TAKES: How it started/how it's going

Reflections on the Tower of Death campaign and what's cooking.

Last year, I was asked if I was interested in having a chapter of Ronin Digital Express included in the third volume of a popular comics anthology that was soon headed to Kickstarter.

I said yes, but on the condition that I could provide an all-new story.

While I was noodling on the outline of the story, I started the art with a series of thumbs for what would eventually become the cover.

This one stuck out:

A little over a month ago, TOWER OF DEATH successfully crossed the finish line in its own Kickstarter campaign. That modest, 300dpi ClipStudio Paint cover thumb that started it all is now this:

I’m happy to report that fulfillment was completed last week, a few months ahead of schedule.

(Fulfillment was a big area of concern for me, given how many high-profile campaigns have gone tits-up lately. For a first-time campaigner, it adds an extra trust hurdle for potential backers, even though it wasn’t you or me who did anything wrong.)

So what did I learn from all this?

Kickstarter is a crowded market right now. Everyone has a book (some creators have half a dozen each year). There’s a lot of stuff, and limited bandwidth.

Like I said, I’m a first-time campaigner. Unproven, and largely unknown.

Most folks who have talked with me about my work seem genuinely impressed with my skills.

But ultimately, money talks.

So the fact that we crossed our threshold in the first few days and made a modest profit amounted to a big milestone for me.

Proof of concept. I’m onto something.

There are people out there who really enjoy what they’re seeing. They want a piece of it.

I’m not breaking any new ground in terms of insight here, I know, but, there’s a difference between knowing something is true, and experiencing it.

I’m not overstating when I say this campaign has changed everything for me about how I’m approaching comics.

From here on out, these are my goals in order:

1. Satisfaction: I’m doing what I want to do, exclusively

2. Subscriptions: Subscribers > followers

3. Revenue: Money talks.

I’ve been working on the steps I need to take to re-orient myself in this direction over the last month.

• I’m re-vamping my online footprint. I have signals asking for followers here, subs there, it’s a mess and people don’t know what to do. When I’m done, everything will point to one action: SUBSCRIBE.

• I’m looking at monetization options. INPRNT, Global Comix, all that stuff.

• I’m looking at cons. A bit longer-term of a goal, but I want to get out there soon.

• I’m off Twitter. And I’m not going to BlueSky or wherever everyone ended up. I learned everything I needed to learn from that.

• No more chasing trends. Drawing fan art from You or Wednesday or whatever everyone’s talking about that I don’t care about. It’s a viable strategy, and doing it helped me gain some followers, sure. But it’s a lot of work for followers who are there because they like the show or whatever you drew; not your comic. In marketing, it’s what they call an LQL (low-quality lead), and while it might pump up followers, I think those followers seldom become subscribers.

• I’m building Ronin Digital Express into an ongoing serialized webcomic for years to come. It has the potential, and I have a story to tell, so I’m going to invest in it for the long, long haul. It’ll be manga-style, like TOWER OF DEATH. I had a lot of fun adapting to that style, and frankly, I’ll be able to produce chapters twice as fast if I dump color. I’ll do other books and Kickstarters here and there, but Ronin Digital Express will be my main product, and everything else is downstream from it.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the changes in the coming months. Not the boring, behind the scenes dreck, but stuff you might actually care about like, “now you can buy prints here,” and whatnot.

In the meantime, subscribe to Ronin Digital Express if you’re not already.

Rent*space will become more of a companion reader to my projects. Behind-the-scenes, when the camera is off, type stuff.

Thank you again to everyone who supported TOWER OF DEATH. You made my dream come true, really.

If you missed out, I’ll put out the PDF soon (marked up from the Kickstarter price, of course), and I have some print copies still that will be available for purchase at some point.

I’ll have some cool stuff for RDE fans soon. And Fistful of Yen proceeds as well.

That’s it. Be good.