Kickstarter Lessons & Santana's Abraxas
"I didn't ask for Santana Abraxas. I didn't listen to Santana Abraxas. I didn't do anything!"
Larry Gopnik, A Serious Man (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)
I had a small stash of comics when I was very young - often ‘feel better’ gifts my parents got me when I was sick with a bad flu or the chicken pox - mostly Spider-man and Avengers and the Hulk - but the first comic I remember buying from a spinner rack was Secret Wars #4, when I was about 9, with that incredible Bob Layton cover of the Hulk holding up a mountain (“beneath 150 billion tons” of rock) to keep all the heroes alive.
(Age and time shed some doubt on this memory; it could have been issue #8, “Amid the Chaos, There Comes A Costume!” - the introduction of the symbiote; or even #7, which has a comparatively forgettable cover [also by Bob Layton], but I distinctively remember the Torch cornering Spider-Woman, right before the Wrecker blasted onto the scene and dumped the Wasps’s dead body at the feet of the heroes. I digress.)
Secret Wars blew my mind, and unlocked a life-long obsession with comics, although it has ebbed and flowed over the years, and evolved from superhero fandom to a broader appreciation of graphic storytelling across many varied genres.
Some years ago, I pitched a “simple, easy” story idea to my longtime friend, Devinder, who had expressed interest in working on something together. It took a lot of head-banging and research, and writing and revising and editing and revising and editing and revising, but we eventually finished a draft of DEAD MONEY we were happy with, although it’s not a happy story. But it was written as a movie script, and while we love movies, it is much harder to make a movie, especially one with a train crash and horses and zombie-horrors. So we sat on it for a long time.
Now, Devinder also loved comics. When we lived together during college and for a few years after, we’d make regular pilgrimages to the comic store, or conventions. We passed books back and forth, like Alias, Ultimate Spider-man, Fables, The Maxx, Planetary, The Authority, Preacher, Hellblazer, The Invisibles, The Long Halloween, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Top 10, and more.
Fast forward a few years. I’ve been trying to get a comic project together for a while now. I’ve worked with so many incredible artists at places like Wizard101, and Ganz (Webkinz), and Ubisoft, but somehow never found the right person to partner with.
I had the luck and opportunity to go Buenos Aires and attend the MICA (Mercado de Industrias Culturales Argentinas) festival, where I met Mishka De Caro, a game designer and educator who also shared a love of ttrps and stories and comics.
At some point I asked Mishka if they knew any comic artists and their eyes lit up. So I proposed to Devinder that we have a chat with Mishka and talk about trying to find an artist to work with, and to have some readymade material to work with, we talked about taking the intro to DEAD MONEY and revising it as a comic script.
Mishka introduced us to a few potential artists, and we found a lot of common ground and interests with Tomás Aira. We got Tomás to do a few character designs and a short sample, and we fell in love with it pretty quickly. That short sample expanded into a longer sample, and by that point we were pretty much committed to seeing the first issue through to the end, to at least see what we could produce.
And once we were fully in the process of producing the first issue - reviewing sketches, inks, dialogue, revising where we had to, and showing it to a few trusted folks - we felt the best way to test the market would be to take it to Kickstarter.
Which sounded easy on the surface, right?
When I first proposed to Devinder that we find an artist and try to turn DEAD MONEY into a comic, I wasn’t planning on starting a side business (J&D Studios), I wasn’t planning on assembling a team of kick-ass co-conspirators, and wasn’t planning on ordering Santana’s Abraxas. And yet…
I’m an experienced Kickstarter user from the audience side, having pledged to 62 (sixty two!) campaigns over the years, some small from friends, some big and professional, and a bunch in-between. And I’ve known a number of friends who have run campaigns and had a lot of advice to share.
What I Knew (or Thought I Knew)
These are the things I knew (or thought I knew) going into it:
Kickstarters are a lot of work. Big, wildly successful ones are basically a full time job for the month it runs.
A wildly successful kickstarter is not always a good thing, and has wrecked businesses (and probably friendships) for those not prepared to scale up appropriately. It could be because of too many add-ons that are not properly accounted for; it could be because ramp up of production wrecks the planned pipeline; or it could be something as unpredictable as a global pandemic or a constant roller coaster of potential tariffs
You want as strong a start as possible when launching, which means in part:
Trying to get as many friends/family to sign up for the pre-launch “notify me on launch” list
You also ideally want as many day one pledges as you can get, which means returning to that list and reminding them that while you love them, for this one day, their money is more important to you than their love (or something like that)
There are various Kickstarter spotlights - like the “Projects We Love” badge - that are handed out in mysterious and unusual ways
Everything takes longer than you expect.
These Are Things I Believed
Theser are things I believed from us researching the campaign and planning it.
