The webcomics blog about webcomics

Kickstarts, On A Wednesday


There’s an audacious set of Kickstarts going on with contributions from the webcomics community, both running for just shy of a month, and with the potential to fill your shelves with lots and lots of women-centered work. Let’s dig in.

  • Naturally, we start with the latest on the Smut Peddler Double Header, which we noted yesterday was still too young to qualify for a spin on the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II¹. We’re remedying that now, and as of this writing, the FFFmk2 gives SPDH an expected final total of US$162.5K +/- 32.5K, or a range of US$130K – 195K. Given that the last Smut Peddler did about US$185K and that this prediction is probably a bit of an underestimate², I’d look for a number on the high end of that range.

    Also of note: the per-backer total of $US42.81 is significantly higher (so far) than that of either of the prior two Smut Peddler projects (5709 backers @ US$32.45 for the 2014 edition, 2291 @ US$36.27 in 2012); if the 1472 backers that exist now merely hold onto the per-backer ratio (and I’d expect them to do so, as the low-priced early bird packages are all long gone, and the high-priced special art packages are yet to be added), meeting only the backer count of the 2012 edition puts the Double Header over US$152; if they reach the backer count of 2014, you’re looking at nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

  • And on the just-launched end of things, a new anthology project, 1001 Knights seeks to create three hardcover volumes, each about 250 pages, with a total of 1001 original characters, who are people-positive with feminist overtones. It’s going to take more than 250 creators to pull this one off, and US$70,000 of which (as of this writing, which is not quite the same time as the writing of the last item³ — I can’t type infinitely fast people!) some US$15,000 has been raised in the couple of hours since launch.

    The webcomics-related creators that have their name associated with the project (a full list of which may be found here) include Aatmaja Pandya, Allison Strejlau, Carey Pietsch, Darryl Ayo, Isabel Melan&ccecil;on, Jordan Witt, Kori Michele Handwerker, Leisl Adams, Molly Ostertag, Ryan North, Sara Winifred Searle, Scott Wegener, Shannon Wright, Steven Sugar, and literally hundreds more.

    Wrangling this many creators and contributions is an enormous task, so I’m pleased to see a couple of things in the campaign that make me confident it won’t collapse into a never-fulfilled fiasco:

    We’ve held off on kickstarting until we we had nearly everything in hand. We’re working with Breadpig to make sure all costs are accounted for and to make sure fulfillment of rewards will be as efficient as possible. We’ve also got the job narrowed down to 3 printers.

    Not having to wait to get art in is going to be huge factor in meeting the promised (and honestly, very aggressive) delivery date of July 2016. But working with Breadpig means that they get the services of George, about whom I once said Problems see George, and wisely decide to be elsewhere. It’s still going to be a near thing to get the books laid out, to the chosen printer, proofed, printed, and transported before fulfillment can begin, but Breadpig have a history of meeting or beating delivery dates, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

    It all depends on meeting goal, though, so if you’ve got room on your shelves for between one and three hardcovers that look to be substantial and handsome, check out 1001 Knights.


Spam of the day:

Checkout the latest Engagement Rings

I’ve been married for more than 20 years, dipshit. Try harder.

_______________
¹ As a reminder, the FFFmk2 states you take the Trend value of a project at the 24-30 hour mark from Kicktraq and call that PV. The range at close will be PV/4 +/- PV/20, but has only shown to be valid for project with at least 200 backers at calculation time.

² The SPDH launched at 9:00pm EST Monday night so we’re actually at about 36 hours now, and the Kicktraq trend chart is angling downwards at this time.

³ And I just went back during the proofing pass on this post, and it’s now up to more than US$17,000, which because Kicktraq only updates totals once an hour, I can tell you is up from less than US$11,000 in 49 minutes.

RSS feed for comments on this post.