer NOT to buy anything. They had identified all of the common protests and dodges that customers came up with when they initially wanted to avoid buying anything and had developed responses that psychologically nullified those arguments. It was all a little disconcerting, to be honest, and it probably influenced me years later when I started publishing Help Desk, but in all fairness the knives were excellent. I still own and use some to this day.

I was pretty good at learning the pitch. In 'test sessions' I was really good at delivering the pitch. But when it came to actually trying to sell cutlery I was a miserable failure. Why? Because at the end of the day I couldn't get past my basic belief that the customer was in a better position than I was to determine whether or not they really needed to buy a $600.00 luxury item. That is, obviously, a fatal characteristic to have if you're in any kind of sales. I lacked the aggressiveness that I needed in order to "close the deal." There would be times when I could see that my potential customer was right on the edge, tantalizingly close to purchasing something, and all they needed was a nudge in the right direction... but I couldn't bring myself to do it. It was their money, it was their call.

I was the worst salesman ever.

When I started Help Desk I forced myself to take stock of my weaknesses and plan accordingly: one of those weaknesses was my lack of artistic talent, and one was that I was still a lousy salesman. When Help Desk started as a feature on the OS/2 eZine website I was able to work around both--in 1996 it was more important that I keep my file sizes small than it was that I be a great artist, and Help Desk received exposure through the website, and the marketing efforts of that website, so I didn't have to try to sell it at all. When I decided to take Help Desk off of the OS/2 eZine website and do it all on my own, I had to really think hard about what that would mean. Help Desk was something I wanted to do--I saw it as legitimate criticism about an industry that was largely being given a free pass--but I knew going into it I would need to accept some realities. Help Desk was not going to be the next Sluggy Freelance. It wouldn't be as popular as User Friendly. It wouldn't be lauded on Slashdot and it wouldn't, at the end of the day, make me money. If I was going to do it, I had to be willing to pay for it.

This probably sounds counter-intuitive to anyone who is involved in webcomics today. The big talk these days is about "making it" in webcomics, but back in 1999 (Help Desk started in '96, but it didn't break off from OS/2 eZine till '99) webcomics wasn't a genre per se, it was just a bunch of people publishing comics for various reasons. Some artists were building up a portfolio that they were hoping to use to get a comic syndicate to notice them (that was actually a rather common reason at the time), some very few were actually making money off their comics (User Friendly and Sluggy Freelance first, then PvP and Penny Arcade a little while later), and a lot of people were just trying it out because it looked interesting. I viewed Help Desk, as I said, as legitimate commentary and criticism and I viewed it as an electronic form of pamphleteering. So I decided to put my money where my mouth was and pay for it out of my own pocket until I could no longer afford to do so.

I wasn't anti-money or anything--if, by some stroke of good fortune, Help Desk became an overnight sensation, people started buying my lousy t-shirts, banner advertising came pouring in and I made a lot of money, so much the better. But that's not what I was gunning for: I had a job that paid pretty well and what's more my career interested me more than 50% of the time (honestly, that's a pretty good percentage for a day job) so I was more than willing to finance my own little satirical revolution against the computer industry. Words and poorly-drawn clipart are cheap in the grand scheme of things, and publishing a website was on the whole a lot less resource-intensive than actually printing and distributing pamphlets.

When I joined Keenspot the financial concerns went away. It was a great run and I was happy to be there, but the longer I was there the more it looked like I was a poor fit: I was mostly uninterested in the comics-as-business aspect of things and never took advantage of a lot of the resources Keenspot offered its artists, and I was very interested in technologies and ideas that were incompatible with Keenspot's business model. I wanted to convert my site over to a database-driven Content Management System (first WordPress, then Drupal) so that I could ultimately integrate reader comments, individual comic transcripts and a full site search tool into my archives, and I wanted to start using a Creative Commons license to copyleft my work. After thinking about it for a while I decided, once again, that doing the things I wanted to do with my comic would require I forgo the relative financial security of Keenspot and return to being self-funded.

We parted on excellent terms. Keenspot is good people.

I'm pleased with the success I've had since leaving Keenspot. I was able to pull off almost everything I wanted to do: I converted everything, every bit of my archives all the way back to 1996, to a database-driven site that accepted user comments. I was able to add a pretty decent archives navigation system. I was able to add a complete transcription system that ran 100% within the site and was fully searchable by the site search engine. I've had a number of disasters along the way and a few serious system crashes but I've managed to recover from them, and learn from them. The site is now almost exactly what I wanted it to be.

There is a downside, however. I am now once again paying for everything myself, and this current setup is quite a bit more expensive than it was in 1999. Project Wonderful is a cool and innovative ad company but my banner ad revenue is negligible -- Ubersoft.net just doesn't get enough traffic to promote enthusiastic ad bidding. None of this is surprising. I went into this with my eyes open, and I made the choices I did knowing that there would be consequences.

But my current situation is, sadly, bringing those consequences to bear. In 2007 we moved from Upstate New York, where I was working full-time as a technical writer, to Monroe, Louisiana, where there is no demand whatsoever for technical writers of any kind. I took a four-month job in New Orleans at the beginning of 2008 and have been living off savings since then. No-one in Monroe is willing to hire me, at least not yet, and I'm hearing the phrase "overqualified" more than I'd like. The telecommuting market is, to be blunt, shot to hell. Employers aren't as keen on telecommuting as they once were -- they want you to relocate, or at the very least be willing to live there for the duration of the contract. I have a daughter now, which is both expensive and tiring, and caring for an infant makes it difficult to live somewhere else for a three to six month contract. To top it all off, we're all in the middle of a nasty little recession that appears to be reaching across the entire globe.

And this month is when my savings run out.

When that happens I won't be able to justify paying for my server. What this means is that I may need to disappear, at least for a while. In the list of priorities, funding for my own private war against the binary robber barons needs to be lower than paying rent, paying the power bill, paying off debts, and making sure my daughter has formula. It's just on the verge of grim over here, and if one day the domain name doesn't resolve it's because I was forced to cancel my Slicehost account until such time as I can afford it again.

There's a chance that day can be avoided. I just set up a store on CafePress where I'm selling a few things. If you want to help, you can go over there and buy some buttons, or a coffee mug, or a bumper sticker, or a t-shirt. Or, if you don't feel like doing that, you could always click on the PayPal link near the top of this site and make a direct donation. If enough of you did that I'd be able to keep the comic going... heck, if enough of you did that I'd be able to turn this into my full time job... but this is pretty short notice, and as I mentioned earlier there's a recession going on... many of you may be in situations similar to my own.

If I'm forced to shut down the server due to lack of funds to keep it going, it won't be the end of the world. This was the risk I took when I made the decisions I did so very long ago, and when you take risks you need to be willing to face those consequences. When I have money again, Help Desk will come back--and hopefully you will as well.