Womanthology and Kickstarter
Jul. 23rd, 2011 03:55 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
copperbadge.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
crowdfundingHi all! Sam again :) I'm here to post an entry on behalf of the crowd at Womanthology. The entry is theirs -- I am just a messenger, though I have to say I'm excited about Womanthology and the information they have to share with you. Away we go!
***
This is a story of a crowd-funded project that's enjoying successes beyond its creators' dreams. It's a story about hard work, good planning, and a little bit of magic. It's a sometimes-cautionary tale, with over 1,100 protagonists (and counting), and it's one that I hope will offer both inspiration and some hard-headed tips for others starting out on crowd-funded projects. It's a story that's still in progress, so we hope too that you'll excuse a little fuzziness around the edges. This story's about Womanthology, a crowd-funded charity comic book anthology created entirely by women, which so far has raised over $62,000. And we weren't all sitting comfortably when it began.
Act one
The story starts with the crowd-sourcing of material - of talent - even before we got around to crowdsourcing our funds. Womanthology is the brainchild of professional comics artist Renae De Liz. A well-respected artist with an established career and a New York Times bestseller to her name, Renae was struck by the abundance of excellent, but unpublished, female comics artists she encountered online. With the encouragement of fellow artist Jessica Hickman, Renae made a single post from her Twitter account, seeking women interested in contributing to a comics anthology. Retweeted dozens of times, her tweet attracted over 100 responses in a single day: and so Womanthology was born.
Contributors didn't know each other - we didn't have to attend a meeting, audition, or even speak to one another to get involved. We come from all over the world - from Malaysia, Mexico, and Greece, as well as English-speaking countries - and we span a huge range of backgrounds and experience levels. We came together in just a day, have built from nothing toWashington Post coverage in just two months, and will have our book in stores before the December holidays. Here's the story's first moral: online, things can happen like lightning.
What happened next, behind the scenes? A month of relative, industrious quiet. Renae set up a contributors' web forum, where discussion and idea-sharing began. Creator lists were formulated, fleshed out, and updated: using Google Docs let us do this easily, among a small network of volunteers spanning the globe, despite the high volume of information to manage. (This is where I came in - as well as having a story in the book, I've been wrangling the admin effort over recent months.) We started a Blogspot site, encouraging contributors to upload video profiles and plot their locations on a global map: through the blog, and through volunteer-managed profiles on Twitter, Tumblr, deviantArt, and Facebook, our creator community became visible, vibrant, and built up collateral for the fundraising drive to come. Here's the second moral: sharing the load among volunteers is a great way to get through the high-volume work of social networking and blogging.
For Renae, the project's shape was clear from the start: she envisaged an anthology of new comics by women, to be sold in stores, with proceeds going to charity via GlobalGiving.org. Though self-publishing was an option, Renae wanted to use a traditional publishing house. As well as conferring credibility, this route offered a key logistical advantage: comic book stores are supplied overwhelmingly by the major distributor, Diamond. Diamond deals directly with the big publishing houses, meaning that working with one of these is a creator's best route to the comics distribution network.1 We were very lucky (and Renae worked very hard!) in persuading prominent publisher IDW to agree to print Womanthology. Moral the third: don't be afraid to mix-and-match new business models with elements from traditional publishing. Those older models have advantages you can co-opt to give your project juice.
There was something else going on during this month that later, I believe, made all the difference to our project's crowdfunding success. As an established artist in the industry, Renae knew and had access to some hugely popular and successful professional comics creators. She convinced several to sign on to the project - not just to promote it, not just to submit content, but actively to co-create stories with our unpublished writers and artists. This created a huge buzz around the project: for some talented creators, struggling to break in, not only was the dream of publication about to come true - a bigger dream, to work with some of comics' most talented and famous women, had materialized. This is something completely new in comics - something that, I believe, many of our backers have found hugely inspiring. What's the moral here, then? After all, not everyone with a fantastic idea will be as well-connected as Renae. But everyone will have someone in their lives who can help, maybe in ways you haven't yet considered. A friend with great InDesign skills who can help with your marketing materials. Even just a Twitter-famous acquaintance who can help to boost your signal. That, then, is the next message I'd suggest: don't just source from the crowd, that amorphous mass of strangers. Source help, ideas, support, and inspiration from the people you know already.
End of Act One, then: we had an exciting set of contributors, a clear goal, a route to publication, and some very useful friends. What was next?
Act two: raising the funds
Though IDW had kindly agreed to attach themselves to the project, we still needed to cover the costs of printing up front - because we wanted to devote proceeds from the book's sale to charity, rather than to repaying the costs of publication. That meant we needed a fundraising drive, and we chose Kickstarter to manage it. The costs we calculated, to publish and distribute a 330-page, hardcover, premium format book, totalled US$25,000. This sounded big. It sounded HUGE. But we reasoned that there were over 150 of us contributing: we had friends and families; we had form for using the web to connect with strangers. Thanks to Renae's connections, we also had some really, really cool rewards to offer our backers. Over a month, we thought, we could give that goal a really good shot. The Kickstarter campaign launched on the evening of July 7, and we all crossed our fingers and went to bed.
