Okay, Make Your Opus!
Here's an example of a creator who started with her dream project and lived to tell the tale!
One of the best pieces of advice that I often give to creators is to NOT make your first comic project your magnum opus. Instead, focus on small projects like shorts, anthology stories and one-shots. Use them as skills development, building your creative muscles so that you’re ready to take on that epic project after you have enough experience to do it justice.
There are lots of good reasons to follow this advice, of course…
If you can’t tell a good story in a few pages, you won’t be able to tell one in hundreds.
Finding an artist for a short project is easy… asking an artist to climb on board a maxi-series is a much tougher ask.
Big projects take much longer to complete… and becoming a creator who is known for completing projects is important.
Big projects require big investments, often in both time and money… and when you don’t have a track-record of sales success, you have no idea whether those investments will ever pay off.
Working on a bunch of smaller projects, with a variety of collaborators, is kind of like dating… and is a great way to figure out who you might work well with on a bigger project in the future.
I’ve given this advice to aspiring creators for years.
But the truth is, some creators aren’t going to follow it. And that’s okay. Because some creators SHOULD start with an epic, if that’s truly what they’re inspired to make… and with the right attitude and approach, it CAN work, as M.K. Palmer’s MERAKI teaches us.
Years ago, after having some success launching books on Kickstarter with the support of backers like you, I decided to teach a small pilot class on Kickstarter launching to 8 comic creators who signed up.
M.K. was one of those creators in the pilot group who had an epic project in mind... it was a tale she had been waiting her whole life to tell, and she was putting in the work to make sure she would do it justice… investing in comics writing courses and putting together a professional team to bring that vision to life.
The problem?
After budgeting out the first arc of the story, M.K. realized it was going to cost over $25,000 to get the thing made. And as a first-time creator and crowdfunder, with zero audience… a $25K goal for a graphic novel she was just starting to work on probably wasn’t going to be feasible.
So, she did was savvy comic creators have been doing for years… she broke that grand vision into smaller chapters, and made her first launch in 2016 for an introductory ZERO issue. It funded, and allowed her to start building her audience, bringing in revenue to sustain the project, and growing her skills as a comic writer.
Just about every year since then, MK has launched one or more Kickstarter campaigns, continuing to tell this story that means so much to her, raising many times more in total than that initial $25K target that seemed impossible at the start. In just a few hours, MERAKI’s 12-issue finale wraps.
Check out the Meraki finale on Kickstarter.
It’s an awesome example of the power of breaking your projects into small, bite-sized, attainable milestones can transform seemingly impossible dreams into inevitable reality.
So, if you’ve been sitting on that dream project… or heard the advice to put it off and work on something more achievable until you’re “ready” I hope you’ll use M.K. and Meraki as inspiration to boldly move forward on that opus.
Just remember to break it up into achievable milestones first!
-Tyler James
ComixTribe Publisher
P.S. If you DO decide to bring that magnum opus to life, and want some help planning that first achievable milestone launch for it, the new Comic Book Crowdfunding Launch Planner from ComixLaunch can help!
Click here to check it out on Kickstarter as we head into our FINAL WEEK!