By Zack Quaintance — Folks, I have to confess…I’m worn out. I don’t know if I have it in me to get you an actionable Kickstarter Comics Tip today. In fact, I know that I don’t. I’ve also recently compiled list culled from this experience and this blog for a pair of great websites, doing a funny version of Xavier Files and a more serious take for my good friends at The Beat.

By Zack Quaintance — As I write this, we are rapidly approaching the 48 hours remaining line for our campaign for Next Door. I think a natural question that keeps coming to my mind is whether I want to do this again. It’s a tough one to answer, and it’s probably one best not answered as of yet. To be totally honest, as far as Kickstarter goes I’m just not in the headspace to think about my future with the platform.

By Zack Quaintance — I have three days left to go for my Kickstarter campaign for Next Door, and, friends? I am absolutely wiped out. I have done everything in my power to promoted my comic. We’ve worked hard on it, and I think we really have something special on our hands. Now, I want to get this book to the audience I know will love it. And so, the promoting continues.

By Zack Quaintance — As I type these words, the DAYS TO GO counter on our Kickstarter campaign page currently reads 4. By the time you read this, it will likely read 3 or less. By any metric, our campaign is now winding down, heading into the homestretch. There’s a sense of relief that goes along with this, which is nice, but at the same time I’ve found myself working as hard (if not harder) than at any point in this process.

By Zack Quaintance — I’m going to be blunt with you all here today: I’m running on fumes. I’ve been promoting this Kickstarter now for what feels like several months, and it’s getting harder to maintain the same level of enthusiasm with which I started. I look at the campaign page, and I see 8 DAYS TO GO, and It hurts, folks.

By Zack Quaintance — I waited a long time to launch my first Kickstarter campaign. In some ways, the roots of it go back about three years, if not longer, to long before I ever started collaborating on the book with my friend, artist Pat Skott. See, I may be a newcomer to writing comics, but I’ve been writing fiction since I was a teen, off and on as college and career ate into time to do so.

By Zack Quaintance — I’ve been clear about this from the start, but this is my first Kickstarter comics campaign. As such, I’m super grateful for the success we’ve had. With nine days remaining in our campaign, we’ve had 225 total backers pledge $5,744 to make our comic a reality. That’s certainly nothing to scoff at, and while we’re working with established pros like colorist Ellie Wright and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, it’s remarkable for a first-time writer and an artist on his second KS project.

By Zack Quaintance — I have been running this website for two years and some change, sort of gently ramping up how prolific and comprehensive the site strives to be over time. One of the features we do with regularity is Small Press Previews. This feature, however, was not my idea, not entirely. It was born out of the high frequency of pitches I get for indie comics coverage.

By Zack Quaintance — At this point in our Kickstarter Campaign for Next Door, it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve hit a wall. We’ve had a really good run so far — better than we expected, to be certain — but we’re firmly mired in the Week 2 - 3 doldrums, where most of the folks interested in our book have heard about it and packed already…or they’ve signed up for a notification and will likely back when the time to do so starts to dwindle.

By Zack Quaintance — Like many Kickstarters, we had a relatively robust first week (more than we expected, to be certain), followed by a slower Week 2. So, as with all things with this project, I reached out to others who have knowledge of the space for advice on how to continue to market the first comic that I’ve written, Next Door (back it on Kickstarter now!). And the main piece of advice I got back was to pivot my focus from soliciting coverage by wider comics news outlets, to building support within the Kickstarter platform.

By Zack Quaintance — Everything you read about Kickstarter campaigns warns you — you’ll have a lot of pledges during your first week and a lot of pledges during you last week, but the middle two weeks of your campaign will be slow. Painfully slow, in fact. That said, like so much else within running your first Kickstarter campaign, there’s really no way to anticipate exactly how it will feel when it arrives. And friends? It’s rough.

By Zack Quaintance — Today I want to talk about the preview we assembled for our Kickstarter campaign for Next Door. That is, the set of completed pages we’ve been using to stoke interest in the book. We went with four specific pages that constitute one scene. You can find those pages in the gallery below, ordered as they appear in our forthcoming comic…

By Zack Quaintance — The first draft of my project’s campaign page was, in a word, stilted. I don’t have the exact wording of it (I destroyed all the evidence), but it was really formal, really tightly-wound, and perhaps a bit nervous…the way one gets when they’re talking to a strict teacher or a cop. All of this put the tone of the page at odds with the tone of the comic. One thing I’ve definitely learned during my time kickstarting my first comic is that you want to match the tone of your page as closely as you can to the tone of the book, thereby pulling in an audience that will (ideally) appreciate the work.

By Zack Quaintance — As I write this, I’m sitting here getting ready to record another podcast appearance, my third in the past seven days. It’s going to be fun, I’m going to enjoy talking to the podcast host (who is another person who does what they do simply for the love of comics), and then when it’s done, I’m going to be absolutely exhausted. In fact, at this point in my campaign (day nine!), exhaustion is my cruising speed. And you know why?

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.