Kickstarter Comics Tips: A behind-the-scenes blog

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By Zack Quaintance — So, if you follow me on Twitter and logged on for even a second today, you probably saw that I’m making a comic, and I’m making it through Kickstarter. And because that process isn’t demanding enough, I’m also keeping a behind-the-scenes blog…with daily updates. The book is called Next Door, and you can learn all about it with the link…and also see the cover below.

Next Door three-part connecting cover by Pat Skott with colors by Ellie Wright.

So that’s that. This blog, meanwhile, is ostensibly an effort on my part to share in near-real time the Kickstarter comics tips that I’m learning as I go. This is my first Kickstarter, so I’m not a veteran of the platform or anything, but as you’ll see in the months to come, I have spent weeks upon weeks speaking with others who have more experience crowdfunding to assemble my own approach. I’m also earnest as all get out about this, and excited to share all of my missteps, triumphs and embarrassing moments as we go.

How embarrassing? Well, tomorrow’s post, for example, is going to be a deep dive into how my original marketing tact for the thing was going to Death of Salesman meets Noah Baumbach. That was my genius marketing…for a comic book…where a dog urinating kicks off at least part of the action. I promise you, though, my attempts to navigate the world of Kickstarter comics only got better from there.

Anyway! I hope to strike a good mix between actionable advice and fun anecdotes in this space in the days and weeks to come, and I sincerely hope you’ll join me for the ride. As with the other recent daily, month-long-plus projects I’ve done on this site (thinking namely of the two collaborative readings lists we wrapped this year, the Quarantine Reading List and the Extra Eisners), I’ll be keeping master list landing page of each entry below.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it!

Kickstarter Comics Tips

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Kickstarter Comics Tips: Thank You
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Thank You

By Zack Quaintance — Folks, I have to confess…I’m worn out. I don’t know if I have it in me to get you an actionable Kickstarter Comics Tip today. In fact, I know that I don’t. I’ve also recently compiled list culled from this experience and this blog for a pair of great websites, doing a funny version of Xavier Files and a more serious take for my good friends at The Beat.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: 3 Giant Mistakes I Made
Kickstarter Comics Tips: 3 Giant Mistakes I Made

By Zack Quaintance — As I write this, we are rapidly approaching the 48 hours remaining line for our campaign for Next Door. I think a natural question that keeps coming to my mind is whether I want to do this again. It’s a tough one to answer, and it’s probably one best not answered as of yet. To be totally honest, as far as Kickstarter goes I’m just not in the headspace to think about my future with the platform.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Take Breaks From Promoting
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Take Breaks From Promoting

By Zack Quaintance — I have three days left to go for my Kickstarter campaign for Next Door, and, friends? I am absolutely wiped out. I have done everything in my power to promoted my comic. We’ve worked hard on it, and I think we really have something special on our hands. Now, I want to get this book to the audience I know will love it. And so, the promoting continues.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Aim Big for the Last Week
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Aim Big for the Last Week

By Zack Quaintance — As I type these words, the DAYS TO GO counter on our Kickstarter campaign page currently reads 4. By the time you read this, it will likely read 3 or less. By any metric, our campaign is now winding down, heading into the homestretch. There’s a sense of relief that goes along with this, which is nice, but at the same time I’ve found myself working as hard (if not harder) than at any point in this process.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: An Interview with Letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Kickstarter Comics Tips: An Interview with Letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

By Zack Quaintance — This is the last full Friday of our campaign, and as such, we come to the end of our interview series, featuring the team of our book, Next Door. Today’s interview features the project’s letter, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, who in my opinion is easily one of the best letterers making comics today. Hassan is also behind some of the absolute best analysis of comics we have through his digital magazine PanelxPanel as well as his YouTube channel, Strip Panel Naked.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: (Don't) Curb Your Enthusiasm
Kickstarter Comics Tips: (Don't) Curb Your Enthusiasm

By Zack Quaintance — I’m going to be blunt with you all here today: I’m running on fumes. I’ve been promoting this Kickstarter now for what feels like several months, and it’s getting harder to maintain the same level of enthusiasm with which I started. I look at the campaign page, and I see 8 DAYS TO GO, and It hurts, folks.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Being a Good Comics Citizen
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Being a Good Comics Citizen

