Comics marketing 201

How to get people to care about your Kickstarter comic

Last summer I wrote a very creatively titled post called Comic Marketing 101 about the challenges that single-issue comics face in a world where there are almost 100 new comic issues hitting the shelves every week.

But standing out in the direct market is a bit different from standing out as an indie comic launching on Kickstarter.

On the one hand, you tell people you’re writing a book with Rogue in it and people have an immediate reaction. They know her, have opinions about her, or at the very minimum, have at least heard of her. Or you’re an artist posting your artwork of said Southern belle, and similarly, you benefit from decades of stories, attachment, artwork, and feelings that the character has earned.

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A post shared by @francinedelgadoart

But what about an entirely new property?

You have no recognizable characters, you are probably not a household name in the comics community, and you are asking people to use their limited time and financial resources to give your creation a chance.

How do you do that?

You go to where the indie comic readers are, and that’s on Kickstarter.¹

The Kickstarter campaign for Blood of Atlantis #1 just finished last month, and despite this being my first comics project, the campaign raised over $10K from 369 backers. Remarkably, most of those backers were people who had never heard of me, or the series.

As issue 1 heads to print, and work on issue 2 begins, I wanted to reflect on the campaign and some marketing lessons learned.

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The formula for success

I spend a lot of time studying what other successful comic creators have done on Kickstarter and in the direct market. Reverse-engineering the path of someone else’s success can be useful in identifying high-level guideposts, but it’s no substitute for charting your own course. Everyone’s path, circumstances, and interests are different, and slavishly copying someone else is probably not the best idea.

That being said, I’ve identified three markers for a successful Kickstarter comic campaign: hook + art + community.

Hook

The hook is your elevator pitch. How would you describe your comic in 15 seconds or less?

It helps to maybe include a recognizable property (or two), but only if they actually relate to your comic and someone can visualize what that combination entails.

Something like “Fullmetal Alchemist meets Game of Thrones!” doesn’t really tell the reader what they are getting.

On Kickstarter, you have several attempts at a hook before you even get someone to your campaign page. You have the campaign image, the title, and a subtitle. Similar to a YouTube video thumbnail and title, a great campaign will use the image, title and subtitle in combination to communicate different aspects of the campaign.

For example:

My campaign image evokes a woman dreaming of a far-off adventure on a Greek isle, with some sort of magic ring, ancient secrets, and a certain leather jacket.

Then my title adds to that with reference to a modern adventure that’s going to be epic and also have magic.

Finally, I throw in the two comps: Indiana Jones (linking back to the leather jacket in the campaign image) and Dungeons & Dragons (referencing the magical adventures), and give a bit of background about what the comic is about.

That’s all the space you’re given on Kickstarter before someone gets to your campaign page, so you need all three items firing to get them to click.

Once they do, then you have another set of chances to convince them to back. That’s where the next part of the formula takes precedence.

Art

This could also be labeled Art + Story, but really, you are going to be leaning on the comic’s art (both the interior and covers) to make the sale to a potential backer.

On my campaign page, I provided a few paragraphs filled with hooks and punchy sentences, mixed with a bit of artwork, to get people scrolling down to the preview:

I included a six-page preview right on the campaign page, to give people a taste of the story and to show off our artist Francine Delgado’s awesome artwork. I also added a link to a 12-page preview, so people could read a full third of the issue for free.

When you are targeting a cold audience, you want to be generous with your comic to build trust. For example, Charlie Stickney now gives away the entire first issue of White Ash, clocking in at 52 pages, right on his campaign page, without even requiring an email sign-up. (His latest White Ash campaign is currently live, so you should definitely take a moment to back that).²

Besides the preview, you also need your covers to do the heavy lifting of communicating what your comic is about, but in different ways.

Blood of Atlantis #1 has four covers, and they each bring a different vibe.

• The main cover is highlighting our cast, and giving a little taste of the magical elements in the issue.

• The Pulp Homage cover is borrowing the goodwill from a well-known existing property while also providing its own take.

• The Day in the Life cover is showing the different sides of our main character Beatrice and how much of a bad-ass she is.

• Finally, the Hellfire Magazine Homage is an awesome pin-up with some fun design work to catch the eye.³

Community

Now we get to the final and oftentimes most vexing piece of the puzzle.

Although Kickstarter has its own audience of backers, a first-time creator on the platform still needs to bring their own crowd to bear.

How do you do this your first time out?

• Friends & family - tell them about the campaign, with a no-pressure, no expectations pitch. You should tell them they don’t need to back if they don’t want to, but encourage them to help spread the word. Ideally this category will help jumpstart your first campaign, and then they cycle out in subsequent campaigns, replaced by your readers.

