I went to my first Fan Expo yesterday and managed to get in one seminar led by experienced panellists. The second seminar was a bust because, whether by some miscommunication from the staff or some other reason — we were told by a staff member that the location of the seminar had changed at some point, and she suggested that perhaps the experts hadn’t gotten that info — those panellists didn’t show at the appointed time and place.
But in any case, the first one was solid. It was called You Crowdfunded Your Comic, Now What?, and the panellists included several people covering a range of experiences with crowdfunding to get their comic projects off the ground and into the hands of fans who, via crowdfunding, had literally helped make the work possible in the first place.
Among the panellists was my friend Ricky Lima, who has been making his own comics for 13 years. For years I’ve been occasionally tapping Ricky to pick his brain on how he does what he does, and the details of his experiences and insight, all in order to look at the possibility of doing it myself. Writing comics is something I’ve dabbled in a bit and would be very satisfying to do as a job, so it has long been among my myriad potential goals as a creative outlet that may, some day, actually lead to paying work.
I left the seminar on an initial high, from the energy and passion for their work that all the panellists brought, and with the revelation from panellist Michael Schwartz that there are now indie comic publishing companies who themselves rely on crowdfunding to get their comics (and other books) published. That was a new concept to me: Not just independent comic creators looking to have their work see the light of day, but companies who assist creators with that goal and who have connections for distributing, etc., but that also rely on crowdfunding to do their thing. It struck me that crowdfunding is a developing phenomenon, changing from its origins to be used in new and interesting ways.
But…
I was hit with a thought from seemingly out of nowhere last night that crowdfunding to make comics wasn’t for me. What Ricky does — what all those people engaging with us at the seminar yesterday do — isn’t something that is in my near and maybe even far future. I put the notion aside for the time, but then it popped into my head again this morning. And I took the time to examine it from a few angles and see why this seemingly counter-intuitive notion was poking at my mind.
And in doing so, I came to the realization that it’s actually right.
Here’s the thing: If you’re going to do crowdfunding effectively, as I had heard numerous times before, and as Michael Schwartz opened with in the seminar, has to become a full-time job for you. To do that — totally hone in on it, tune into how things are proceeding with it, maybe change rewards for different tiers and stretch goals as the fundraising campaign is active, then finally seeing through every one of those rewards getting squared away for each of the dozens or hundreds or thousands of people who contributed money to the project — that’s not something you can idly do when you get the chance in your everyday job/life routine. It’s got to be what you’re dedicated to for the whole time that campaign is active and while anything connected to it remains incomplete.
Well… I can’t do that. It’s not that I won’t — this isn’t about willingness to shift gears and learn new skills — this is can’t, at least not right here and now, because as it is I’m not making enough money working and I’m actively trying to find other jobs. Trying to find a full-time job, while evidently needing to wholly dedicate that much time and effort to how a crowdfunding campaign is proceeding, simply doesn’t work. And once I get another job, I’ll need to focus on settling in and doing well there. So again, that won’t allow full-time job hours to be spent on the funding campaign, either.
Connected to that money issue (the main reason I’m looking for other work), Michael and Ricky both said that they have full-time jobs but that the money they earn is then poured back into the work of making comics. I had always thought that the money one gets from crowdfunding helps pay for things like, say, the person doing the artwork (i.e. a writer like me would have a tentative agreement with an artist to do the artwork for the material I wrote, and then the money from successful crowdfunding would in part pay for the artist to do that work). But at least in the case of indie comic production, the reality of it is that usually the project is entirely done, the various people brought into the project have already been paid for their work, and the crowdfunding goes toward other expenses like printing and shipping and perhaps a bit of actual marketing.
When I asked Michael about how indie comic publishers work, like his current work with crowdfunding company Clover Press, he underscored that newfound understanding of mine: No, they don’t connect you with an artist for the comic you wrote and approached them with and they wish to produce with you. You have to basically bring the book to them as a fully finished (and paid for) project, which they then help you print and distribute and market with their better established connections than you’d have alone.
Meaning, in short, that however you slice it, an independent comic creator — including someone who only brings writing talent to the table — needs to have paid for everything up front to then get the basically finalized material printed and made into its final format.
Well… again… I’m not making enough money right now to even cover the bills and other day-to-day expenses J and I are already dealing with. I can’t go paying an artist myself to make my writing come to life on the page before I even know if anyone will be interested in funding the project to help it become a physical item they can read and enjoy.
Put bluntly, even if I had the passion that all these panellists have for creating comics — and I remain very splintered on what creative project to focus on at any one time; I love comics but don’t live and breathe them like all of these people do — I simply don’t have the financial means to pursue this particular kind of project. That was what was poking at my mind.
Further, the reality came on the heels of that realization that while I’ve written comics, I don’t write them nearly as much as I write in other formats. Mainly fiction. I love comics and probably always will, but my default has long been other kinds of writing. So even if I did get to the point where I wanted to indie publish something (and I daresay that time is getting closer the more I consider it), it would make a lot more sense to start in that kind of project and not one I dabble in writing far less often, like comics.
This doesn’t mean that the possibility of writing published comics is dead forever because hey, once I get a better-paying job, maybe I’ll find myself with a gradually accruing bit of money that could go to, say, a copy editor and, say, an artist. But doing that is for sure on indefinite hold.
Initially this all hit me as a negative: Dammit, I have this invaluable connection with Ricky who’s only ever been helpful and insightful and encouraging, and after years of possibilities about doing stuff like he does bouncing around in my head, now it’s a long-time seemingly possible thing that I’ll have to put on the shelf due to being unattainable.
But I realized that it was actually a genuine positive. I’ve long been pulled in many, many directions at once creatively. I want to try this, I want to try that, I like doing this, I’ve made one of those and a lot of these other things, what if I approached more publishers, what if I put it out myself instead or first or as well as them, hey here’s an idea for a follow-up thing to that other unfinished thing, books, short stories, haiku, screenplays, tabletop games… (I tell ya, folks, it’s pretty cacauphanous up in my head most of the time, and that’s not even including stuff about work and other work and day-to-day issues). Point being, the necessary step of letting go of this particular option as a creative outlet helps quiet at least one of those sources of ideas, possibility, and questioning.
And while process of elimination would be a far longer method of determining what creative project I should be working on from moment to moment, let alone long-term — rather than just making myself pick one, already — it still does help me get closer to the one key piece of advice that Ricky has always encouraged me to do: Focus.