By Zack Quaintance — I waited a long time to launch my first Kickstarter campaign. In some ways, the roots of it go back about three years, if not longer, to long before I ever started collaborating on the book with my friend, artist Pat Skott. See, I may be a newcomer to writing comics, but I’ve been writing fiction since I was a teen, off and on as college and career ate into time to do so.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Asking for Help
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Asking for Help

By Zack Quaintance — I’ve been clear about this from the start, but this is my first Kickstarter comics campaign. As such, I’m super grateful for the success we’ve had. With nine days remaining in our campaign, we’ve had 225 total backers pledge $5,744 to make our comic a reality. That’s certainly nothing to scoff at, and while we’re working with established pros like colorist Ellie Wright and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, it’s remarkable for a first-time writer and an artist on his second KS project.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: A Conversation With David Pepose of The O.Z.
Kickstarter Comics Tips: A Conversation With David Pepose of The O.Z.

By Zack Quaintance — I mentioned this in a blog post last week, but one of the inspirations for me to stick with it and continue promoting my Kickstarter as hard as I can has been writer David Pepose, who also launched his first Kickstarter project this month and is having tremendous success with it. Pepose’s project is called The O.Z., and you can read all about it on The O.Z. campaign page. In just a week, The O.Z. has brought in a tremendous $28,000 (and counting!) from 757 backers.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: An Interview with Colorist Ellie Wright
Kickstarter Comics Tips: An Interview with Colorist Ellie Wright

By Zack Quaintance — We’re now two weeks away from the end date for our campaign, and to commemorate how far we’ve come, the blog is taking a break from candid lessons learned to feature one of my collaborators on Next Door, colorist Ellie Wright. I recently told this story on the Watching Comics Podcast, but when artist Pat Skott and I decided to expand this project from the black-and-white 5-page short that it started out as, we separately made lists of colorists whose work we thought would best fit our tone and aesthetic.

Kickstarter Comics Tip: Getting Coverage on Comics Sites
Kickstarter Comics Tip: Getting Coverage on Comics Sites

By Zack Quaintance — I have been running this website for two years and some change, sort of gently ramping up how prolific and comprehensive the site strives to be over time. One of the features we do with regularity is Small Press Previews. This feature, however, was not my idea, not entirely. It was born out of the high frequency of pitches I get for indie comics coverage.

Kickstarter Comics Tip: Trying to stay creative while promoting
Kickstarter Comics Tip: Trying to stay creative while promoting

By Zack Quaintance — At this point in our Kickstarter Campaign for Next Door, it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve hit a wall. We’ve had a really good run so far — better than we expected, to be certain — but we’re firmly mired in the Week 2 - 3 doldrums, where most of the folks interested in our book have heard about it and packed already…or they’ve signed up for a notification and will likely back when the time to do so starts to dwindle.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Co-Promoting
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Co-Promoting

By Zack Quaintance — Like many Kickstarters, we had a relatively robust first week (more than we expected, to be certain), followed by a slower Week 2. So, as with all things with this project, I reached out to others who have knowledge of the space for advice on how to continue to market the first comic that I’ve written, Next Door (back it on Kickstarter now!). And the main piece of advice I got back was to pivot my focus from soliciting coverage by wider comics news outlets, to building support within the Kickstarter platform.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Inspirations for NEXT DOOR
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Inspirations for NEXT DOOR

By Zack Quaintance — Today we’re going to dive into something a little bit different. Instead of talking about a recent experience I’ve had running the Kickstarter for my first comic, Next Door, I’m going to take a look at five stories that helped to inspire the story you’ll read when you get your hands on the book. I’ll go into details about the ways that each of these stories influenced Next Door, with the hope that this glance at the intersection of topics will help understand why the campaign, cover art, and promotional material has taken shape the way that it has.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Weathering the Week 2 - 3 Lull
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Weathering the Week 2 - 3 Lull

