Thanks for sharing this, Adriano! I'm curious, for marketing outreach for From Parts Unknown, did you tap into the wrestling audience through forums, podcasts, etc? Might be a new audience that is not necessarily used to comics yet and this could be a gateway in. I've been trying to make some headway in that space for A Real Slobberknocker.
I didn't! Honestly, I wouldn't know where to start. I'm pretty mainstream when it comes to wrestling podcasts/youtube. It's CVV and WhatCulture are the breadth of my knowledge with that area.
It might be something I look into when I eventually collect the books (sometime next year, at the earliest) and they're available "wide" on retailers.
I do agree that genre-hopping partitions some works, such that an audience in one doesn't carry over to others, but I also think an important piece is missing here when constantly lamenting on how the NKW audience didn't immediately flock over to FPU.
The independent space opened up the playing field for talented people to gain their own audience, but also flooded the market with low-quality self-published items. I've received indie comics with pages duplicated and out of order, comics that were years late, comics with multiple artists on the same work where page-to-page could differ from museum-masterpiece to pre-school scribbles, and works where the multiple colorists had no synchronization and the characters could change hair / clothing /vehicle colors page-to-page.
The adult industry is the only one where customers are already primed and conditioned to receive the lowest quality material from the most sketchy and scammy places. Any other industry with the same lack of standards or quality would be long out of business.
The hundreds of new backers to NKW knew nothing about you or Pesto, and platform badges mean little with no established reputation (to those new backers). They were not going to take even greater risk by funding multiple campaigns running in parallel, giving money to something new, without having received the prior in-progress items already paid for.
Physical copies of NKW have not been delivered yet, and not everybody wants to read the digital item first (which spoils the whole point of ordering the physical copy). Once NKW backers have received their copies, and have had time to assess the quality of you and Pesto, then they may be willing to test future items.
I don't think you can accurately assess how many (or few) people from NKW cross over until fulfillment is complete. FPU#4 may be the first time you start to see the trickle or cascade come in, assuming it runs long enough to overlap with fulfillment. And if vampire-wrestlers just aren't someone's interest, you may first see the NKW audience crossing over in the next series.
I was surprised that this wasn't taken into account with the analysis. After-effects can be a slow-burn process.
Fair point on the physical fulfillment and backers potentially holding off until they get comics in hand. I think that was a flaw in my rapid release/launch plans as I didn't leave room for any delays in getting hard copies delivered.
I also agree with your assessment about the indie space being a wide open playing field. I've backed campaigns with little more than a 3 page preview and have been burnt as frequently as I've been delighted.
I, possibly naively, hoped I had crossed some kind of threshold with the NKW campaign given the scale compared to my previous ones. Instead, it was a return to form which, again, is reasonable. I was doing my best to remember my headspace during the campaign and may have been caught in a loop.
All said, clearly there's more work to be done in earning backers' trust - and that's going to take time, indeed. I appreciate the feedback.
Self-assessment is always hard, so I appreciate you taking the time to help me see some blind spots! I hope to improve with each experience.
Under a different professional name, I've released a bunch of music, and my experience has been:
1) A song that gets a hundred thousand (100000) streams on one platform may get only ten (10) on another.
2) The majority of streams on each platform come from just a few songs, with the majority of songs receiving almost nothing.
3) The platforms differ on which songs are popular and which are not, as the audience is not the same across all platforms, so the two points above combine together.
4) The primary traffic sources on each platform differ.
I have seen a few comic creators run simultaneous campaigns across IndieGoGo, FundMyComic, KickStarter, and BackerKit, to address the equivalent observations above. Yes, the minimum goals may be trickier to calculate to break even, and there may be more upfront work, but those creators are:
1) Catching the audiences that only have accounts on a single platform and may not know the others exist.
2) Evening out the algorithmic differences between platforms on how projects are recommended and suggested to people supporting similar works.
3) Evening out the differences in tastes and preferences of individual audiences across platforms.
You seem really into analysis, metrics, and statistics. You may consider going "all out" with both NKW#2 and FPU#4 across all four platforms (with catch-up packs) as a test-run. See how the ratios between projects, crossovers between projects, traffic sources, and total backers, all compare with each other. The conclusions may be surprising.
If you run all four platforms and realize you already were using the best two of the bunch, then at least you will have that confirmation. If you do better than expected, then you will have found an improvement. You may kick yourself later for not trying, and thus never knowing.
It's an interesting idea. I tried running a follow-up campaign in the past using Crowdfundr to limited success, but it might be worth trying the ones you mention.
I'll have to look into what limitations they might have too. Kickstarter, for instance, requires it to be an "original work" in some way. Whether entirely new or a new format, but that may not be the case with the others.
Thanks for the idea. It's something to consider with going forward.
Thanks for doing this Adriano! Very informative for creators like myself leveraging KS and seeing what’s working and what isn’t.
