Failing Forward

*sigh*

I've been trying to writing this blog post for a few days now. And every time I start to write it, I'm just not sure what to say. It's a bummer of a blog post for me personally, but I guess it's a learning experience.

I launched my Kickstarter with high hopes. I didn't wan't to raise funds for printing my comic that grossed in the thousands (though, that would have been awesome), I just wanted to raise funds for a smallish-to-mediumish print run.

Well, it wasn't going to happen. So I closed down the kickstarter page and thought about it. Analyzed what I did wrong. I may be missing something, but I don't think I did anything really wrong. I posted a good description and added a very brief but coherent video and added fair rewards (all of these I guess could be debated, but I thought they were all pretty good). And my goal seemed small enough to conquer.

What I didn't realize, and have come to now, is that I didn't and don't have what I thought a did. A network. I can say I don't have a fan-base either, but I kinda already knew that. I was hoping that with my couple hundred Facebook friends and couple hundred Twitter followers, that good word of mouth might spread about the project.

Wrong. After thinking about it, half of my friends and family don't even know what Kickstarter is, so that's not gonna help at all. And on Facebook, that's pretty much all I had. And with Twitter, well, how many of my 260 followers are interested enough in my work to RT, much less pledge? Not much.

But this isn't sour grapes. This is a learning experience. I'm still publishing my comic book, I'll just have to print a couple dozen at a time, instead of the smallish print run I initially wanted. And I'll still try a kickstarter in the future, but now I know what I need. I need a network. And I need a fan-base. Without those, making headway on a crowd-funding site, where you're reaching out to people doesn't really work, unless of course you're making potato salad. You need people who support your work to share the project and people who enjoy you're work to pledge and enjoy the project. I'm not there yet. But hopefully in the future I will be.

Making comics isn't a sprint, but a marathon.

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained." - Marie Curie