Exiern

Art by Colin Wells. Check out his Instagram here and his webcomic here!

OK, first things first. We’re aiming for new story pages this time next week from Monday the 13th of January. in the meantime, there’ll be a new page of this feature every day until then.

The TL:DR is that we suggest things you may not have been aware of, you save money and then maybe you’re in a position to bung us at least a/an extra $1 a month to help with the making of Exiern. The deeper motive is … well, read below the text in bold which has the first of our simple to use potentially money saving ideas.

Assuming you use laundry detergent, simply put less than the recommended amount into the machine. Between one-half and one-eighth the recommended amount. As per the advice at the link (Item Number #1) here at Cracked.com (yes, they often have really good advice  believe it or not).

“One appliance repairman even suggests that by using the detergent boxes’ recommended doses, you’re actually damaging your clothes and your washing machine with too much soap.”

Apparently, recommended amounts might be a fiendish plot to make you use more product faster and hence make the provider of the product more money faster. Well, how about that?

Advanced level: I’ve also seen it suggested that provided your clothes aren’t heavily soiled, it’s more the agitation action of the machine and water on the clothes that cleans them as opposed to the detergent which more gives your clothes a nice smell as per the detergent (lemon etc) than anything else.

Now this might be a bridge too far but it might be worth considering trying smaller and smaller amounts each time until you do notice what you think is a difference in effect and then make sure to use more than that.

However, it seems to be suggested that we could all use less than the amount recommended on the box or bottle and hence save a little? A bit of which you could perhaps send in the direction of helping make more Exiern?

More on what our ultimate motives are below but if we help even in a little way save you some money, your washing machine and environment in any way, we’ll count that as a win!

This feature is nominally about recognising the fact that asking people for money via Patreon even when there’s extra content available can only go so far. It may not be much as an amount but when you split people’s financial demands across many small amounts (never mind the big ones), people still have to prioritise.

We’d clearly hit a wall some time back which is why we’ve been trying various new things as you might have noticed. Signing up with a new ad management service (Ezoic) and also promoting this webcomic on sites of a related thematic nature (TGC). It has helped increase revenue by about $200 US/month for now at least.

But we still need to do more. Superficially this is along the lines of if we bring to your attention a few clever ideas to help you save money out of your existing disposable income that you may not have known about before and maybe then, you’ll be in a position to start sending us a dollar if you weren’t before or an extra dollar if you already are (many thanks for your existing contribution!).

However, this feature isn’t really about that either. From a short term expenditure point of view, it would have made more sense to use the money for the main feature but extending that line of thought to its logical conclusion, we’d be even better financially off keeping all the money instead of making this webcomic since it’s still losing money.

We still keep making it, though in spite of this because we’re really having fun with it but it makes sense to at least keep trying to raise revenue one way or another and minimise our losses at the very least going ahead.

So, what all of this is really about (on top of buying the next artist to take over enough time to be ready to take over on a regular weekly basis at least) is us having a discussion in the comments section over the subsequent week about what ideas everyone has to help us at least break even with the production of Exiern.

And if nothing else comes of this, maybe we can at least have some fun along the way.

We look forward to hearing your ideas (and maybe even donations!).