We had a modest goal in mind, so it shouldn’t take up too much of my time.
I needed some kind of “marketing” / content plan.
It was very unclear how much to post about the project, balancing fear of spamming friends / having them get turned off by the “noise” vs. people never seeing your posts, no matter how often you post. Because…
All social media sites try to keep you locked into their system these days, and thus to some unknown degree throttle views to your posts, apparently more so if you post external links, or post the word “Kickstarter”, or any of several other issues.
a) As I’ve never had a huge social media presence, I wasn’t sure about how that would impact things.
You can spend an endless amount of time planning your Kickstarter, and not launching it - see #9 and #10 above.
Getting all the assets together to launch the Kickstarter is a fiddly affair and can also take an infinite amount of time. See the old adage, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Common wisdom is that a 30 day campaign (or a little shorter) is the sweet spot. Much shorter and you risk not having enough time to get your message out, and even a little longer tends to have significantly diminishing returns.
Common wisdom is that it is better to launch on a Tues, Weds, or Thurs – Mondays are bad because people are getting back to work from the weekend, Fridays are bad because people are wrapping up the week, and weekends are bad because people have a lot of stuff to do and distract them. Of course one might think that the days off from work would be better for a frivolous activity like perusing Kickstarter, but clearly lots of people like to ponder them as a break during the workday.
Hrmph.
What I Learned After We Launched
And this is what I learned after we launched, some of which would have been great to know before, but I’m not sure we could have easily found the information before we were in the deep water of a campaign (see again infinite time that can be spent researching).
The best time to get into Kickstarter - especially in comics - was years ago.*
a. This is due in part to social media sites throttling links/notifications that point you away from their sites. So it’s harder to be seen & generate traffic
b. Also the field is now heavily dominated by bigger companies with major marketing budgets (see the endless ads spammed on FB and YouTube and wherever…)
c. Also, there have been enough projects that got funding but then failed to deliver that some folks have been burned badly enough they won’t risk Kickstarter again.
* “the second-best time is now,” etc. etc.
There’s still a lot of folks - especially family members! - who don’t know what a Kickstarter is, or how to support it, or how they got on the Columbia Record Club mailing list.
Notify Me Before Launch and day one pledges do help, but no one knows if there are magic numbers or…?
We had approx. 180 “notify me on launch” sign-ups (IIRC), which anecdotally were equal to or higher than most projects of this scope.
This felt really good for our first Kickstarter, though of course we were leaning directly on friends and family.
We also managed to hit our funding goal in under 36 hours, which gave us a strong sense of achievement and feeling of validation from our people.
We’ve been posting (individually, as well as under “Dead Money Comics”) on many of the socials: Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter (ugh, yes), Instagram, Reddit. But in 2025 it’s very hard to “generate engagement” (ugh, yes).
a. I’ve had a lot of positive response on LinkedIn, surprisingly enough.
But really, the best responses I had from folks was to contact them directly with a personal note, a bit about the project and a link. Having worked in ttrpgs and video games for 25 yeas, and made some good friends in comics and horror/SF/fantasy/spec fiction worlds, I have rather a lot of people in my Rolodex (I mean, I’m not talking Matt Forbeck levels, but I do know Matt!). So I started at the “A”s and worked my way down.
a. Sites like LinkedIn and FB, for all their nonsense about “building communities” and whatever, make it surprisingly hard to access your contact list in an easy way. It’s actually really hard to start at the “A”s and work your way down.
b. If someone doesn’t reply, is it because they don’t want to be pestered or “sold” by a friend? Probably. But it could ALSO be that they didn’t see the DM, because if you aren’t a heavy user of these tools (on their respective sites) you may never see the message. See again the nonsense about “community” sites.
There’s a Kickstarter Comics Guru! Who knew? His name is Sam Kusek, and he seems pretty friendly.
https://updates.kickstarter.com/kickstarters-new-comics-lead/Sam Kusek has a monthly “Comics We Love” newsletter, that you can subscribe to here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/newsletters/comics
There’s a great podcast called ComixLaunch run by Tyler James, which you can find here. The site is a little basic, but the content has been very good.
Despite having a modest funding goal and only a few stretch goals and not having a lot of questions to answer, constantly trying to spread the word took up a lot more time and energy (and mental energy!) than I expected! See #8, and #7 and #1 above.
There is the basic lesson of: take the time/effort you think it's going to be and double it.
We are in the endgame now, and have a good chance of hitting our $7000 goal (which means we can fund the art for issue #2 right away, AND give all print pledges free posters of two of our covers), and could theoretically hit our 10k goal, which would give a free copy of issue #2 in PDF to each backer at the $5 and above level.
Photo by Jake Nyveen Link to the Kickstarter campaign here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deadmoney/dead-money-a-western-horror-comic-book