The comic is broken into separate "stories" each with a beginning, middle, and end. Unlike most web comics it's not a forever-ongoing-oh-let's-just-continue-to-draw-stuff deal. After one story (from 50 to 100 strips) ends, a new story begins, sharing the same universe and the same MC(s).

Option 1:

Standard web comic, release a new strip every week for free. You have to wait a week for new strips. The minus of this I think is if I'm reading a comic for its story (and this comic is definitely story-orientated), I'd rather read the entire issue than wait 1 week each. The plus is that readers check your page every week?

Option 2:

OK, this is something that I haven't seen done before, and perhaps for good reason... But perhaps not. Entire full stories are released for free once completed (again, 50 to 100 strips). You can easily read them in one go. Once the site is up you can read story #1 in full for free. Now, to see the next story you would have to wait until it is completed in full which may take up to half a year or more (at the speed of 1 / 2 strips a week). ALTERNATIVELY, you would have an option to pay let's say $0.05 cents a week and receive the updates weekly. Once you pay the $0.05 you get access to all the content that's been there before as well, so let's say you decide to start paying weekly 5 months into production, you get 5 months of weekly comics that came before. The minus here for the non-subscribers is of course that by the time you complete the full story people might forget about the comic, but, IMO if you're doing it for ZIE ART, then as long as you're happy with the artwork and the story, it shouldn't matter so much...

Hmm. What do you think? Please do note that the goal here isn't to make lots of money or anything like that (anyone who starts a webcomic with that goal in mind is in the wrong business, heh).

Option 1. Option 2 won't work.

The main reason is because online transactions have a fixed shoeleather cost irrespective of transaction amount, so microtransactions seem more inconvenient than even paying a greater amount for the same product. Services like Xbox Live fight this by forcing customers to convert a larger amount of money at once, but for a lot of reasons this isn't an option for most merchants (the closest equivalent would be asking customers to retain a PayPal balance, but it would probably be wise to not market to people imbecilic enough to trust PayPal with any amount of money).

Additionally, the vast majority will never subscribe no matter what the price is, so as far as most of your readers are concerned the comic will be dead for 26 straight weeks. A lot of webcomics just peter out because the author loses interest or has run out of ideas. Over the years I've literally read and forgotten about a hundred webcomics just because I hit the end and ran into a patchy update schedule. The biggest challenge would be convincing readers that you're still updating regularly even though you aren't showing anything. This would also make it a lot harder to sell a subscription service, because people don't really have any way of knowing that they're going to get what they're paying for.

Re: Jon'c

All very valid points. Thanks for your input!

Yeah, basically, if you don't update on a fairly regular basis (at least once a week usually) people forget you exist, and that means lost traffic. You want return visitors, and the only way to do that is consistent fresh content. Use ads on the site, and release weekly (and I'm assuming these aren't little 3-pane comics).

You could try something along the lines of what warren ellis did with Freakangels. Deliver 6 pages once a week (or even 2-3 pages) so the story moves along. His intention for it was basically free to read while the story is ongoing and monetize by selling books. worked rather well for him, but hes like all professional and has a name recognisable to most comic nerds and a great artist.

My thoughts would be that there are so many other free webcomics out there, why would I want to pay for one (especially just starting). You're best going with free, making money off ad revenue, then potentially selling products based on the comic once you have a large enough audience that it would be feasible.

Only comics that are subscription-based on the internet are porn.