Crowdfunding can be used by webcomic artists in a lot of ways, from bringing large scale projects to life, getting print runs together, which we talk about book printing in another episode, so check that out. But today we want to talk about the planning process. What should you do (or avoid) along the way to make it work as smoothly as possible, what kinds of things are attractive in a campaign for your readers, and what expectations should you have? Our hosts are here to share their tips and tricks for crowdfunding!

Know What Platforms Are Available: Kickstarter is what I’m familiar with and what I’ve seen be successful. IndieGogo is a solid choice if Kickstarter is not available in your region, and there’s a few other platforms out there in rougher stages of development when they were flirting with NFT garbage. Other platforms I know of are Zoop, Crowdfundr, and BackerKit’s new service. Know that in these smaller cases, you will be doing a lot of the legwork bringing awareness to the platform and your audience to them, so you’re almost always going to raise less money compared to Kickstarter because it’s more established.

You Won't Be Able to Launch Immediately: You're going to need a little time to connect your bank and verify your identity, so don't expect to draft and launch the same day!

How to set your fulfillment timeline: Most book printers will take a month or so to print, and there can be a lot of other odds and ends to figure out during fulfillment, so don't feel the need to make very fast promises about delivery. 3 months would be the absolute fastest I would ever promise on anything, but if things change, audiences are very understanding. Get your quotes done BEFORE you launch your campaign. Stay on top of what you need to know and what money you’re going to have to hit to fund your project.

Draft as long as you need: When you click the button to start a campaign, it puts you in draft mode, and you can stay in draft mode for as long as you need filling out the various information and showing previews to your peers to see if everything's reading well. Take advantage of this! Start a draft as soon as you think you might want to do a campaign, and take your time with it. Ask close friends if your goal is reasonable, if the pricing seems clear and accessible. You might get people asking for plushies or big things that aren’t in the cards for you, and that’s stuff that you can politely set aside if not realistic. But if multiple people are saying the same thing about something being out of budget or inaccessible to them, that might be a thing to look into modifying.

Choose the Right Timeframe: You can choose the duration of your campaign: the minimum is 1 day and the maximum is 60 days. Most people opt for 30 days. I’ve also gone for three week campaigns. You’ll need time to get the word out, so don’t cut yourself too short, but longer campaigns can be a big energy sink and lose that “urgency to buy” that makes crowdfunding more compelling. You’re going to be marketing your project like no tomorrow, be prepared to never shut up about it.

Set Up the Prelaunch Page: When you're getting close to launch, there's an option to make a prelaunch page so people will receive email notifications as soon as you launch. This is a really powerful feature and can let you start talking about your campaign sooner, and you WILL want to be talking about your campaign with a lot more frequency.

What Types of Backers You Can Expect: There’s three types of people you’re going to be reaching: Newcomers who have NEVER read your stuff or heard of you, fans who follow your work, and your besties who just wanna give you a lot of money.

• People stumbling across your work for the first time may only want to grab a $5-$10 digital tier. This can feel weird if you make a comic that’s free to read online or you already offer a PDF in your store, but that’s extra steps they’re probably not going to take. Make it super-easy for people to start your comic by offering a PDF.
• Casual fans will want the basic reward, and maybe one or two extras if they’re reasonable.
• A few superfans or very excited friends and family might want to drop hundreds of dollars on you and will grab just about anything you offer, no matter the price (or sometimes choose the “no reward” option if they just want to give you general support). It’s usually not a LOT of people, but they will contribute a good percentage to your full goal, so try to give them one or two easy options they can pick on the list..

How to Craft Reward Tiers: You can craft reward tiers at any dollar amount you want, and there's no technical limit. It is very possible to overdo or underdo this, so focus on making rewards at a variety of dollar amounts. And make sure you don't have an overwhelming number of options.

How to make Add-Ons: You can use Kickstarter’s add-on feature to include small items/upsells. This is a little bit hidden and only pops up after someone chooses to pledge, so don’t hide anything TOO juicy in here, but it’s a good way to offload merch you might have made for a convention, other comics you’ve made, things that don’t need a larger print run that you can just get a few of, stuff like that. It’s an add-on, it’s a thing to throw in a box you’re already sending them, don’t make it really complex.

Changing Things After Launching: Once you launch a crowdfunding campaign, you can add or change almost anything except the end date and money goal (unless you're Hiveworks) and you also cannot touch any products that a person has pledged to. Some creators will add surprise tiers mid-campaign, either because they thought of something they were missing, or just to drum up attention during the sloooooow middle-of-campaign.

Stretch Goals: One thing that’s not supported within the Kickstarter framework but that people do are stretch goals. These will vary depending on the type of campaign you’re doing. Book Kickstarters often include small paper products that can ship along with the book for no extra price or upgrades to fancier paper stock or finishing add-ons like spot gloss or foil. Apparel Kickstarters might offer some unlocks of other designs for the base product that you can choose after the campaign. Hitting this goal should benefit MOST of the people who are there for a physical product. You do not have to overthink it or make a lot of extra work for yourself though. Most people are happy to receive anything that’s free.

What Happens at the End: At the end of the campaign, if you don’t make the goal, nobody will be charged. If you do, they'll take about a week or two to send your money to your connect bank account and then you can buy all the stuff you need

Keeping in Touch with Backers: Once the campaign launches, you’ll also get the option of posting “updates”. These are shown on the campaign page and emailed to anyone who has pledged or signed up for your interest form. It’s good to try to make one update every week or so (and another just before the end) to let people know how things are going. If things are going quickly, you might use them to talk about stretch goals or announce new tiers add-ons, if things are moving slowly, you can show off parts of your comic-creation process or highlight the things you want people to get excited about. And then after the campaign, you’ll probably want to send out an update every month or so to let people know the status of all the orders until they’re all shipped out. You’ll also be able to keep updating campaigns long after the campaign ends, and this can be an awesome way to retain your audience if you need to relaunch an unsuccessful campaign or you’re making a whole new thing.

What Happens if You Don't Get Funded?: If you don’t make your goal or if it takes a while… it feels like crap. The reality is that you might not fund the first time, but you’re not out of luck. A lot of projects fund after people scale down their goals and relaunch, so maybe look into different printers or smaller quantities for now. You might also look into how your outreach was handled, if your social media posts and campaign page were confusing, not frequently updated enough, hard to share, or not being noticed for some other reason. Or just wait until your comic has gotten a little more traction! Try to look at the positives of how many backers you did get!

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Episode Release Date: March 20, 2024

Episode Credits:

Christina Major (@delphina2k) - she/her, sombulus.com

Ally Rom Colthoff (@varethane) - she/they, chirault.sevensmith.net wychwoodcomic.com

Kristen Lee (@feathernotes) - she/they, ghostjunksickness.com lunarblight.com

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The Intro "DO IT (feat. Shia LaBeouf)", and the Outro "It's Good To See You Again!!", both by Adrianwave, have been used and modified in good faith under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licensed. Edits include: Fade IN/OUT, and a repeat added to the beginning of "It's Good To See You Again!!". For more information on this creative commons use, please reference https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.

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