How to launch an $80,000 Kickstarter for a single issue comic
Beast & Snow has been an absolute roller coaster ride of a campaign, and the creators break down how they raised over $80,000 for the first issue.
I’ve been friends with Kat & Phil for a long time and been a fan of their work for just as long or longer. I love their Slice of Life Webtoon, and read their newsletter. Still, somehow the fact that one of their books raised $80,000+ on a single issue slipped by me. I’m steeped in comics Kickstarter, so I have no idea how I missed this one.
This write-up was originally posted here, but I asked to pull out a clean version without all the other material they posted. If you like this post, LGBTQIA+ comics, or just really fun books, I highly recommend you check out Lifeline Comics.
Beast & Snow has been an absolute roller coaster ride of a campaign, and one of the most frequent DMs we've been receiving is "How did you create such a successful campaign?". So we wanted to address it in this installment of the newsletter for creators and readers alike.
How Did We Come Up with the Idea?
You should always look at the market. Why are the biggest giants in that select market selling? As for Kickstarter, the two most popular types of projects on the platform are campaigns based on something people already know (public domains, collection of previous properties, etc.) and NSFW books. This planted the seed for The Beast & Snow...why couldn't we do both?
We wanted to take the challenge a step further and work on a genre Lifeline Comics has never tackled before...fantasy. Being completely transparent, I've never been a big fantasy fan. I wanted to create a world where I could even LOVE fantasy. Throw in some werewolves & vampires, and I was sold.
At the heart of every Lifeline Comic is character and organic storytelling, and that's exactly what we did with the creation of this new series! We wanted to create a book that reflected the current Kickstarter market. A book that would challenge us with story beats we've never tackled before, all while keeping the elements of our writing that our readers have come to expect from us.
How To Find the Perfect Creative Team
Pulling together your Creative Team is perhaps the most important step for every project. Unless you're a solo act, most comics are a collaboration of multiple different creators, each contributing their own voice and style to the project. So finding the perfect team for your book is often a tall order.
Each project we take on has a different story for how we assembled our team. For our anthologies, we primarily relied on an open submission form (a handy tool for a smaller project that requires less commitment from contributors). For past comics, there's been a mix of artists that we found and connected with on social media (Instagram and Twitter are your friends, folks!) or who we met directly at Conventions.
For The Beast & Snow, we first worked with interior artist Dorilys Giacchetto on Hairology. We immediately loved her style and working with her, so we approached her with our pitch for this comic. It's not the first time we've gotten to further collaborate with artists who applied to our anthologies, and it certainly won't be the last!
As for variant covers, we connected with Liana Kangas several times before through Zestworld (a platform that we are all creators on) and at C2E2 2023. They're an amazing person and we desperately wanted the chance to work with them. And thankfully, they also loved the idea of working on the project!
We have collaborated with Longestdistance on many covers in the past. We absolutely love her stained-glass style and knew that we wanted to bring that to The Beast & Snow.
And Stjepan Šejić (who we talk more about in our "Thumbnail" section) is an artist who we have been fans of for the longest time. We reached out to him months ago about collaborating on another project that he was unfortunately unable to take on at the time. But he expressed interest in working with us when his availability permitted, and thankfully the stars aligned for The Beast & Snow where he was able to take on a cover commission and loved the idea for the project!
Comics are a small world. Folks that we enjoy working with on one project are some of the first people we think of when we are pulling together a new one!
Finding An Audience
"Blowing up" on Kickstarter rarely happens randomly. It's a combination of having the right project AND putting in the time/work to build an audience.
We've spent the last three years cultivating an audience for our ten+ comic series - two of the strongest subsections of which have been queer comic fans (via Slice of Life, Bi Visibility, and Rainbow Canvas) and horror comic fans (via HAUNTING).
By the time we launched The Beast & Snow, we had crowdfunded over a dozen "similar" projects and built an audience of thousands of potential backers who might be interested in jumping on to this exciting new one. Plus, we had spent the time to grow a readership of over 50,000 readers on Webtoon who are fans of queer WLW content.
In addition to the benefit of building an audience that could quickly jump on this new project, this has also built up a catalogue of previous work that is available on The Beast & Snow. A significant percentage of the funds we've raised on the project have been folks who have purchased our past work - which bodes well for the monumental success of this Kickstarter also helping to grow the audience for our next ones!
How To Be Active with Your Fanbase
One of my favorite aspects of this job is being able to interact with new and old fans alike. Comic conventions have been a great opportunity to showcase our library, while also running into our readers in person (we can do a whole different post on comic conventions!) It's always awe inspiring when a Slice of Life fan, who reads on the WEBTOON, tells their friend all about the book and have the biggest smile on their faces when they see a physical version of the series on stands.
Another great way to stay connected is, well, this newsletter. Creating bi-monthly posts has been a great excuse to keep connected with you guys. We love telling you what we've been up to and creating a platform to showcase all the exciting things we have in the pipeline.
How To Promote a Kickstarter?
Social media is important, but not the be all, end all. Organic backings from Kickstarter itself is going to be where you find a majority of your new readers. So how do you get Kickstarter to push you? The three most important elements of any Kickstarter are your thumbnail, subheader, and title. Let's use The Beast & Snow as an example:
Thumbnail: We're still blown away that we've been able to collaborate with the ever so talented Stjepan Šejić. He made such a wonderful cover that it was an easy pick as a thumbnail for us. It also helped that we were able to meld our fanbases together to create a product that our fans could be excited to pick up.
Kickstarter rewards clean thumbnails. I never recommend having words on your thumb. Let the art speak for itself!
Subheader: You're in an elevator with Kevin Feige. You can only utter one sentence about your project. What's that sentence? That's how you should treat your logline for your Kickstarter! Tell me what makes your project stand out compared to the rest?
There have been plenty of Snow White and Beauty and the Beast adaptations. But have all of them been queer? Are there usually werewolves and vampires involved? Are they not safe for work? The familiarity helped us shine all while adding elements to help us stand out.
Title: I always recommend adding the genres of your book to the title. The Beast & Snow #1 - NSFW Queer Fairytale Romance is a lot more excited than just Beast & Snow #1. It tells your audience what to expect from your campaign in a concise way.
Social Media/Becoming a Part of the Kickstarter Community: Social Media may not be the end all, be all, but it's still an important part of building your brand. We love to update our readers on what's going on and what will be happening next on there, but we find it best to use social media to connect with others. Become part of the Kickstarter community! Back other campaigns and interact with their work. I've seen Kickstarters that are inching closer to their goals on the last day pioneered and crossing the finish line because of the help of the creator's fellow peers.
If you liked this one, I highly suggest you check out Kat & Phil at Lifeline comics. They are great resources about making comics.
Additionally, you can get a copy of Monica Leonelle and my book about Kickstarter for free below.
If you want to learn more about making comics, here are some other resources:
The 5 biggest mistakes writers make when turning their books into comics
[SPECIAL ARCHIVE EPISODE] How to sustain a legendary 50-year writing career with Marv Wolfman
[SPECIAL ARCHIVE EPISODE] How to build a legendary comics career with Jim Zub
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That's a very eye 👁️ catching image. Wow! It POPS!!!!
Should the thumbnail be from the cover or can it be from a picture inside?