Broken Frontier

It’s time to check back in with a project I wrote about a few months ago; Jamie Tanner’s new and still unnamed, graphic novel. What was interesting about this project is that he decided to try and fund it, at least to some degree, in advance by using of the creative project funding platform called Kickstarter.

You can read more about it here, but essentially the concept is that a creator interested in starting a new project can make a funding pitch for the project online and accumulate the necessary capital through contributions from supporters. These contributions aren’t regarded as open donations, but as purchased incentives. To encourage people to pledge money towards their project, the artist offers up rewards that supporters might be interested in, either material items connected to the project (the book or album they’re creating) or more creative rewards (such as getting to be a character in the book).

The pitch and sponsorship incentives are put up on the website for a certain amount of time, and either the project reaches its goal, an amount set by the artist for how much they need to do the project, and the money is exchanged through Amazon.com, or it doesn’t reach the goal and no money is exchanged.

When I last checked in with Jamie, he was in the middle of his time for collecting supporters and he was already close to his goal of $5,000. In fact, he ended with a support total of $7,544.

I decided to talk to Jamie again to find out, now that the project funding was successful, just how practical the scheme was for setting him up with the money and time he needed to start his new project.

Interestingly, since the funding goal was reached, Jamie has been spending most of his time meeting the demands of his reward commitments, rather than working on the actual project. He’s been packaging up books, prints, and artwork, and bringing them to the post office to send out to his supporters.

This part of the endeavor has also been eating away at the amount he earned, since shipping, both domestic and international, comes entirely out of his own pocket. So it is worth noting that the amount received through funding does have Amazon’s and Kickstarter’s percentage taken out, and anything that needs to be shipped will have to be paid for by the artist.

Also, since some of Jamie’s rewards included commissions and sketches, he’s been at his desk completing those.

So, a system meant to give an artist the time and money to work on a new project is not without a certain amount of strain on those aforementioned areas. But I suppose that part of the appeal of the Kickstarter program is that it finds a way to let the artist earn funding through their creation, rather than through charity.

Another factor for Jamie is that because he hadn’t really come up with a concept for his new project yet, he was mostly funding it through rewards based on what he’d already created, such as selling his first graphic novel The Aviary and commissions that he has to complete before starting on new work.

Perhaps a better way to structure it, if an artist is in the position to do so, is to make the incentives more closely linked to the actual project, therefore reasonably pushing the delivery of the rewards to after the project is complete. This would free the artist to first put the time into finishing the project, and then honoring promises to the supporters.

Either way, Jamie knew that the primary advantage to doing Kickstarter was to give him the excuse to devote himself to the project full time. As he put it:

“This is my (perhaps laughably) small attempt at living out an approximation of that dream, as deluded as it may sound - even though funding for my project went over the initial goal I set, it's still far from a comfortable amount to live on here in Brooklyn (this is a huge understatement).  But I'm not getting any younger and I've got just a little bit of money saved up, so I have to try it while I can.”

And now that there’re no more excuses, it’s time for him to think up his idea, with his supporters watching.

Jamie’s been putting updates up on the Kickstarter website. You can see the latest one here. In it you can check out what he’s done to meet the highest level reward he offered, to have a character in the book named after the supporter and drawn to look like them. He’s posted a drawing of the character named Blackwell. And in the comments section, you can see that the person Andrew Blackwell who purchased this reward, is happy with the way his likeness has turned out so far.

So what’s next for Jamie? He’s going to continue to develop his new graphic novel and provide updates for his supporters. He’s also continuing to accept new supporters. Since his Kickstarter time is over, he’s set up his own storefront where he’s offering many of the same incentives as before. You can find that here.

Kickstarter may not be the perfect system for every artist, but if you’ve decided to quit making excuses and commit to your next project, this is a great way to get going on it and find people who are willing to support you along the way.

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Tyler Chin-Tanner started his own publishing company, A Wave Blue World, and writes and draws layouts for Adrenaline, its flagship series.
© 2010 Tyler Chin-Tanner.  All rights reserved.
Email: tyler@awaveblueworld.com
www.awaveblueworld.com