Self-Publishing - Launching Pre-Orders!!

 On Thursday May 18th I set comics live for pre-orders! I made a few graphics to promote this specifically for Instagram Stories, Instagram Grid and Twitter! Below are screen caps of the posts:

I have previous experience in selling things online, and that really helped me feel confident in setting this all going. I set myself a target I hoped to reach, similar to what I would have done on a crowd funding campaign, something that would allow me to cover the costs of my initial print run of 50 of each comic, and I achieved this within the first few days of the pre-orders being live! I can now go ahead and finish the comics knowing that I can easily pay for the initial print run, which cover all pre-orders, as well as leaving spares for my upcoming comic markets and some stock for comic stores!

Self-Publishing - Pre-Orders & Crowdfunding Research

I researched out to the comics community via twitter to ask for advice on the pros and cons of crowdfunding V's a self-ran presale, here are some responses I received:

The consensus seems to be that a crowd funder (eg Kickstarter) is a great way to promote your work, its transparent about the costs of the project and how much you're looking to raise, it also allows me to send updates to everyone much easier than a self-led pre-sale. I still don't know if this is the route I will go down for this project (purely based on time restraints), but it's interesting to know for future reference.

Below is a slide from James Lawrences lecture on crowdfunding, specifically on working out the costings:

Discussed the maths (costings) with some other comic creators, and it made me realise how complicated this could be, I was advised that it can be time consuming too to promote and make it worth while.

An option that was given to me was setting a page up on my website as a pre-sale, with a link directly to paypal, to keep it really simple and manageable, with little pressure to hit a target in a certain time scale etc.

I think for my first two comics I will go down the pre-sale route, and for further projects (or even reprintings), where I have more time, I will go down the crowd funding route.