Tag: kickstarter

Monday Monday

So, last week went a bit loopy, if you recal my original plan was:

This week

Mon – Three Inks (F&McB 6,7,8)
Tue – Two Inks (F&McB 9,10)
Wed – Ink Covers (war story 5 & 6)
Thur – Pencils (F&McB 1,2)
Fri – Pencils (F&McB 3,4)
Sat – Terran Omega Page 25
Sun – Put together pdf of Terran Omega issue 1

Alright, to recap, planned on a lot more paying work last week than I managed. On the other hand I did rapidly bring forward the schedule for printing Terran Omega issue 1 – In fact, I should have 100 copies in my hand later today!

Once I got the invite for the Rendr Festival it became obvious my best way to make use of the opportunity was to have business cards and copies of the comic to hand out, so that’s that what happened. Something of a miracle I got that all done. But it did rather mean putting the hold on paying work for a week.

So, this week it’s back to the grindstone, I’d really like to finish the F&McB part 3 so I can invoice and get those war covers inked. Then pencilling the next lot of invoicable work.

This is life as a comic artist, panic panic panic.

In the speed of putting Terran Omega print together I spotted one typo (just one? yes, for now).

I hate that it exists and will beat myself up forever about it, but it does mean that I’ve got a proper reason to reprint it via a kickstarter (SIGN UP ON MY NEWSLETTER TO BE NOTIFIED! )

On the plus side, I actually think the cover and graphic design and logo all look fantastic and can’t wait to see it in print (hopefully the colour will look good!)

Kickstarting the Numbers

Let me let you in on a secret about the kickstarter – like I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but here goes:

I’ll be setting a target of £300 – this should cover printing 100, plus sundry envelope costs, and the price of the comic will be £6 – which means, best case scenario I can make £300 – assuming costs of each issue is £3 (with packing bits). Now, that means posting 100 comics, and I don’t know how long that will take but I can guarantee it won’t be worth doing for £300.

(And then Kickstarter take 10%)

So, my real target has to be something like £4k – which on the cover price alone is impossible, so I have to figure out various worth while tiers and price points to make it possible.

I just haven’t figured out what they are.

What I’m trying to do is figure out a way to make doing this whole project pay a page rate of £200 per page – which is a a piddly rate for script, pencils, inks, colours and lettering (let alone cover, and graphic design).

At that rate this 25 page comic should cost me about £5k (again, ignoring the cover and sundry bits and bobs)

If I can somehow make £3-£4k on this, and then a similar amount when I eventually do a collected edition, then boom! I’ve made a sustainable way to do creator owned books (for me)

The collection (which is realistically at least a year or two out) I’d love to have all of the art, three versions of the strip, the script and all sorts. A real grab back of how this story was made. But we’ll see. But it will also feature me selling the original art which might be, ultimately, the only way to make it pay.

But maybe this is all wrong think and I should just focus on the end goal which is getting nice looking comic for me in my hands, I mean, on that front it’s already wildly successful!

Kicking the tyres on a Kickstarter for Terran Omega

I’m starting to mull over my kickstart options and so I phoned Matt Garvey, since there’s few people know more about publishing comics on Kickstarter than matt (who, coincidentally, has a new kickstarter about to launch – The Skim, a casino heist comic with some amazing artwork – great big juicy double page spreads that you’ll want to see in print)

So here’s the shape of it, it’s nebulous and foggy and I’m doing some thinking on the page as I type it, but the more I concentrate the more I can see it forming up…

I’m going to do a kickstarter for Terran Omega The Ghosts of War. Single issue comics for part one and part two.

Issue One, right now, I’m looking at March launch date. Soon, right! TERRIFYINGLY SOON! (so it might move)

Launch issue 1 on kickstarter, with some tiers:

  • PDF File / colour & B&W&Green
  • B&W Copy (why no green, you ask? Price, I reply!)
  • Full Colour
  • Full Colour with Alt Cover

Pages 1-25 with front and back cover, should come to 32 pages in total.

There will also be add ons to get PDFs of the Artist Edition – same comic with big super high res versions of the images!

I think the comic price will be about £8? (pricer than I’d like, but I am really figuring things out here and don’t want to go too low and burn my fingers) and I’m two minds about doing an alt cover. I suspect some people might want both copies and there’s a part of me hates that for them (maybe I can work out a two edition price?)

I anticipate there being 100 printed and sales hitting 50 or so. Maybe.

Haven’t looked in to postage yet, but will do.

Then when issue 2 is complete, I’ll do the same (or similar, or take all the lessons I’ve learned and try and apply them and so it may be completely different).

Issue 2 will have a slightly different page count, which could mean a slightly different page count for the comic (there’s two pages less, which means you can nearly print four pages less of book, but I could also just use that for fun backwater, so probably the same page count – I told you I’m thinking this through as I do it!)

THIS WILL ALL BE A PRELUDE TO A HARDBACK/PAPERBACK edition. I have no idea what they will be priced like. But certainly, I’ll be limiting the hardback numbers because oh boy does that look expensive to do! (I mean I might limit them to ONE copy for me…)

My ideal hardback is oversized, and stuffed with two versions of the comic (colour and black / white / green ) and maybe an artist edition at the back. That is wildly unlikely – because it would push the page count to uhm … 148+ pages and er.. yes. That gets costly quickly. I mean if the kickstarters go well, who knows maybe…

I think you’ll not see the hard back until about a year after the kickstarter of issue 2 but it’ll contain new material(I hope!) and sketches and all sorts that I can fit in.

