The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

There is no “I” in team, but there are two in “idiot.” Which is something I definitely feel like sometimes. Putting together the Kickstarter for WAYPOINT has turned from a simple operation by my editor Dane Styler and myself into a complex one involving the fine folks at PRANA Direct Market Solutions. And that’s required learning a skill I never expected to learn: management.

My friend Matt Maxwell -- whose Kickstarter for the next installment of his excellent 80s weird fiction series, Hazeland, launches in a couple days – refers to himself as a “feral writer.” I think I may have become one as well. It’s been a bit since I’ve been in a writer’s room, so I’m just hanging out here with my cat and my computer and the weirdos on a comedy Discord. The only instructions I normally give are telling my cat to get off the keyboard. It’s a new experience for me to coordinate a team of people. Which means I need to domesticate myself again.

It turns out that self-publishing a comic also puts you in a unique position when working with a marketing team: you’re both the client and the publisher. The final decisions lie with me – it’s my book at the end of the day, I’ve sunk the time and money and creative energy into it – but there are a lot of areas where I have no idea what I’m doing, because I’ve never done this before. That can make it difficult to communicate what I want with the good folks I’m working with.

I want to make it clear I’m not complaining here. It’s just a learning process. When I get asked what dimensions I want the book to be, or the thickness of the paper, or how many copies I want to print of each individual issue (which is tricky, because usually you sell more copies of the first issue with diminishing results after that), I don’t know the answer. I obviously need enough copies to fulfill the Kickstarter orders, but since the entire purpose of the Kickstarter campaign is to fund a print run so I can get books into stores and sell them at conventions, I need to take that into account as well.

I’ll be honest: I thought it’d be a lot more straightforward than this. It’s a lot to juggle – I often learn a decision exists just before I need to make a judgment call on it. I realize I probably could’ve gone a much simpler route and just launched the campaign myself, but as nice as it is that Kickstarter and other similar sites make it easier for creators to reach their audiences directly, it’s as complicated a process as going through a publisher. Just in an entirely different way. The crowdfunding sites don’t just act as a storefront. In a lot of ways, they gamify the experience, and I have to learn how to play the game.

Thankfully, I’ve somehow managed to make enough friends and contacts around the comics industry that I have good people in my corner to help me. I met a lot of them due to the generosity of my mentor, Steven T. Seagle. That’s where I befriended my editor, Dane, and he’s the one who introduced me to the Prana team (whose founder, Atom Freeman, also knows Steve; it’s a small business). Networking works!

Of course, even during the creation process, I had to collaborate. Lots of back-and-forth with my artist, Jakub Wiśniewski, which could be difficult with the time zone and language differences. HdE and I had to decide on the right font (well, he did, but I had to approve it) and whether or not all the characters had the same font and word balloons. It’s not more collaborative than making a movie but it’s definitely more collaborative than screenwriting. I’ve had writing partners before, though, so I’m more used to that level of negotiation and compromise. Being the boss on the production of a comic? A whole other can of worms.

Coordinating communication between everyone can be tricky – there is such a thing as too many cooks sometimes, and e-mail chains can get real confusing – but I feel fortunate to have experts in my corner. The tricky part is figuring out how best to get my thoughts across to my collaborators in a clear way. It makes sense in my brain, I swear! It’s just sometimes a case of not knowing what I want until I see it (or knowing that I don’t want something when I see it). At least I have confidence knowing that the final product will come out excellent, thanks to their expertise.

So if you were wondering why the Kickstarter launch date keeps getting pushed back, it’s because this is basically a crash course in brain surgery for me. That’s how much I care about my readers: I am learning to communicate better with my fellow humans. I know, it’s a big sacrifice for me. But it’ll be worth it to bring this book to you.

The Kickstarter in question:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waypointcomic/waypoint-1-4

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