While I have not yet completed production on my first comic book yet, I am already looking ahead to the inevitable Kickstarter attempt and have been trying to find ways to make it more likely to succeed.
Basically, here is what I’ve found out:
- Most Kickstarters have a digital tier for a few bucks, then the physical copy mailed for around, give or take, $10-12. Some are lower, some are a bit more. Top Secret Press beats them all by giving you TWO physical copies for only a couple of bucks more, lowering the unit price a lot closer to the cover price. I plan to do this myself.
- There is a ‘sweet spot’ of approx $25-25 that generate the most support, and also the most revenue for comic book Kickstarters, in general. Of course the trick is to have enough value there for the user making the pledge, without breaking the bank on rewards and cutting your return. This means postcards, stickers, prints, and other little things that only cost a couple of bucks but allow you to add $10 or more to the reward tier.
- By the time you are offering your fourth book on Kickstarter, most of your potential pledgers do not need to put up the extra $$ for digital copies of books they already have from you. This must make each new Kickstarter a bit harder. What else is there to offer?
So I got to thinking that there might be a win-win here for publishers and pledgers. My idea is basically this:
We get together 6 or so indie comic book guys who have a Kickstarter coming up in the next year or so, maybe sooner. Each puts one of his earlier books into a pool. Each of the 6 or so publishers is then able to use this pool of books in his Kickstarter without any payment to the others, he is paying by allowing the others to use his book as well.
This would allow us to go from the physical tier of approx $10-12 into something closer to the sweet spot. Imagine 40-50 pledges at $22-25 and all you have to do is mail a floppy.
You could make your digital comic book in the pool up-to-date with new ads for your site, existing books, others in the series, or your upcoming Kickstarters. It’s essentially free advertising.
The trick would be to not make the pool too large, so we do not end up stepping on each others potential pledgers, and to have a variety of genres and books but no crap, garbage titles.
I will update this if I can come up with a better way to explain, or expand on the concept, but for now there it is. What do you think?
