This Guide Is
Brought To You
By:
Kat Calamia and Phil Falco
How to Create a Successful Kickstarter
Beast & Snow has been an absolute roller coaster ride of a campaign, and one of the most frequent DMs we’ve been receiving is “how did you create such a successful campaign?”. So we wanted to address it in this installment of the newsletter for creators and readers alike.
How Did We Come Up with the Idea?
You should always look at the market. Why are the biggest giants in that select market selling? As for Kickstarter, the two most popular types of projects on the platform are campaigns based on something people already know (public domains, collection of previous properties, etc.) and NSFW books. This planted the seed for The Beast & Snow…why couldn’t we do both?
We wanted to take the challenge a step further and work on a genre Lifeline Comics has never tackled before…fantasy. Being completely transparent, I’ve never been a big fantasy fan. I wanted to create a world where I could even LOVE fantasy. Throw in some werewolves & vampires, and I was sold.
At the heart of every Lifeline Comic is character and organic storytelling, and that’s exactly what we did with the creation of this new series! We wanted to create a book that reflected the current Kickstarter market. A book that would challenge us with story beats we’ve never tackled before, all while keeping the elements of our writing that our readers have come to expect from us.
How To Find the Perfect Creative Team
Pulling together your Creative Team is perhaps the most important step for every project. Unless you’re a solo act, most comics are a collaboration of multiple different creators, each contributing their own voice and style to the project. So finding the perfect team for your book is often a tall order.
Each project we take on has a different story for how we assembled our team. For our anthologies, we primarily relied on an open submission form (a handy tool for a smaller project that requires less commitment from contributors). For past comics, there’s been a mix of artists that we found and connected with on social media (Instagram and Twitter are your friends, folks!) or who we met directly at Conventions.
For The Beast & Snow, we first worked with interior artist Dorilys Giacchetto on Hairology. We immediately loved her style and working with her, so we approached her with our pitch for this comic. It’s not the first time we’ve gotten to further collaborate with artists who applied to our anthologies, and it certainly won’t be the last!
Editor’s Note: If you’d like to read more and as well as check out several Kickstarter projects currently happening that Kat and Phil are happily recommending, including their current project The Beast & Snow, head here! It should also be noted that The Beast & Snow is currently at 64,271 dollars of its 13,000 dollar goal with 1,771 backers and 8 days to go. So if this sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in on the pledging today!
