I’m about to start on page 21 of Terran Omega, and 24 pages mark the actual halfway mark and 25 pages is a good chapter break for part one. But actually I think getting to page 20 is a thing in itself.
Here’s how it started: about a decade ago I was approached by Broken Frontier to do a sci-fi story -I pitched an idea I’d noodled around for a bit – Terran Omega, the last human being who was a weapon who had worked up 10,000 years after she was useful and decided to become something not a weapon. The Iron Giant mixed with Kung Fu. It meant I could write and draw multiple stories with this one character, because she could stumble in to each one and help resolve it but she would move on to the next – a story engine, is how I thought of it. I enlisted the help of my pal Scott Ferguson (we were doing a podcast together at that point, along with our mate Ron).
Of course, I didn’t do more, I had a bunch of ideas, some more developed than others. And I kept coming back to the idea of space ship ghost story, and I kept trying to figure out how to make it work – both the story and more importantly, the actual method of doing the thing such that I could afford to do it.
So the solution and the plan I decided on is this, and it’s been successful thus far (and by successful I mean I’ve stuck to it).
Write the entire thing in advance. Write a story you want to draw, because you’ll be drawing it for a year. Don’t worry too much about descriptions, just write enough that you know what’s happening. I wrote it fully scripted, you could also write marvel style (where you write a paragraph a page and add dialogue after) but I worried by the time I added dialogue for, say, page 15, I’d be 15 weeks away from doing the dialogue on page 1 and consistency might be a problem.
Then I do all the layouts, just making sure I know what each page looks like (I have of course, LOST the layouts!)
I have a art shelf specifically put aside for the project, and everything I do on it, goes in there, so I can put it away and take it out when I need it.
I pencil and ink a page on the weekend (hopefully), then upload it to go live for Wednesday on patreon for free. I want to build an audience for the eventual kickstarter, so building that audience out before the kickstarter is important, and while I could do that on my own website, I felt like patreon would allow me to grab some people that wouldn’t stumble across the blog.
(I’d already had a little success with building an audience on patreon a few years ago with John Reppion doing our folklore comics)
I set a few tiers on patreon, free (B&W&Green comics on Wednesday) $1, $2, $10 – those tiers all get the same but it allows people to pay what they’re comfortable with. I’ll be honest, I don’t make enough from paid subscribers to even make one page of B&W art, so trying to figure out how to give three tiers of people didn’t things felt like a job. This way I get to say “Hey I appreciate you giving me money, I’ll let you access stuff early and see the colour work and whatever else I can think of, but I’m not going to draw a distinction between you”
With this book, as it happens, it divides neatly in to two parts. So I think I’ll have a two issue pdf comic BEFORE doing a kickstarter with the whole thing.
The magic ingredient for getting it done for me is getting the script done and just slowly but surely chipping away one page per week and ignoring the horrible urge to start other things.
Finishing is a skill of itself, and one I know I have (because I’ve finished so many projects) but with stuff I’ve written and drawn them myself I tend to do four page strips at most, and often don’t finish those so this – even now, at 20 pages- is the longest entirely creator owned thing I’ve ever done, and so I take a little pride in that. Wait til I hit page 48 I’ll be unbearable!
One thing I’ve decided to do is add a newsletter I’ve found there are people who are unwilling or unable to go to patreon. I suspect Substack would be best for this, but Substack has fallen prey to the billionaire nazi-bar problem (you know, you allow one nazi in to your bar, and before you know it you’re a nazi bar) So instead I’m using Kit. I know nothing about kit except it looks good and is free for less than 10k people. (And laughably I’m vastly orders of magnitude below that so can’t imagine it’ll be a problem.)
I’ll send monthly updates with the pages in them, I think. Because again, this is about gathering readers for the end goal of a kickstarter.
So, how’s it working?
As far as numbers, the patreon has gone from around 20 people to 325
My Patreon is collecting about $90 per month, which is probably really about £50 a month, the thing is, I’ll dip in to that when I get to the point that I need to turn the work in to something physical (though I suspect I might have to do that before the tax year ends) it’s been three months already so it’ll pay for… something. I’ve grown the free readers but paid readers have stubbornly refused to grow at the same rate. Maybe it’s because I’m not asking for much (perversely, people are more willing to cough up more than cough up less, if you don’t appear to need the money they don’t feel the need to pay it to you – it’s that thing where a thing of value looks better when it’s priced higher, so maybe I haven’t done myself any favours here)
I’d love to grow the patreon to around 500 by the time the kickstarter happens, I think that’s a really good base to a successful kickstarter (And I’ve no idea how to grow it but looking at other comic creators on patreon it’s not an outrageous number)- though I’m not expecting all of them or even half of them to make the leap to a paid kickstarter. For a start a lot of those readers may be in the US and postage may just make any kickstarter entirely unaffordable. I’m in Belfast and I’ve yet to figure out what that means for postage to the Eu and to mainland GB, I HOPE – but am not convinced yet – it puts me in a weirdly good position, where I won’t be hit by European de minimus rules (because NI is in a liminal European Union condition) and similarly I won’t be hit by GB de minimus rules, but the US remains a bit of a nightmare for figuring that stuff out (last I heard the post office was telling people not to send stuff to the us due to backlogs!)
I do need to reach out to various websites to do interviews and so on, but it’s something I’m not great at doing (I’m a great interviewee! but rubbish pr person). I think that’s something I should try and get better at.
All in all, been a good start to this. I turned 56 in December, and I’m more conscious than ever that there’s only so many pages in me and I’d like more and more of them to be stuff I wrote.
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