About success and failure

I woke up early this morning and couldn’t sleep, lying awake with thoughts about creativity and money.

I’m battling two deadlines and I should be drawing.

Instead, I’m crowdfunding: between fulfilling my Kickstarter and setting up a new campaign at Voordekunst I try to come to grips with what happened with my “failed” crowdfund on Zoop.

And how to communicate it to y’all.

I tried to raise 6000 dollars for a re-release of my Philosophy book. The campaign had a roaring start: within a week, over half of the money was raised.

And then it stalled.

And I let it.

That was a hard thing to do. I have crowned myself the Crowdfunding Queen over here in Holland. This was my first “failure”.

Except it wasn’t failure. What happened was this:

I sent a message to the old publisher of Philosophy, to let him know I was giving my book a new life through crowdfunding - and he promptly offered to republish it.

Wow!

That brought on an interesting dilemma: what to do with the crowdfunding?

We all agreed, Zoop, the publisher and me, that the two could exist together: the publisher encouraged me to crowdfund this one for the fans and a little pocket money. I could make it worth the forty dollars for backers by embellishing it, and then later on he would publish a more sober version, at a lower price.

You can imagine that took away my steam for the campaign.

For years, I have planned out my strategy to bring back my Philosophy book to the English market and now - BAM - here’s my wish fulfilled. Just like that. By my “old” fairy godmother, who I thought in retirement.

It goes to show that crowdfunding success can be measured in different ways.

In the last week of the Zoop campaign, it was difficult to do nothing. I’m sure if I had done a bit of promotion, those 6000 dollars would have materialized. And I would have loved to use it to produce a very special limited edition of Philosophy, with end sheets and extra pages and what not; yes, a lot of work for a relatively small group of people, but I love special editions like that, and I love rewarding the small and devoted crowd.

But I didn’t.

Hopefully, in a year, those backers can pick up their physical copy of Philosophy at their own (comic) book store. Fingers crossed!

I took the small, devoted crowd over to Kickstarter, where I campaigned for a small press collection of my recent webcomics.

(Well, technically I started the Kickstarter while the other campaign was still running; and the crowd of backers are not necessarily the same people)

This was a whole different kind of crowdfunding: I was asking just 500 euros to finance a 60-page stapled booklet that was relatively cheap to print and ship.

It was a succes!

The goal was reached within 24 hours and the campaign ended at a whopping 266% with 52 backers (plus a few people with no credit card who bought it off me directly).

About fifty people.

I often imagine they would all show up at my door for afternoon tea: that’s quite a group! Two classrooms full of people who are interested in my work, enough to spend a little money on it.

The group is small enough that I know most backers by name. I like reaching out to them individually to hear about their wishes for who to sign the book to, or what to draw for their “post-renovation collateral art” piece.

This is what I’ve been doing in the past weeks and yesterday I sent out the last of the packages, so the Kickstarter is now closed.

It was a smooth, fun process, from setting up a campaign for the first time on Kickstarter (love the platform! So many graphs and tools!) to producing the last of the art works. I got to collaborate with a few fans on some really meaningful pieces. I got to send out my book to no less than nine countries. (I like to secretly “visit” the addresses in Google Street. It’s such fun to see where my parcel will physically end up, thousands of miles away!)

Had the Kickstarter attracted twice the amount of backers, it would have been a completely different experience. I know, because in Holland I’m used to 100-150 backers per project. Still small enough to reach out to some of the bigger backers, but big enough to be more like “work”. (That’s why I work with my Dutch publisher on these; he handles the shipping)

The same goes, in a way, for this newsletter:

I have 1500 subscribers on Substack, and sometimes I cast a jealous eye over to colleagues like Kelcey Ervick (9300), Lian Cho (12K) and Jason Chatfield (45K!).

Bigger numbers means more success, right?

Except that it doesn’t.

