Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, Jules Rivera, kickstarter, Misfortune High

The Terrible Twos of a Kickstarter Project

Published Sat, 22 Mar 2014 18:00:52 -0500

Jules Rivera writes for Bleeding Cool:

Last September, I launched a Kickstarter campaign for my original graphic novel series called Misfortune High. The series is about a spoiled, rich teenage wizard who gets a quick comeuppance when he's expelled from his high class wizard school and sent to a magic school in the ghetto as punishment. That high pitch makes a lot of people laugh, as there's nothing like a 1% citizen getting a taste of what it's like to be the rest of us.

The project got a pretty good response and the Kickstarter was funded at 125%. Overall, reward fulfillment went down smoothly. I was grateful I got a successful project off the ground without ending up a Kickstarter horror story. Hooray.

One would call that a happy ending, but Misfortune High is a series. I only launched book 1 out of 5, so that wasn't a happy ending. That was a good start.

This month I launched the Misfortune High Book 2 Kickstarter. Before everything kicked off, I thought I had a leg up this time around. I was much more prepared with materials and I had been through the gauntlet before, so I knew what to expect, right?

Yeah, maybe not.

While this Kickstarter had a very strong start ($1500 on day 1), I've found out that launching a Book 2 is a whole different animal from a Book 1 in a series. Yes, I'm a proven commodity as a creator, but it's tricky to get new readers to jump onto a series in media res (a highly common problem in the comics industry). It's like trying to sell tickets to a movie that already started 20 minutes ago. My Book 1 backers are a great, reliable bunch, and many of them have come back for Book 2, but I still want to grow the fanbase with this campaign. So, I was faced with the challenge of how to reach new readers 20 minutes into the movie.

Turns out the answer is easier than one would think: start them at the beginning of the movie.

I found I had to make Book 1 more accessible to new backers, and call lots of attention to the fact that book 1 is available at all. I made an entire set of banners to point out this very fact because subtlety is vastly overrated.

My office closet is currently the sole distribution warehouse for Misfortune High Book 1, and I have a healthy supply of copies. It's really easy for me to throw book 1 into any rewards package for any backer who asks. I even offered a few rewards that included Book 1 from the get-go, but readers need a few bigger, brighter road signs to point them in the right direction. Some rewards have been added to include even more access to Book 1. The focus of the campaign has shifted a bit to push Books 1 and 2 as a package deal, as opposed to pushing mainly Book 2. I think the effort is paying off with more new folks showing an interest in jumping on the campaign.

I hope my cautionary tale can help others who might be in my unique position of keeping a series going exclusively through Kickstarter. A second campaign for a series is not going to be the same as the first. If you did your job right the first time, many of your backers will be return customers, and you'll have to think of new ways to keep their attention. And grabbing new readers means you have to give them a good jump-on point that makes them feel comfortable. It's a careful balancing act and I almost blew it. Learn from your mistakes quickly.

As of this writing, there are still 20-some days left in the campaign. That's 20 days of sketching, writing, promoting, and dropping even more surprises. I'm hugely grateful to the amount of people who stayed for round two, and I'm excited more people are taking a chance on this project than before. The lessons I'm learning here are hopefully going to help me into round 3.

Hopefully, I'll have enough copies of Book 1 to last me through that much.