For Those Of You In The UK, There’s A Special Bit At The End, Courtesy Of FSFCPL
For everybody else, there’s the entire rest of the post, which is less time-sensitive than the UK bit. Take it away, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin!
It was always a given that Boulet’s first crowdfunding campaign would make a splash. The only questions were when and how big.
In case you missed it, as a new year’s resolution Boulet set himself a daily strip schedule, as a way to reconnect with the spontaneity of web creation; as a sign of the times, he created them as Instagram vignettes. So even if he has later put them on his blog as well so as not to be solely dependent on Facebook infrastructure, they are quite specific in format (notably, they are narrow enough to be easily readable on handsets).
After a year 2020 where the average productivity was slightly lowered, he surprised himself when he reached update 100 and didn’t stop until May (with a few more in August) — all that in parallel with his breadwinning activities.
Which raised the question of what to do with them.
As he reveals in the crowdfunding video, his publisher, or to be more accurate, the one where he has published his comics blog collections so far under the name Notes, did proactively contact him about, maybe, publishing these?
But not only did he feel these were sufficiently different in format and tone to warrant developing them as a specific project, also times had changed since the last tome: a new kind of publishing house where his promotional efforts would be taken into account, where he would not sign away any more rights (merchandizing, translation, adaptations, etc.) than he strictly needed to, and where he would need to only give up a share of the crowdfunding money proportionate with the work taken off his plate, which was the main obstacle keeping him away from self-publishing? (Note who was agreeing with Boulet in this discussion? Lisa Mandel)
As he put it, it’s as if Fate had sent him a sign. Hence, Rogatons.
After an explosive start that dissuaded me from reporting on the extravagant amount that applying the FFFmk2 would have given (given the lack of track record), the campaign did nevertheless reach 7195 preordered books, or 6759 Booksecc, putting him among the top crowdfunded French comics creators.
I don’t know if that allows him to be completely independent from traditional publishers (if you think this book just required the 6 months or so of work where we actually saw his strip output, you’re fooling yourself). But he certainly took a giant step towards that.
Meanwhile, he isn’t leaving his historical publishers down so far, as evidenced by the fact that he’ll be in Cumbria this weekend for the Comic Art Festival) where he will sign Notes for Soaring Penguin Press, and by his relaying of the availability of Dungeon in English at NBM Graphic Novels.
As always, we at Fleen thank FSFCPL for keeping us up on the Continental scene. Have a good weekend, everybody, espeically those of you in Cumbria. Oh, and maybe come back sometime over the weekend? I’ll have some news for you then.
Spam of the day:
Summer is here Is your lawn ready?
I’ll note this was sent on 18 September, which is just before the end of summer in the northern hemisphere.
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