Q&A 40: Kickstarter

Nevin asks:
Every now and then, I'll see a commenter suggest you use Kickstarter to fund a new comic. Since you have never done it, I assume that you have reason to believe it won't work for you. Could you explain what you think about Kickstarter? I'm always interested in the business behind art careers. If you want to say anything about other funding models that you've decided against (or may consider in the future), I'd like to hear it.

I am asked this question in person quite often.

I'll preface my answer by saying that I have done a Kickstarter - the Giant Days Not On The Test/Library Editions Kickstarter that funded the completion of the hardcover omnibus series - one that BOOM! Studios had never taken past the third volume of seven. After they had done a couple of very successful crowdfunders (most notably the Keanu Reeves vehicle Brzrkr), and after my French publisher Akileos had funded their translated versions of the same omnibus series all the way through, I suggested to BOOM! that they look at finishing the English versions the same way. The Library Editions are now the de facto default versions of Giant Days, so clearly Kickstarters do work for me.

The reason that I haven't done more is threefold:

1. Running and fulfilling a Kickstarter is a full-time job. I didn't run the Giant Days one, BOOM! had a whole infrastructure set up to oversee it, and a staff to put everything together. Plus, it was a reissue program, so there wasn't much new material required. I could work with someone else to fulfill it, but that takes me to the second point:

2. More than half of my audience is in the USA. Any project I drove myself would realistically be fulfilled out of the USA. This adds layers of complication and expense to my own access to whatever I produce. The logistics, currency hedging through a long project, international printing issues, dealing with suppliers, shipping costs, and half a dozen other wearying issues that people will moan at me about make me not want to do it.

3. My main (these days only) project is the comics you read here, or on badmachinery.com, or wherever else - the webcomics. My Patreon currently funds their production. Not to a lavish extent, but it covers my modest household bills, hosting costs, and software and hardware costs (Adobe subscriptions, broken Cintiqs, that sort of thing). I don't spend my days thinking about all the other things I could be working on at the same time. Working on a Kickstarter to do something else would inevitably stop new webcomics appearing. I'd have to stop the Patreon. I don't really see why I would do it at the moment.

A Kickstarter front-loads goodwill and concentrates attention, which is very useful when producing limited runs, but again, that concentration adds workload in fulfilling orders. That doesn't suit the way I work, or my energy levels, right now. I'd go, for want of a better phrase, Billy Bananas if my Kickstarter did better than expected. But to do that, it would have to go some way outside my existing readership, and the comics Kickstarters that do that tend to have some kind of heat that I don't know how to generate. Maybe there's a point 4, actually:

1. I do not enjoy promoting my work and when I try, I am seemingly not very good at it.

In the end (thankfully) I'm not sure that there's anything new I'm so desperate to make that I need to tap into other funding sources to make it. It would be nice to work with Max Sarin on something new, but I don't have anything in mind at the moment. Maybe you do? I'm always open to suggestion - that's what got NEMS printed and the second part drawn (thank BY NIGHT artist Christine Larsen for that).

So: any potential Kickstarter hits the same wall that many other seemingly viable projects do, when you are working alone: there is only one of me.