By Zack Quaintance — Everything you read about Kickstarter campaigns warns you — you’ll have a lot of pledges during your first week and a lot of pledges during you last week, but the middle two weeks of your campaign will be slow. Painfully slow, in fact. That said, like so much else within running your first Kickstarter campaign, there’s really no way to anticipate exactly how it will feel when it arrives. And friends? It’s rough.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Picking Preview Pages
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Picking Preview Pages

By Zack Quaintance — Today I want to talk about the preview we assembled for our Kickstarter campaign for Next Door. That is, the set of completed pages we’ve been using to stoke interest in the book. We went with four specific pages that constitute one scene. You can find those pages in the gallery below, ordered as they appear in our forthcoming comic…

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Matching campaign to comic
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Matching campaign to comic

By Zack Quaintance — The first draft of my project’s campaign page was, in a word, stilted. I don’t have the exact wording of it (I destroyed all the evidence), but it was really formal, really tightly-wound, and perhaps a bit nervous…the way one gets when they’re talking to a strict teacher or a cop. All of this put the tone of the page at odds with the tone of the comic. One thing I’ve definitely learned during my time kickstarting my first comic is that you want to match the tone of your page as closely as you can to the tone of the book, thereby pulling in an audience that will (ideally) appreciate the work.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Respect the PR Hustle
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Respect the PR Hustle

By Zack Quaintance — As I write this, I’m sitting here getting ready to record another podcast appearance, my third in the past seven days. It’s going to be fun, I’m going to enjoy talking to the podcast host (who is another person who does what they do simply for the love of comics), and then when it’s done, I’m going to be absolutely exhausted. In fact, at this point in my campaign (day nine!), exhaustion is my cruising speed. And you know why?

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Set aside money to invest
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Set aside money to invest

By Zack Quaintance — My first-ever Kickstarter comic — Next Door — did really well in its first full week, exceeding our total funding goal by more than 50 percent. Now, to be totally honest, we kept our goal modest, asking for minimum funding to ensure that at the very least, we would be able to pay our fantastic colorist (Ellie Wright) and our superstar letterer (Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou). We’re on pace to eventually be able to afford some truly cool add-ons as well, so there’s really nothing but great news all around.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: The Pat Skott Interview
Kickstarter Comics Tips: The Pat Skott Interview

By Zack Quaintance — So today marks day five of the campaign for my first Kickstarter comic, Next Door, and folks, I have to tell you — it feels like it’s been live a month. And the project so far has been really exciting, getting funding within 24 hours of launch. It’s also give rise to this blog in which I share the Kickstarter Comics Tips that I’ve been learning along the way.

Kickstarter Comics Tip: The Exhaustion
Kickstarter Comics Tip: The Exhaustion

By Zack Quaintance — In a normal week, the last post of the day for this site goes up around 3 p.m. Eastern Time. I’m often proud that this happens so reliably. I don’t know if anyone has ever noticed, but, damn it, it means something to me. This, however, has not been the case with this week, no where close, not with the advent of my new Kickstarter campaign for Next Door, the book that gave rise to this blog.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Assembling a Creative Team
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Assembling a Creative Team

By Zack Quaintance — One of the questions I’m being asked the most as I promote this campaign is how did our team of four creators come together. And, I must admit, before I started making this comic, that was the question I found myself asking other creators on Kickstarter most frequently. So, in today’s behind-the-scenes blog, I’m going to tell you how our team came together to make Next Door, and then I’m going to tell you what I think the underlying secret was to me (a writer who can’t draw) finding such talented collaborators.

Kickstarter Comics Tips: Taglines and Bad Decisions
Kickstarter Comics Tips: Taglines and Bad Decisions

By Zack Quaintance — So, I’ve been writing about comics a long time, and one thing I get hung up on is how all new books pick an equation of existing properties to market themselves. On a light week, I probably read at least two new book announcements, and every book has one. Like for example, Game of Thrones meets Spy vs. Spy (hey, that sounds cool…). The idea is to find a magical combo that will fire dopamine in readers’ brains, making them think MY OLD FAVORITE THING + MY OLD FAVORITE THING…this must be MY NEW FAVORITE THING!

You can browse and potentially back the Next Door: Neo-Noir Comic One-Shot now!

See our past top comics to buy here, and check out our reviews archive here.

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.