My printer jammed so I called it a Limited Variant and sold out in an hour.

Authenticity in indie publishing is complicated because creators are expected to simultaneously be artists, marketers, business owners, community managers, and public figures. Everyone is trying to make it, and when a project or someone stumbles, the mob mentality often rushes to label people as “grifters” before understanding whether someone acted maliciously or simply failed publicly.

Our online spaces hate uncertainty, and the internet often hurries in to fill the blanks. Many of us are authors… some fancy themselves as opinionated journalists. We’re all incredibly good at turning pieces of information into complete narratives, whether true or embellished.

Real authenticity usually happens where there’s no audience. Not on “X”, and not in the bowels of a Discord server.

Online, people stop being human very quickly. They become avatars representing an argument, a mistake, or a controversy. Projects become content to dissect, and failures become ongoing discourse for spectators to react to in real time. But outside the for you page, the consequences are rarely that abstract. People lose their jobs. Relationships strain. Mental health deteriorates. Burnout compounds silence, and silence gets interpreted as guilt.

None of this excuses failure or removes accountability from creators who mishandle projects or communication. Its just trying to restore scale and humanity to situations the internet tends to flatten obtuesly into entertainment. A delayed project online can become a weeks-long spectacle of screenshots, theories, and outrage. In real life, it’s often someone quietly drowning while thousands of people watch and react publicly from behind a screen. Let me tell you a story of one time it felt different.

A creator stumbled pretty badly fulfilling their Kickstarter, so much so that my former local comic shop was the first to weigh in publicly. It was a mess, and in retrospect frankly embarrassing to witness the dog pile it caused. One of which I’ll admit myself, and many others we know in the community wasted no time sharing our poorly formed opinions on.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment you fire off a thought… sometimes you instantly regret it. There had to be more to the story, and I was in no position to judge, none of us really were. The actual struggle that this creator had endured was unfathomable, and a lot of the community quickly realized we should be better.

Band of Bards had no real connection to this creator, but we’ve never been ones to sit back and watch while others struggle. We reached out to see what we could do to help facilitate getting this campaign back on track. A group of other creators pooled their money together to cover the printing and shipping costs, and we arranged for the print order to be included with our upcoming Direct Market comic order. We passed the savings from the bulk order over to those creators, and covered as much of the freight cost that we could on the backend, to get the printed books on the road, and into the hands of campaign backers.

This is the first I’ve publicly spoken about any of this… why? Because its not anyone’s business, and the small part we played — we didn’t do it for clout. The truth is that good people make mistakes, and they shouldn’t be hung out to dry for it.

We did it to help someone who was just overwhelmed and incapable of fixing the situation alone. The creators who stepped up, pooled their money together to get the work printed, and then shipped all those packages are the real deal, and I’m glad we had an opportunity to assist where we could. I’m so grateful when I think back at some of the really amazing things this community has done.

Online authenticity though has become strangely aesthetic. We’ve learned how to package vulnerability into something presentable, how to perform our own version of transparency in ways that are easy to share, and easy to build a personal brand around. Entire reputations are now built around being perceived as “real,” even when that authenticity is still being filtered through strategy, optics, and audience expectations.

In creative spaces especially, it can become difficult to tell where sincerity ends and presentation begins.

But real authenticity is usually much quieter than that. It often looks like helping someone without posting about it afterward. Protecting a person’s dignity even when you could benefit from exposing them. Choosing repair over creating a spectacle. Or just giving someone room to rebuild… instead of turning their worst moment into another piece of content for the algorithm.

These creators had every opportunity to publicly distance themselves, capitalize on the situation, and position themselves as the “good guys”. That probably would have been better for engagement, visibility, maybe even their individual businesses. Instead, they all worked quietly in the background because not every act of support needs an audience attached to it.

Real authenticity usually happens where there’s no audience. Not on “X”, and not in the bowels of a Discord server.

None of this means that backers were wrong to be frustrated. People backed a project with their money, trust, and enthusiasm, and they deserved an answer when things started going sideways. The criticism this person received wasn’t entirely unfair, and we as creators absolutely have responsibilities when we ask a community to believe in us.

Band of Bards is a great example because we’re not infallible, and we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but one of the Kickstarter Campaigns I was most excited to participate in, Amongst the Stars, is late at being fulfilled. It’s also largely my fault. And while we are trying to get it across the finish line with every ounce of being that we’ve got left, it seems the world continues to throw bricks back through the windows we just got fixed.

Accountability matters because communities need to protect themselves from genuine bad actors. But somewhere along the line, accountability started to become indistinguishable from a performance. The conversation stops being about resolution and starts becoming about visibility, about outrage, and about who can deliver the sharpest public condemnation.

We’ve been given a lot of grace while we work through our issues, and I’m never going to forget that.

The difficult truth is that we know very little about most situations we watch unfold online. We see fragments, screenshots, delayed updates, emotional reactions, and a public perception that’s stitched together to try and form a complete story. From there, we become caricatures: the scammer, the fraud, the victim, the villain. And once someone is flattened into a role, empathy becomes much harder to extend… we see it everyday.

Grace has become incredibly rare on social media because it doesn’t move as well as anger does. Giving someone space to recover doesn’t trend… But I think communities are healthier when they leave room for both accountability and humanity at the same time.

What’s hard to manage is that none of this fits neatly into the kind of stories the internet prefers to tell. People want villains, and simple explanations for complicated failures. Creative spaces are also full of exhausted, imperfect people trying to build meaningful things while learning in public. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we recover. Sometimes we need help.

Maybe authenticity isn’t about looking flawless or always saying the right thing at the right time. Maybe it’s about what people choose to do when there’s nothing to gain from it. Quietly helping. Quietly apologizing, and trying again. I think there’s still value in communities that leave room for that… not instead of accountability, but alongside it.

See you soon,
Chris