• Other comic creators: get to know your peers at i) your level, ii) at one level above you, and iii) 2-5 levels above you.

  • The first group will have a similar reach as you (namely, very little), but you should be helping each other cross-pollinate.

  • The middle group will already have an audience and will most likely be willing to share your campaign if you’ve gotten the time to get to know them.

  • And the last group probably won’t share your campaign, but you want to be on their radar as an up-and-coming creator that they’ll want to know about in 2-3 years’ time.

  • Reach out to creators on social media, at comic conventions, and by backing their Kickstarter campaigns. If you have a newsletter or blog, offer to do an interview or get a quote from them for a blog post about comics.

• Comic readers in the wild: This is the toughest group to reach. You may think you can just post about your comic on social media and readers will flock to you, but it doesn’t work like that. You can maybe get super-duper lucky and somehow have a post go viral, but the impact will be fleeting, and most people won’t remember who you are or what you do the day after. Instead of hoping that the social media platforms will give you algorithmic reach beyond your following, you should have the mindset that you are going to hand-sell your comic one reader at a time.

Once you’ve got a seed audience at the end of your first campaign, then you need to move them through the Funnel of Connection (TM).

The below chart from Jack Conte’s recent SXSW talk is instructive.

• The top level of the funnel is people who come across your comic on social media, on Kickstarter when you have a live campaign, or via a recommendation from someone else.

• You can get a smaller subset to move down to the next level by nailing the first two parts of the formula, and getting them to buy your comic or back your campaign. If they like your first issue, they’ll come back for the second, or they’ll tell other people, adding more people to the top level. You keep in touch with these fans through an email newsletter, so you are not beholden to social media visibility to reach them when you have something new to release.

• Finally, a very small subset of the second level will move down to become true fans. They’ll buy everything you make, they’ll evangelize and recommend your work without you having to prompt them, and they will follow you across all of your social accounts.

Now, the reason I labeled this last part “Community” and not “Followers,” is because I think it’s easier for people to form connections to creative work when they have a place to talk about it with other fans. This could be on social media, a writer’s newsletter, the comments section on a webcomic, or on this Substack post!

At the end of the day, the real beauty of Kickstarter is that every time you launch a new campaign, you are bringing in more readers to the top of the funnel, you create urgency to act because of the limited timeframe of the campaign, and you provide opportunities for community to form between backers through backer updates and the campaign comments section.

It’s because of all of the above that well-run, serialized comic campaigns on Kickstarter tend to grow over successive campaigns, rather than shrink like most direct market comics, where the first issue will almost always be the most ordered issue.

Thankfully, our Blood of Atlantis #1 campaign did the heavy lifting it needed to do as a brand-new comic, and we have a great foundation to build on for the next issue and the next Kickstarter campaign. And I’ll be talking more about issue 2 and how I’m getting the word out about the comic in the months to come!

Readers, what’s the most interesting comic marketing tactic you’ve seen?

Creators, what’s one marketing technique you tried that you didn’t think would work but actually did?

Missed the Blood of Atlantis campaign? You can pre-order the comic here.

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More on this topic

Jack Conte’s recent talk at SXSW, Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web:

Jordan Holt discusses indie comic marketing:

Amazing Journey back issues

Check out issue #15, now with new advice from Brian K. Vaughan!

True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8) | Comic book spoilers (#9) | Lessons from Kieron Gillen’s masterclass (#10) | Comics marketing 101 (#11) Designing memorable characters (#12) | The importance of comic book shops (#13) | Finding community at NYCC (#14) | Writing issue number one (#15) | Announcing Blood of Atlantis (#16)

1. Or you go to Webtoon, which has a large and rabid audience looking for new comics. Succeeding on Webtoon has its own challenges, and having never used the platform as a Canvas creator (the part of the app where anyone can upload their comic, as opposed to the Webtoon Originals), I’m not really sure what the best strategy is there.

Additionally, there are scores of independent publishers out there, Image Comics chief among them, and tons of indie comic readers buying indie comics from comic shops each week. But the odds of pitching a publisher and getting published as a first-time comics creator are fairly low.

2. For issue 2 of Blood of Atlantis, I will probably put the first 12 pages of issue 1 on the campaign page, in addition to pages from issue 2, giving new readers even more of a preview.

3. We also showcased the art and story with trading cards and stickers. These used existing artwork in a fun way that didn’t require a ton of extra money. Some campaigns offer prints, but for this first campaign, where readers have very little (if any) attachment to the characters, I stuck to using art from the interior and cover for the swag.