If you’ve been following Level Ground Comics since our beginning, you’ll know that we were founded just at the end of 2019. As a group of peers looking to get editing experience while helping amplify the artistic voices of our fellow students, we wanted our first project to reflect everything that Level Ground Comics was founded upon: a sense of community, lifting each other up, and of course, a love for comics and storytelling. After weeks of brainstorming, the A Taste of Home: A Cooking Anthology project was born. A few months later, we have been astounded by the response, with the project raising nearly double our original financial goal.
How did we get here, and what did we learn along the way? There are plenty of “how-to Kickstarter” guides on the internet (many of which we used while planning our Kickstarter), so for this workshop, we are going to speak not only on what made our Kickstarter successful, but also what our approach to the Kickstarter looked like. We hope it will give you insight into how to run your own crowdfunding projects, or how to participate in comics anthologies.
Here are our three main takeaways from this experience, brought to you by the Level Ground Comics team:
Choosing the Right Artistic Team
We chose to open up an application process to choose our artists and stories for the anthology, and were blown away by the response—over 50 people applied! While we unfortunately could only choose sixteen artists to participate in the project, we are very happy with the results of the group of artists we chose.
We took several factors into consideration when deciding if an artist would be included in the anthology. Because Level Ground Comics’ mission is to help bridge the gap between beginning and experienced professional artists, an artist’s social media following or past comics experience was not a factor that we took into consideration. Instead, story structure, artistic skill, and how the narrative fit with other submissions led us to our final decision.
When organizing an anthology, it is not only about the individual stories being told, but also the overall tone that the whole anthology will have. Having a clear understanding of the themes we wanted A Taste of Home to represent helped us choose what stories were the best fit for the project.
Being a Good Editor
A Taste of Home: A Cooking Anthology was the first editing opportunity for many members of Level Ground Comics. The eight editors we assigned to the project learned many lessons about what it takes to be a good editor, including timeliness, communication, and a fluency in the elements and principles of comics creation.
Being an editor comes down to interpersonal communication, and if that skill is present, then most other elements of the job will fall into place. Our editors kept close contact with the two artists assigned to them, making sure their artists met each checkpoint, reviewing the art, making suggestions, and affirming their efforts positively. The editors also served as a mediator between Level Ground Comics and their artists, helping to facilitate dialogue throughout the entire process, so everyone stayed on the same page.
To learn more about what it takes to be an editor, check out last week’s interview with Christina Lynn!
Planning Ahead, Building a Buffer, and Keeping Track of Time
If you were paying attention during the first paragraph of this workshop, you noticed that it took us months to take this project from beginning to end—in fact, A Taste of Home still isn’t over, because we still need to make sure all of our backers’ orders are fulfilled. If all goes according to plan, everything related to this Kickstarter project will be completely done around August. That’s a long time.
We knew this would be a big undertaking, and so we made sure to build in extra time for every stage of the planning process. This proved helpful for our team as well as the artists on the project, many of whom were students juggling their anthology work along with school, and who needed an extra day or two at some stages for additional touch-ups to their pages. At some points we even had to postpone dates, most notably when the Coronavirus pandemic started impacting our school and work schedules. However, we made sure to stay on track despite setbacks, building each other up and remembering our goal.
Overall, It’s Been Wild
Of the Level Ground Comics team, none of us had ever run a Kickstarter, and only a few of us had contributed to one in the past. While the task of running a crowdfunding campaign can seem daunting, we all found that the process was much easier when we worked as a team and took advantage of the network of creatives we have around us. We hope this short summary of our experience inspires you to start a crowdfunding campaign for that project you’ve always dreamed about, or to contribute to a campaign already in progress. Or, by keeping these three key points in mind, we hope you can find the right artists, editors, and timeline for your own anthology project!
Level Ground Comics plans to organize one large project like A Taste of Home: A Cooking Anthology every year. This project included over 30 contributors, collaborators, professors, and mentors, and over 500 Kickstarter backers, and we hope to continue to grow that network in the coming months and years. We are incredibly grateful for the support of people like you, and we hope that our future projects will be met with the same, if not more, excitement and enthusiasm.
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