GIRL GENIUS Wins Hugo

Via Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter:

The first "Best Graphic Story" category winner being named was among the highlights of this weekend's Hugo Awards results. That winner was Girl Genius, Volume Eight: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones">Girl Genius, Volume Eight: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, from the writing team of Kaja & Phil Foglio, Phil Foglio on the art and Cheyenne Wright on Colors from their own web/print company Airship Entertainment. The Hugo Awards are a science fiction awards with a 50-plus year history, and were held this year at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, concluding today in Montreal.

Phil Foglio gave a very interesting interview this spring on giving away your work on the Internet and then making money from it. Here's the item from the March 23, 2009 edition of this blog:

Phil Foglio on Giving It Away

How do you make money by giving it away? Phil and Kaja Foglio are living the answer.

Better than that; in this interview at ICV2, Phil Foglio gets into the hardcore numbers of their studio (the 2 features he draws, money, print run, work schedule, number of unique visitors, distribution, etc.) and why they went from a monthly comic book schedule to putting it on the Web every week, with a physical, paper book of the comic produced about every year.

And by cutting out the production of a monthly comic book, Phil has more time to draw, producing 6 pages a week.

" ... [W]e figured we saved around $20,000 a year by not having to produce the individual comics. Production time… I’m not just talking about printing, but paying for our time and the time it took to format it. Because then we’d have to re-format the same material differently for graphic novel format, which was the final form.

"We’ve been doing it for four years now, and at a very conservative estimate, I’ve got 270,000 readers."

Hat tip to Comics Reporter!