What It Costs to Keep a 16-Year Story Alive - The Week in Solo Self-Publishing

Self-publishing asks more of you than most readers ever see. It asks you to be a financial officer before you’re allowed to be an artist — to look at a campaign that came agonizingly close to its goal and decide, with a clear head instead of a hopeful heart, whether the numbers actually support what your imagination wants. It asks you to carry stories across years, sometimes decades, through the loss of people who helped you build them and the quiet departures of collaborators who couldn’t stay the course — and to keep going anyway, because the story still deserves an ending.

And it asks all of this of one person, usually late at night, in the gaps between formatting print files and answering backer emails, where the actual writing — the reason any of this started — has to fight for whatever time is left over. None of that is a complaint. It’s the honest shape of the work, and I think you deserve to see it clearly, because understanding what it costs to make these books is part of what makes backing them mean something.

The Kickstarter for Gothic Horror Team-Up #3: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is in the books: $2,870 raised, 97 backers. Close — genuinely close — to the private benchmark I’d set for myself before launch: $3,000 and 100 backers as the threshold for justifying another issue in this series.

I want to be straightforward with you about what that means, because I think the honesty is more interesting than the spin. I can’t treat this series as a foregone conclusion just because I love making it. Every issue costs real money to print, ship, and produce well, and as a solo publisher, the only person doing that math is me. A decision to continue has to weigh the likelihood of actually recouping those costs alongside my own artistic pull toward these characters — not one or the other. That’s not a lack of passion. It’s what keeps the passion sustainable long enough to finish anything at all.

What’s certain, regardless of where the sequel question lands: this campaign gets fulfilled properly, on schedule. Print files went to the printer on Thursday, July 16. Digital fulfillment goes out to backers on Wednesday, July 22. And if you missed the campaign window, late pledges are open right now —

On Tuesday, August 4, the Deep Space Lovecraft Collected Edition pre-launch page goes live, and with it, a 3-page preview of what’s arguably the most ambitious single volume this imprint has put together: 184 pages collecting five previously released sci-fi adaptations of Lovecraft’s short fiction, plus 24 pages of brand-new adaptations — including, for the first time, The Outsider and Dagon.

The collected edition will be available in both hardcover (A4, case laminate) and softcover (A4, perfect bound) — a format built for readers who’ve been picking up individual issues and want the w0hole cosmic-horror-as-hard-sci-fi saga in one object, and for new readers who’d rather start at the beginning and read straight through.

With the collected edition heading into launch, work is already turning toward the next single-volume adaptation, targeting a Tuesday, October 13 Kickstarter. This time, you get a say in which story gets the Deep Space Lovecraft treatment next.

On Tuesday, September 1, Last Ride of the 4 Horsemen: The Complete 3-Volume Epic launches on Kickstarter — and this one carries more weight than its page count alone can explain.

The campaign collects the entire Last Ride saga into three volumes: the original series and issue zero (112 pages), The Conquest arc (88 pages), and The Tribulation arc (88 pages) — the full arc of a steampunk apocalypse told across 13 individual issues over more than 16 years. Each volume will be offered in hardcover (8” x 10.88”, case laminate) and softcover (6.625” x 10.25”, perfect bound).

Sixteen years is long enough for a story to outlive some of the people who helped tell it. This one did — a collaborator who worked on the series passed away during its run, and more than one contracted, paid artist departed partway through their commitment, leaving pages unfinished and timelines broken. Completing this story anyway, in the format it always deserved, is as much a personal milestone as a publishing one. This launch isn’t just a Kickstarter. It’s closing a chapter of my life that started in my forties.

The Daring & The Depraved #2 is tentatively slated to launch Tuesday, September 22, and colorist and artist Carlos Tron continues work on interior pages for this superhero story set in a world where those born with powers may only have children with those born without — a premise that splits its powered characters into three camps: protectors who see the powerless as equals, opportunists who see them as livestock for breeding, and extremists who see them as vermin fit only for eradication.

Covers are in development, and I’m previewing a faux action-figure packaging treatment for the issue 2 cover — a format choice that leans into the series’ pulpy, collectible energy while still taking its central conflict seriously.

Issue 3’s script is already in development, which tells you something about how these characters have grown: they’ve taken on three-dimensional lives and motivations of their own, faster than I expected. Worth naming honestly — finding real, uninterrupted time to write creatively, while also running nearly every operational and logistical piece of this business alone, is one of the harder tensions in this job. The fact that the next script exists at all is its own small victory.

Here’s the honest through-line across everything above: the $2,870-versus-$3,000 math on Gothic Horror Team-Up, the 16-year weight behind Last Ride of the 4 Horsemen, and the scramble to protect writing time inside a one-person operation aren’t separate problems. They’re the same problem in three costumes — the constant work of matching ambition to what’s actually sustainable, alone, without a studio behind you.

And here’s where that work actually gets resolved: not with optimism, but with production steps. The Gothic Horror Team-Up decision gets made using the same disciplined numbers that got the print files to the printer by July 16 and digital fulfillment out the door by July 22 — real deadlines, hit on schedule, regardless of what happens with a sequel. The Last Ride epic gets finished not by wishing away the loss of a collaborator or the artists who left, but by literally assembling the pages that remain — 288 of them, across three volumes, bound in the hardcover and softcover formats that make sixteen years of work into something a reader can hold. And the time crunch behind The Daring & The Depraved gets answered the same way it always does around here: script pages, written anyway, ahead of schedule, because the only way through the tension between running a business and making art is to keep doing both.

Four campaigns, one collected edition, and a poll that puts the next choice in your hands. That’s the season ahead. Thank you for reading this far into how it actually gets made.

Thanks for making comics with me!

• Kevin LaPorte