The problem with crowdfunding — comics edition.

I won’t lie — crowdfunding is awesome. For several reasons, crowdfunding helps mitigate a creator’s risk.

• Will people like this idea?
• How much do I invest upfront?
• If I do, will someone pay to buy my comic?

Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo provide both visibility and tools. It makes things incredibly easy for a creator to -

• Post their project idea.
• Make a convincing pitch to the potential funders.
• Attracting old and new believers in your work to fund the comics.

Despite the tools provided by the respective platforms, a significant amount of work goes into running a campaign end to end both before and after the campaign. It’s not over till the last copy of the book is shipped.

Where’s the flaw you say?

Now that you’ve had a successful campaign, where do you go from there ?

• Do you send people to your website to buy your books?
• Do you post it on ComiXology ? ( psst .. you end up paying ComiXology nearly 85% of your income. Even volumes don’t justify those cuts.)
• Post it on Gumroad or something similar.
• Your book is picked up by a publisher and then distributed by them.

Most comics do not end up in any of the above 4 scenarios. So, they go through the motions of creating another original work from scratch and then a campaign. This leads us to a situation where -

• A creator has to keep producing original work and do all the grunt work of running a campaign end to end.
• Then repeat step 1 with a new comic idea.
• We end up in a graveyard full of comics funded once and never seen again.
• With a creator constantly trying to come up with new ideas and not reaping the benefits of their previous work, we end up with a severe dilution of quality.

How do I know about this? Because I’ve been there and seen it first hand. Being a part of 2 anthologies in the last couple of years, both my works ended that way. A lot of times, people whom I know want to buy the work but have no way to buy it. Where’re the books? Maybe the originators of the Anthology want to -

• Run a second campaign for the same item.
• Bundling multiple old projects and running a campaign again.

The failure rate of such campaigns is extremely high. They want to reach a new market with their books, but crowdfunding the same project twice is a strategy with severely diminishing returns for several reasons. -

• The same rewards the second time around mean you’re killing the exclusivity of your book.
• Why would then anyone fund you the second time around?

Comics are still pretty much collectable items. Despite the proliferation of digital comics, physical comics still remain the primary medium of choice apart from memorabilia like autographed pullouts, 3d flashcards, merch.

So we want to keep that up while being able to keep selling our comic post-campaign without getting on the wrong side of our core backers?

So here’s an idea ..

Why can’t we have a platform where -

• People can pre-order comics ( get all the benefits of crowdfunding ). Pre-ordering is a simple age-old concept, just made to work like crowdfunding. We build a web page with all the information related to the project, get backers to pre-order your comic. Instead of offering a whole lot of rewards, we offer people genuinely exclusive rewards. e.g. Physical and Digital Bundle. They can have things like extra pages of content, pull-outs, flashcards, posters, covers.

• When the pre-order ends and are shipped, the comic automatically becomes available to the general audience. Anyone can order it anytime from there. It is searchable, discoverable for audiences old and new.

• Post this initial launch we intend to build tools to continuously improve your comic sales through things like understanding your audience, interacting with them and keeping them up to date with a host of social features. We want to make decision making around comics more predictable so that indie comic creators get the maximum benefit from using our website and tools.

Most importantly we’re small and we’re new. We’re willing to hear and shape our product in a way that benefits the indie creators the most. In the end, that’s what we want, to make the indie creators punch above their weight. To do that we will have to start by consolidating everything we have in one place.

In the next post we will talk about blockchain and Kickstarter’s decision to move to blockchain.