Anyway, news of this as I build up what I’m doing.

Channel Hex: Planet of the Blind

Reminder: this isn’t the final work, the final work will be an entirely different story. This is just me trying to figure out some stuff about logos/layouts/page sizes/etc.

Anyway, last time on Channel Hex, I’d planned on a commando digest size and now I’m skewing more towards a slightly larger italian digets sized – art would still be A4, but those books tend more towards 4-5 panels per page rather than 2 (ultimately it may be between 3-4) so I drew a page of the imaginary story (aren’t they all) of Planet of the Blind, and dumped some logos on there. Thanks to my pal, Jim Lavery – who put up with me doggedly asking him to help me design a logo even though I’d clearly had exactly what I wanted in mind already – who suggested a font choice that works great. So I mocked up a single page of the comic, and here it is:

There’s a little too many logos on that page, I don’t think the smaller hex-tentacle logo works at all, and maybe, on that first page i don’t need the logos at all (though the temptation to use the hexagram as a 2000ad style credits in the strip is almost overpowering.)

I’ve a colourist friend has promised to colour up the cover, so once that’s done I’ll repost it with logos/etc.

I’m keeping the actual story under wraps – it’s a corker, and exactly the sort of thing I’d enjoy, fingers crossed when the kickstarter happens (and I’m working at timing now, a tricker thing that you’d think) then you’ll hear all about it on my mailing list at Channel Hex.

Channel Hex: Planet of the Blind

Got some work done, decided to start playing with logos and layouts for the kickstarter digest idea.

(To recap: a 64 digest comic, it’s actually 68 pages – once you include the covers, drawn while I do other work. Scifi/horror like the old UK Starblazer imprint)

So, in order to start working out layouts for a cover I needed a cover. And I didn’t have one. So I figured, it was time to test my working hypothesis that I could draw an A5 sized comic at A5 sized (which is about a quarter of the size of a traditional comic).

Man, my eyes are not what they once where, it was a little too tiny. So I might scale up – maybe not all the way to A5, but a decent 40% larger, maybe… (So a single page will fit on an A4 page, but it’ll still be smaller than A4)

This cover was a lot of fun to conceptualise and draw. I knew I wanted a sci-fi old school concept, spaceman, fighting monster on new planet. Then I covered his eye with an eyepatch and decided to make the monster blind (and he’s hunting it with some rotten meat).

And then a title just came – Kingdom of the Blind – wasn’t quite on-the-nose enough – good old pulpy sci required it be called Planet of the Blind (he also requires his surname to be King, if I ever wrote it)

Anyway, here’s the cover…

The logo in the bottom right is the Channel Hex logo. Spent some time figuring that out today, tried dozens of variations and ended up … going back to the original logo I designed when I first wanted to do some short channel hex stories a few years ago.

I’m gonna stew over some of these design choices, but it’s been fun doing this. I’ve a promise of a script from a colleague I’ve done loads with in the past, and he’s one of my favourite writers too – so I’m really looking forward to it starting. Gonna be trying “marvel style” (it’s alright for me to go – I’M DOING THIS FOR FREE! but it’s a bit out of order to say “YOU MUST WRITE A FULL SCRIPT FOR ME”)

If you’re interested in where this is all going, definitely sign up for my mailing list – I’ve not sent any posts out in a while, but it’s a sure fire way to know when the kickstart is kicking off. Still lots of research to do on that front, I wanna make sure I’m going in to it with my eyes opened as wide as possible -I’ve had a couple of great chats with people and one of the big things, especially as first kickstarter is KEEP IT SIMPLE – one digital book, one paperback and one hardback and that’s it. Try and keep the posting options tight, so you don’t accidentally push yourself over the edge promising stuff.

Tiers of a Starblazer

So been thinking some more on the idea of a digest style comic on kickstarter and what sort of tiers I could do, and again, very open to ideas/thoughts on this. It’s not the sort of thing I want to leap in to without thinking about a great deal first.

There’s a lot to be said for the idea of one single price for one single product (Keep it Simple, Stupid) but then there’s a few fun things you can do on a kickstarter, so here’s some notions – not final ideas, not final prices, just … starting points…

There’s (obviously) a digital comic tier – £1 – a pdf download.
At some point, any comic like this I’d want to look at getting on comixology, but probably for something like £2.50

A Softback Print comic – I’d like to charge £5-£10 for a softback. Not sure how practical that is, but it’s something I’d be comfortable paying for a comic.

A Hardback Print comic – probably around £10-£15

A Portfolio edition – hardback plus a set of prints, from some other industry pros (maybe?)- in a nice little envelope? £ 35 – 50 – 100? (Depending on who I get to rope in and whether I want to make this really limited?)

Broadly speaking I think you’d divide original art into three levels: full page (A), title character page (B), other page (C)

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of C art – £35

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of B art – £50

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of A art – £100

(Again, KISS though – maybe just one Original Art tier at £50 to cover any random page?)

And I think that’s it. All copies signed, obviously. I’ve seen other artists offer sketches or other things to be done, but I think that really skews the amount of work required -and I’d like the book completed before kickstarting (so the idea of adding people if they pay to be in it is a bit .. not for me) I’d like to do the book and then fund the printing and and creation of it. What I don’t want to do is become obliged to do more work (I mean, there will be more work – signing them all and sorting them and posting…)

Another thing I think you need to consider with kickstarter are stretch goals – but I’ll think about that another day…