We hit $25,000 in less than 18 hours.
The total kept shooting upward over the next day, and smashed through $40,000 before the end of the weekend; we reached our 1,000th backer in a week, and today have over $62,000 raised. It's been one of Kickstarter's most rapidly successful projects, and it's far outstripped our expectations.
We're so close to the project still, I'm not sure I can set out all the "whys". Connections, I'm sure, have been critical: Renae's well-known, and comics people listen when she talks. We got tweets and reblogs from some other very prominent comics professionals that drove an awful lot of people to our page. Sometimes this paid off in very obvious ways: once the touchpaper was lit, Renae sent a tweet to Neil Gaiman asking him if he'd like to be involved. He very kindly donated an offer of a personalized postcard, which alone earned us $1,000 in pledges. The generosity of people like Neil accounted for a lot of our early attention. But I also think - I hope - that the quality of the idea was strong enough to account for a lot of the buzz. There's a big, vocal, and active online community of fans who criticize the marginalization of women in professional comics: we got a very sympathetic hearing from lots of passionate people, prepared to put their money where their mouths are. (And I want to stress that a lot of them were men.)
I do, though, have some practical tips for Kickstarter users, things we missed or didn't think of when we were setting up. Firstly, reward structuring: we didn't realize how common it is on Kickstarter to use "cumulative" prizing, where each more highly-priced reward includes all the items offered at each lower price tier, plus something extra. Our rewards are mostly "free-standing", and this caused a little confusion early on. Secondly, administration. We were taken aback by the speed and scale of the response, and had to work full-time answering email and questions from prospective backers (and even journalists and promoters) over the first weekend. At 2:30 am on the day after launch I found myself sitting up in bed at the remote Welsh hotel where a good friend was getting married, answering backer email on a flaky little netbook that I perched on my knees. The lesson there? Plan time for the best-case scenario when you launch (and near your project's end), and encourage your friends not to marry Welsh girls :)
As for Act Three? We're not there yet. Our Kickstarter campaign still has 19 days to run (and we'd love for you to check it out). The extra money we've raised has already let us increase our print run - if we raise more still, Renae has big plans to get more creator-owned material published, and help more independent creators to thrive. For those of us caught up in the whirl, it's been a rip-roaring, sometimes overwhelming, unfailingly heartening experience - and the best part's still to come. In December, we'll hold in our hands the book we made - with the help of more than one crowd.
Laura Morley - Womanthology admin.
1 This isn't to say there aren't thriving small press comic publishers, and creators publishing their own works at their own expense - there are. For a print run large enough to produce decent returns for our charity, though, the benefits of convincing a traditional publisher to bring out our book were clear.
***
This is a story of a crowd-funded project that's enjoying successes beyond its creators' dreams. It's a story about hard work, good planning, and a little bit of magic. It's a sometimes-cautionary tale, with over 1,100 protagonists (and counting), and it's one that I hope will offer both inspiration and some hard-headed tips for others starting out on crowd-funded projects. It's a story that's still in progress, so we hope too that you'll excuse a little fuzziness around the edges. This story's about Womanthology, a crowd-funded charity comic book anthology created entirely by women, which so far has raised over $62,000. And we weren't all sitting comfortably when it began.
Act one
The story starts with the crowd-sourcing of material - of talent - even before we got around to crowdsourcing our funds. Womanthology is the brainchild of professional comics artist Renae De Liz. A well-respected artist with an established career and a New York Times bestseller to her name, Renae was struck by the abundance of excellent, but unpublished, female comics artists she encountered online. With the encouragement of fellow artist Jessica Hickman, Renae made a single post from her Twitter account, seeking women interested in contributing to a comics anthology. Retweeted dozens of times, her tweet attracted over 100 responses in a single day: and so Womanthology was born.
Contributors didn't know each other - we didn't have to attend a meeting, audition, or even speak to one another to get involved. We come from all over the world - from Malaysia, Mexico, and Greece, as well as English-speaking countries - and we span a huge range of backgrounds and experience levels. We came together in just a day, have built from nothing toWashington Post coverage in just two months, and will have our book in stores before the December holidays. Here's the story's first moral: online, things can happen like lightning.
What happened next, behind the scenes? A month of relative, industrious quiet. Renae set up a contributors' web forum, where discussion and idea-sharing began. Creator lists were formulated, fleshed out, and updated: using Google Docs let us do this easily, among a small network of volunteers spanning the globe, despite the high volume of information to manage. (This is where I came in - as well as having a story in the book, I've been wrangling the admin effort over recent months.) We started a Blogspot site, encouraging contributors to upload video profiles and plot their locations on a global map: through the blog, and through volunteer-managed profiles on Twitter, Tumblr, deviantArt, and Facebook, our creator community became visible, vibrant, and built up collateral for the fundraising drive to come. Here's the second moral: sharing the load among volunteers is a great way to get through the high-volume work of social networking and blogging.
