By Zack Quaintance — My first-ever Kickstarter comic — Next Door — did really well in its first full week, exceeding our total funding goal by more than 50 percent. Now, to be totally honest, we kept our goal modest, asking for minimum funding to ensure that at the very least, we would be able to pay our fantastic colorist (Ellie Wright) and our superstar letterer (Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou). We’re on pace to eventually be able to afford some truly cool add-ons as well, so there’s really nothing but great news all around.

For me personally, however, this campaign seems likely to spur total financial ruin. The reason Is that I am spending more time on Kickstarter than ever before, and the more time I spend on Kickstarter, the more cool projects I want to back. Now, I also have a well-documented history of poor impulse control when it comes to purchasing comics, and so what this has all added up to is a situation in which I’m backing and backing and backing books…and soon (in roughly 30 days, give or take) the bills will come due.

This alls brings me to today’s…

ACTIONABLE KICKSTARTER COMICS TIP: If I had it to do all over again, I would budget out a couple hundred dollars in advance to back cool comics Kickstarters running concurrently. The reason I would do this is actually three-fold, with the high-quality of the comics and the poor impulse control just being the first reason. The second reason is that it actively behooves you to make nice with the other books that are being made on Kickstarter at the same time as yours. So, plan on backing other concurrent campaigns, as well as talking up current campaigns on your social media and in your updates — a rising tide lifts all boats. The third reason is that it’s just the right thing to do. Kickstarter is a community, and you don’t want to show up asking support for your thing, when you aren’t supporting anyone else’s.

That’s it for today. I’m now off to see how our campaign is doing (weekdays are apparently going to be harder for us in this middle bit than weekends), and in the process, I will almost certainly end up backing some more books. Anyway, see you all back here tomorrow, when the topic will be matching the tone of your campaign page to the tone of your story, which is something (if I can brag a bit here) I feel like our book managed to do exceedingly well. Cheers!

Back Next Door on Kickstarter now!

See our past top comics to buy here, and check out our reviews archive here.

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.