In this livestream from May 2, 2025, veteran cartoonist Brad Guigar talks about what social-media platforms are working — and which ones are failing. Plus, why you should stop exhibiting at comic conventions, and how to write humor.
Timestamps
01:12 — I stopped using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram — with zero adverse effects on my business
12:47 — Why I stopped exhibiting at comic cons — and improved my bottom line in the process
18:19 — The danger of starting crowdfunding (Patreon, Ko-Fi, Substack, etc.) too soon
22:53 — How to build an audience on social media
35:11 — Using social media schedulers
39:06 — How to gain followers on Bluesky
40:32 — How to write comedy
Additional resources
The Webcomics Handbook on Amazon
15 Posts Your Subscribers Will Love (also great for social-media audience building)
Case Study: Writing a Halloween Joke
Excerpt from “Anatomy of a Kickstarter Campaign”
* Analytics from the previous Kickstarter campaign for "Anatomy of Dinosaurs." Dave had discontinued his use of Facebook several years earlier, so no comparable statistics are available.
Dave was able to drive 46 Kickstarter backers from his Bluesky account, where his follower count was 4,300. That's a conversion rate of 1.06%. Although he didn't use Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook for this Kickstarter campaign, we can compare his conversion rates from the previous Kickstarter campaign for "Anatomy of Dinosaurs."
In short, despite eliminating the "Big Three" social media platforms from his promotional outreach, Kellett reports that this was the most successful Kickstarter for a Sheldon-branded book ever. Bluesky's conversion rate is 56 times bigger than the pledges Twitter was able to deliver and — get this — 42,400 times larger than the paltry amount that Instagram was able to scrape up.
This is the clearest indication yet that Bluesky is delivering the strongest results of all of the social media platforms.
Anatomy of a Kickstarter Campaign
On a recent episode of ComicLab, Dave Kellett shared the real numbers from the Kickstarter campaign for his latest book, "Anatomy of Dinosaurs." Some of those analytics reinforce long-held truths — for example, Kickstarter continues to dominate in using internal mechanisms to maximize backers. However, there was one big surprise: Bluesky outperformed Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in delivering pledges — by a jaw-dropping margin. After dropping the “Big Three” and focusing on Bluesky, Kellett reported a record-high Kickstarter total.
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