For Renae, the project's shape was clear from the start: she envisaged an anthology of new comics by women, to be sold in stores, with proceeds going to charity via GlobalGiving.org. Though self-publishing was an option, Renae wanted to use a traditional publishing house. As well as conferring credibility, this route offered a key logistical advantage: comic book stores are supplied overwhelmingly by the major distributor, Diamond. Diamond deals directly with the big publishing houses, meaning that working with one of these is a creator's best route to the comics distribution network.1 We were very lucky (and Renae worked very hard!) in persuading prominent publisher IDW to agree to print Womanthology. Moral the third: don't be afraid to mix-and-match new business models with elements from traditional publishing. Those older models have advantages you can co-opt to give your project juice.
There was something else going on during this month that later, I believe, made all the difference to our project's crowdfunding success. As an established artist in the industry, Renae knew and had access to some hugely popular and successful professional comics creators. She convinced several to sign on to the project - not just to promote it, not just to submit content, but actively to co-create stories with our unpublished writers and artists. This created a huge buzz around the project: for some talented creators, struggling to break in, not only was the dream of publication about to come true - a bigger dream, to work with some of comics' most talented and famous women, had materialized. This is something completely new in comics - something that, I believe, many of our backers have found hugely inspiring. What's the moral here, then? After all, not everyone with a fantastic idea will be as well-connected as Renae. But everyone will have someone in their lives who can help, maybe in ways you haven't yet considered. A friend with great InDesign skills who can help with your marketing materials. Even just a Twitter-famous acquaintance who can help to boost your signal. That, then, is the next message I'd suggest: don't just source from the crowd, that amorphous mass of strangers. Source help, ideas, support, and inspiration from the people you know already.
End of Act One, then: we had an exciting set of contributors, a clear goal, a route to publication, and some very useful friends. What was next?
Act two: raising the funds
Though IDW had kindly agreed to attach themselves to the project, we still needed to cover the costs of printing up front - because we wanted to devote proceeds from the book's sale to charity, rather than to repaying the costs of publication. That meant we needed a fundraising drive, and we chose Kickstarter to manage it. The costs we calculated, to publish and distribute a 330-page, hardcover, premium format book, totalled US$25,000. This sounded big. It sounded HUGE. But we reasoned that there were over 150 of us contributing: we had friends and families; we had form for using the web to connect with strangers. Thanks to Renae's connections, we also had some really, really cool rewards to offer our backers. Over a month, we thought, we could give that goal a really good shot. The Kickstarter campaign launched on the evening of July 7, and we all crossed our fingers and went to bed.
We hit $25,000 in less than 18 hours.
The total kept shooting upward over the next day, and smashed through $40,000 before the end of the weekend; we reached our 1,000th backer in a week, and today have over $62,000 raised. It's been one of Kickstarter's most rapidly successful projects, and it's far outstripped our expectations.
We're so close to the project still, I'm not sure I can set out all the "whys". Connections, I'm sure, have been critical: Renae's well-known, and comics people listen when she talks. We got tweets and reblogs from some other very prominent comics professionals that drove an awful lot of people to our page. Sometimes this paid off in very obvious ways: once the touchpaper was lit, Renae sent a tweet to Neil Gaiman asking him if he'd like to be involved. He very kindly donated an offer of a personalized postcard, which alone earned us $1,000 in pledges. The generosity of people like Neil accounted for a lot of our early attention. But I also think - I hope - that the quality of the idea was strong enough to account for a lot of the buzz. There's a big, vocal, and active online community of fans who criticize the marginalization of women in professional comics: we got a very sympathetic hearing from lots of passionate people, prepared to put their money where their mouths are. (And I want to stress that a lot of them were men.)
I do, though, have some practical tips for Kickstarter users, things we missed or didn't think of when we were setting up. Firstly, reward structuring: we didn't realize how common it is on Kickstarter to use "cumulative" prizing, where each more highly-priced reward includes all the items offered at each lower price tier, plus something extra. Our rewards are mostly "free-standing", and this caused a little confusion early on. Secondly, administration. We were taken aback by the speed and scale of the response, and had to work full-time answering email and questions from prospective backers (and even journalists and promoters) over the first weekend. At 2:30 am on the day after launch I found myself sitting up in bed at the remote Welsh hotel where a good friend was getting married, answering backer email on a flaky little netbook that I perched on my knees. The lesson there? Plan time for the best-case scenario when you launch (and near your project's end), and encourage your friends not to marry Welsh girls :)
As for Act Three? We're not there yet. Our Kickstarter campaign still has 19 days to run (and we'd love for you to check it out). The extra money we've raised has already let us increase our print run - if we raise more still, Renae has big plans to get more creator-owned material published, and help more independent creators to thrive. For those of us caught up in the whirl, it's been a rip-roaring, sometimes overwhelming, unfailingly heartening experience - and the best part's still to come. In December, we'll hold in our hands the book we made - with the help of more than one crowd.
Laura Morley - Womanthology admin.
1 This isn't to say there aren't thriving small press comic publishers, and creators publishing their own works at their own expense - there are. For a print run large enough to produce decent returns for our charity, though, the benefits of convincing a traditional publisher to bring out our book were clear.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yay!
Date: 2011-07-23 10:49 pm (UTC)Re: Yay!
Date: 2011-07-27 07:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-23 11:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-27 07:35 pm (UTC)-Laura