(Lian Cho drew a beautiful comic about this which I urge you to read, here)

A bigger audience means a different kind of relationship, shifting from “engagement” to “work”. It means more stress and insecurities. Whereas I feel very comfortable with my crowd now. (that’s you!)

All of you who subscribe to my newsletter would fit in here: the beautiful Carré Theater in Amsterdam!

Wouldn’t it be fun to meet up over there some time? I could serve tea and act out my comics for you on stage!

In terms of money: I’m very happy my Kickstarter earned me a few hundred euros.

In the Olden Days (the aughties) when I self-published my comics, printing was more expensive and I was happy to sell a handful of my books at conventions - where I had to pay for a table, travel costs and lunch. If a project broke even, it was a very, very good project. I still have boxes of books left over from that time, gathering dust in a closet. Kickstarter makes self-publishing fun again!

Making comics has never made me rich.

My top year, income-wise, was 2007: I earned 55.000 euros then (not with comics as such, but with live cartooning) which looked like a fortune to me, not realizing that after taxes I was left with what is considered a moderate middle-class income that would barely fund a mortgage and a family with children. I don’t have kids and don’t own a house, and that makes it easy for me to choose fun and creativity over chasing big jobs.

My poorest year was 2010, when I had a taxable income of just 3000 euros.

Yes, you read that right. Three thousand. It was one of the happiest years of my life: newly-wed to an artist (with a cheap apartment! :D ), working on my first book with a “real” publisher (yep, that was Philosophy). I’m lucky in many ways: with my generous family, with the Dutch state and its allowances for rent and care, with my colorist husband.

Earning money is something that I both don’t and do think about. When my reserves dwindle, I start to worry. Crowdfunding is definitely a way for me to ease those worries.

That’s why I’ve started another campaign!

Yes, the third this year!

It’s for a (Dutch!) children’s book I’m both writing and drawing, a text/comic hybrid for readers from age 9 and up - about ‘Scheidoma’ (’Granny Divorce’), the elderly lady you go to when your parents are getting a divorce.

This will be published at Blauw Gras Publishing later this summer. So I’m not crowdfunding to produce a print run, that’s all taken care of by the publisher. I crowdfund to sell signed copies and artwork in advance and to raise some extra income for me to tide me over in the coming months.

That’s a new approach for me, and it feels weird.

If I weren’t me but a fellow artist, I would give me the following pep talk:

Even though I’m very vocal about treating making comics as a business, I too can feel funny about asking people to buy my stuff. Especially when I’m doing so three times in a row, as is happening now. I worry about being seen as greedy (even though, if you’ve counted with me, all of my efforts since January have only netted me about 700 euros, after costs of printing, shipping and Kickstarter fees).

I worry about how my projects are all so different from each other:

I pivot from promoting Philosophy to autobio to a kids book; from English to Dutch - how can I expect all of my readers to follow along? Should I be more consistent in the type of stuff I make, choose one language, one genre with one specific target group?

That would certainly be more business-like.

But - this is me:

There’s just so many sides to me, so many things I get excited or worked up about that I want to share.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, it’s that the only thing worth pursuing is what makes me happy - not what makes other people happy, or what sells best.

Crowdfunding makes me happy.

Not for the money - although that’s not unimportant - but for that small to medium theater full of cool people that I get to interact with and entertain with my specific brand of all-over-the-place-entertainingness.

So.

I had to get this off my chest.

The crowdfunding for ‘Scheidoma’ has had a very modest start this week, and yes, that makes me nervous. But when I think about it, I only need to fill this theater (and the first two rows are already taken):

Maybe I only WANT to fill this theater.

So I can see who’s there.

So I can enjoy how you enjoy the ride.

“It’s not the quantity of your audience that matters, it’s the quality” says Brad Guigar on the ComicLab Podcast.

I need to remind myself of that.

Be assured that you, as a reader of my newsletter who has MADE IT ALL THE WAY TO HERE definitely count as the highest quality reader that I could ever wish for!

Thank you for following me!

(The dawn has dawned. Time to face those deadlines now.)