Kickstarter Math – Easy Way to Crowdfund Indie Comics
Answering a three basic math calculations for funding a comic on Kickstarter.
How much money do backers usually spend?
Kickstarter backers spend more on average than a typical comic shop buyer. For comics in comic shops, buyers usually don’t want to pay more than 5 bucks for a typical floppy comic. However, on Kickstarter, because they often feel more involved in the project, and they can get extra personalized perks, they’ll often spend $20-50 a project.
How many backers needed to fund a project?
We’re going to say you’re hypothetical expenses are $5k USD for a 22-page single issue floppy. Typically, professional artwork for colors and letters will cost you between $100-$300 a page, so if we average that to 200 bucks for 22 pages, that’s $4400. Add in another $600 and you’re at $5k USD.
Obviously this can fluctuate but it’s a good average.
If you plan on printing the book yourself, you’re probably want to print at least 500 copies, which will probably cost you around 1500 bucks. If you add in shipping it could go up to around 1750. Let’s round it out to 2k on printing and shipping.
So, all in all your expenses round out to $7k for a single issue.
500 Copies ($2.97 ea.)
$1,485.60
750 Copies
$1,540.38 ($2.05 ea.)
Because Kickstarter takes 5% and you pay another 5% in Kickstarter fees…your true full revenue needs to be about $7800, and let’s just round it up to $8k. So, you need 8k to break even on 500-750 issue self-published print run. If your backers average $20 bucks, you need 400 backers. If your backers average $50, you’ll need 160 backers. If your backers average $10, you’ll need 800 of them. And if they average only $5 you’d need a whopping 1600 backers.
This is why you’ll want to come up with high quality perks so that you can get your backer averages up to somewhere closer to 50 bucks, or at least $20.
How many people do I need to market to, in order to fulfil my backer needs?
1%/.01% rule (When marketing, expect 1% of your audience to take interest in your project, and .01% to actually back your project. For friends and family, expect 2-20% to actually back your project)
So if you’re trying to get 200 backers, you need to advertise and market to a pool that’s at least 20,000 people. This would mean paying for Facebook or Google ads that can reach this many people.
And when you branch out to broader markets, people that aren’t in your target niche, you need to add a zero to that, so 200,000 people. And in general you can expect to pay anywhere from 1 cent to 1 dollar to reach enough people to result in a backer. It all depends on how catchy your cover is, your title, and the genre you’re going for.
For example, if you need 200 backers. To be safe, you’re going to need to target a niche audience that has at least 20k followers. This would be like a specific artist. If you hire an artist with at least 20k followers, you can expect that maybe 1% of them (200 people) will take an interest in a book he does and about .01% or 20 people interested enough to buy it simply off of an ad or their name alone.
These numbers go up the more catchy your covers and the hook of the story, and word of mouth, etc. And in reality, it’s often even more intense. If you want a more guaranteed 200 backers, you’ll want to hire an artist that has 200,000 backers. Or market to your niche and pay to reach 2 million people.
30/100% first day rule
On your first day, you need to cover at least 30% of your total funds and in reality, you should set your funding goal to around 30% of what you actually need, so that you can hit 100% on your first day.
So what I mean basically is…if you need 8k to cover all your expenses, set your funding goal at $2,400. Then, make efforts to create a funding team, and reach out to friends and family to ensure they back your project on day one. That way you’ll reach at least $720 (which is roughly 30% of your funding goal) on the first day. And if you can reach 3k on day one, you’ll end up higher on the algorithms since it’ll appear more successful. If you can reach your funding goal on day one, you pop up at the top of new lists because it appears to be “hot” or trending.
So, set low goals publicly, but make sure you know your actual numbers.
You’ll then set awesome stretch goals to ensure you can reach your true funding goal, which is the 8k. but if you fail to reach that goal, at least you’ll make some money back and keep the 2400, which is enough to cover your printing costs.
All make sense?
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Conclusion - 4 Keys to Success with Indie Comics
• Find ways to turn your series into a business with merchandise, foreign licensing, and TV/Movie option deals.
• Write a high-concept story that can be understood immediately by one look at the title and the cover.
• Keep your first arc 4-6 issues.
• And please…keep your main characters alive, or make sure the setting itself is a main character.
Hello from California and thanks for the info