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Kickstarter comics5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() Take Zainab Akhtar’s quarterly ShortBox project: each box contains five original comics from a wide range of independent and diverse creators. Kickstarter has also opened up publishing to voices that are marginalised in mainstream comics. Zero guesswork!”īut it’s not about just the nuts and bolts of comic production and selling. It’s so advantageous it almost feels like cheating, sometimes. And some projects have even made me completely rethink how many copies of a book I planned on printing, or how hard I was going to push the marketing. No waiting for books to pay out before we move to the next project. It’s helped us grow at maybe twice the rate we might have been capable of organically. “I seriously can’t tell you how beneficial that’s been for me, as a small press publisher. “And Duncan and I never give away our film rights, which immediately cut out 75% of publishers,” she added.Ĭ Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, has been Kickstarting comics since the platform launched. Since its success, De Campi has been approached by big publishers who moaned that she didn’t approach them with Madi, but she says that is with $360,000 of hindsight. Really well! Well enough we were able to stride into our publisher’s office like Lord Flashheart,” he says. “The idea of going to a publisher and telling them ‘I would like to make a book please’ seemed so absurd that when Alex suggested the Kickstarter route, I immediately felt more calm. Jones, who wasn’t sure that his success with film would necessarily translate to the comics world, says he was driven to Kickstarter by “fear, terror, lack of confidence, a desire to have some inkling that there would be interest in me doing a graphic novel when I had never published one before”. Madi by Duncan Jones and Alex de Campi, in the ‘Mooniverse trilogy’ made up of Jones’s 2009 film Moon and his 2018 film Mute. “Plus the word of mouth from a successful campaign helps raise the book’s profile, especially in this crowded market.” “I was worried that a lot of people who might be interested in the book would miss it if it was primarily available in comic shops,” says de Campi. ![]() One huge Kickstarter success of 2020 is Madi, the graphic novel created by film director Duncan Jones and comic writer Alex de Campi, which raised $360,000. And with the coronavirus shutting down comic shops for long stretches, Kickstarter is a distributor that has stayed open all year. The month-long fundraising window makes for a relatively quick turnaround – which allows for projects such as Tales from the Quarantine, a recent anthology featuring more than 400 artists and writers that raised money for charities involved in the pandemic. Readers pay up front for their comic before it is even finished more than 14,000 people backed the 12-issue BRZRKR, meaning more than 14,000 guaranteed sales. While Kickstarter was originally utilised by indie creators who couldn’t – or didn’t want to – put their work out through conventional publishers, now even the latter are getting in on the act. ![]()
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