Glad it's helping someone!
Thanks for sharing this, Adriano! I'm curious, for marketing outreach for From Parts Unknown, did you tap into the wrestling audience through forums, podcasts, etc? Might be a new audience that is not necessarily used to comics yet and this could be a gateway in. I've been trying to make some headway in that space for A Real Slobberknocker.
I didn't! Honestly, I wouldn't know where to start. I'm pretty mainstream when it comes to wrestling podcasts/youtube. It's CVV and WhatCulture are the breadth of my knowledge with that area.
It might be something I look into when I eventually collect the books (sometime next year, at the earliest) and they're available "wide" on retailers.
I do agree that genre-hopping partitions some works, such that an audience in one doesn't carry over to others, but I also think an important piece is missing here when constantly lamenting on how the NKW audience didn't immediately flock over to FPU.
The independent space opened up the playing field for talented people to gain their own audience, but also flooded the market with low-quality self-published items. I've received indie comics with pages duplicated and out of order, comics that were years late, comics with multiple artists on the same work where page-to-page could differ from museum-masterpiece to pre-school scribbles, and works where the multiple colorists had no synchronization and the characters could change hair / clothing /vehicle colors page-to-page.
The adult industry is the only one where customers are already primed and conditioned to receive the lowest quality material from the most sketchy and scammy places. Any other industry with the same lack of standards or quality would be long out of business.
The hundreds of new backers to NKW knew nothing about you or Pesto, and platform badges mean little with no established reputation (to those new backers). They were not going to take even greater risk by funding multiple campaigns running in parallel, giving money to something new, without having received the prior in-progress items already paid for.
Physical copies of NKW have not been delivered yet, and not everybody wants to read the digital item first (which spoils the whole point of ordering the physical copy). Once NKW backers have received their copies, and have had time to assess the quality of you and Pesto, then they may be willing to test future items.
I don't think you can accurately assess how many (or few) people from NKW cross over until fulfillment is complete. FPU#4 may be the first time you start to see the trickle or cascade come in, assuming it runs long enough to overlap with fulfillment. And if vampire-wrestlers just aren't someone's interest, you may first see the NKW audience crossing over in the next series.
I was surprised that this wasn't taken into account with the analysis. After-effects can be a slow-burn process.
Thanks for this comprehensive feedback!
Fair point on the physical fulfillment and backers potentially holding off until they get comics in hand. I think that was a flaw in my rapid release/launch plans as I didn't leave room for any delays in getting hard copies delivered.
I also agree with your assessment about the indie space being a wide open playing field. I've backed campaigns with little more than a 3 page preview and have been burnt as frequently as I've been delighted.
I, possibly naively, hoped I had crossed some kind of threshold with the NKW campaign given the scale compared to my previous ones. Instead, it was a return to form which, again, is reasonable. I was doing my best to remember my headspace during the campaign and may have been caught in a loop.
All said, clearly there's more work to be done in earning backers' trust - and that's going to take time, indeed. I appreciate the feedback.
Self-assessment is always hard, so I appreciate you taking the time to help me see some blind spots! I hope to improve with each experience.
Under a different professional name, I've released a bunch of music, and my experience has been:
1) A song that gets a hundred thousand (100000) streams on one platform may get only ten (10) on another.
2) The majority of streams on each platform come from just a few songs, with the majority of songs receiving almost nothing.
3) The platforms differ on which songs are popular and which are not, as the audience is not the same across all platforms, so the two points above combine together.
4) The primary traffic sources on each platform differ.
I have seen a few comic creators run simultaneous campaigns across IndieGoGo, FundMyComic, KickStarter, and BackerKit, to address the equivalent observations above. Yes, the minimum goals may be trickier to calculate to break even, and there may be more upfront work, but those creators are:
1) Catching the audiences that only have accounts on a single platform and may not know the others exist.
2) Evening out the algorithmic differences between platforms on how projects are recommended and suggested to people supporting similar works.
3) Evening out the differences in tastes and preferences of individual audiences across platforms.
You seem really into analysis, metrics, and statistics. You may consider going "all out" with both NKW#2 and FPU#4 across all four platforms (with catch-up packs) as a test-run. See how the ratios between projects, crossovers between projects, traffic sources, and total backers, all compare with each other. The conclusions may be surprising.
If you run all four platforms and realize you already were using the best two of the bunch, then at least you will have that confirmation. If you do better than expected, then you will have found an improvement. You may kick yourself later for not trying, and thus never knowing.
It's an interesting idea. I tried running a follow-up campaign in the past using Crowdfundr to limited success, but it might be worth trying the ones you mention.
I'll have to look into what limitations they might have too. Kickstarter, for instance, requires it to be an "original work" in some way. Whether entirely new or a new format, but that may not be the case with the others.
Thanks for the idea. It's something to consider with going forward.