More comic crowdfunding records were smashed this summer with the Good Omens book from Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Colleen Doran, which raised just over $3M USD on a $31K target!
However, this also drew the ire of many indie comics creators, who feel crowdfunding platforms shouldn’t be used by big name creators – who presumably have access to other resources and contacts to get their work published. This is a perennial “zero-sum” argument that perpetuates in the community: the fear that every dollar pledged to a big-name creator is a dollar taken away from an indie creator.
One doesn’t need to look far to see the same arguments recycled from other campaigns such as Brzkr. Or when comic publishers such as IDW, Boom! Studios, Vault Comics, Scout Comics etc., launch campaigns. There is a feeling amongst certain creators that these publishers or big-names don’t belong in crowdfunding.
I think that’s bullshit.
Crowdfunding (or direct-to-consumer (DTC)) is a democratizing force for creators. Sure, sometimes it feels hard to connect with your audience no matter how hard you work, while other projects seemingly raise funding hand-over-fist, but it’s not a zero-sum ecosystem. What many of us forget is that most people don’t understand crowdfunding. They’re used to buying products from stores (physical or virtual) and not pre-ordering a product months in advance. Big name creators help bring more consumers to the crowdfunding ecosystem; people who wouldn’t typically be there. With more eyeballs on the site, it’s actually more likely that they’ll find other products that catch their eye, turning them into a new crowdfunding audience.
Big name creators are not the problem. The real problem are creators who don’t deliver on their promises.
There has been a recent spate of comic anthologies not delivering to their backers, and other egregious examples such as Rob Liefeld’s Brigade Returns Kickstarter (where many backers are complaining they haven’t received their books even though the campaign finished TEN YEARS AGO!!!!)
I think people who get burned on crowdfunding campaigns are less likely to back other campaigns unless they are confident the risk is worth it. If people are burned multiple times by creators, then those consumers may drop out of the market entirely. These don’t need to be big name creators: small, indie projects that fail to deliver could be the last straw for potential backers.
So rather than complaining about big-name creators sucking up all the crowdfunding oxygen, I think it’s more important that we hold other creators accountable for not delivering on their promises – because I feel that is the bigger problem.
But what do I know? I’m just hypothesizing, right?
I found this interesting paper that actually set out to examine this effect. The authors (Cumming, Hornuf, Karami, and Schweizer) actually explored two high-level hypotheses: firstly they set out to define fraud and identify factors associated with fraudulent crowdfunding behaviour, and secondly them documented the effects of this bad behaviour on the success of concurrent campaigns.
The investigation into fraudulent campaign factors is quite interesting in its own right, but is not connected to my thesis. However, the second hypothesis is.
The authors scraped data from all Kickstarter projects between January 1, 2010 and September 30, 2018 and used Kickstarter’s suspension dates as a proxy measure for breaches of trust (comics only accounted for 1.3% of suspended campaigns in this time-period compared to Technology campaigns which were almost 25% of the total). They then looked at all other projects during the same time-period to see if there were any negative consequences arising from these high-profile suspended campaigns, collecting data on 271,971 projects across 15 main categories.
The data were then modelled using regression analyses and showed a 6.4% lower probability of funding for campaigns launching within 2 weeks (before and/or after) one of the high-profile suspensions. They also found a reduction in the number of backers and pledged funding. This means that those creators who had the misfortune to launch within 14 days (either side) of a high-profile campaign suspension were directly impacted by the actions of other creators.
While this analysis covers all campaigns within the time-frame, and is not specific to comics, the lesson here is that the actions of other creators can and do have an impact on your own campaign. It is likely – but not studied in the paper – that this is due to lack of trust amongst consumers in the crowdfunding ecosystem.
The lesson for the indie creator is to put your launch on pause if there is a high-profile suspension (or even high-profile news coverage), to mitigate or ameliorate any negative impacts of those campaigns on your own.
But perhaps the biggest lesson here is that crowdfunding works because it’s a trust-based ecosystem. Campaigns that don’t deliver – or commit outright fraud – decrease the amount of trust in that system - and that does have an impact on the success of individual campaigns.
At the end of the day, the onus needs to be on creators to deliver on their promises – because that, and not the big-names, is the main challenge facing the crowdfunding community.