The Kickstarter campaign for Anything That Loves has reached its official $10K goal, in just a few days. =D> There's still a month left, in which money to pay the contributors may or may not come in. It has to reach a threshold of $15K ($5K over goal) before we get anything, so I'm not counting any chickens just yet. And it's not a lot of money, after you take out Kickstarter's cut and you divide it among the 23 contributors. It'll only add up to woohoo-let's-go-out-for-dinner money if they get like $25K in contributions, and it'd take $75K before I'd get holy-two-mothers-of-God-I'm-gettin-me-a-new-computer money.
The original plan was a flat per-piece rate, but Zan realized that would be unfair to people who'd done longer stories (I think there's going to be a 20-pager in the book). So he suggested a per-page rate, but one of the long-story contributors objected that this approach wouldn't properly value someone who'd done a concise well-executed 1-pager. So Zan put together a formula that combines the two approaches: $X for the first page, then a smaller $Y for each page after that. (I swear: nobody does sociopoliticoeconomic correctness like a bunch of queers. )
Zan's Kickstarter has reached $15,195 in donations, which means the first level of payments to the contributing creators goes into effect. Based on the page-rate formula described above, for my 7-page story I'll receive almost $60! $-) OK, not a lot of money ... but considering that I literally asked them to take a story from me, I can't complain about the rate.
The rate of donations has slowed a bit (no longer averaging ~$1000/day), but ATL is now just one dollar short of $20K, which will double each creator's take for it. (If no one else signs up, I'll chip in the extra dollar myself.) The number of contributing creators is now 30 (one team of 2), and the page count is just under 200. Much to his credit, Zan hasn't changed the payment formula for the creators, or the price of the book, even while he's been accepting more stories for it.
And now we've passed the $25K mark! Which triples the original thank-you-for-donating-your-work payment. There's 6 days left of the campaign, so it's possible that we'll get another $5K in the excitement running up to the funding deadline, and I'll get another ~$60... but I'm not counting on it. And I still have to y'know: get the piece finished of course, or I won't see a penny and I'll become a pariah among queer cartoonists. But it's almost ready for coloring, so no sweat.
I'm wrapping up work on "Scout", which means I can turn my attention back to other projects. I have three contenders to work on next:
Drub is almost finished inking "Hardcore", a 5-pager that takes place at a punk rock concert. No lettering (just title and credits), but I'll need to color it.
There are still the couple unfinished pages of "Dark Night", the story that had a few pages in the SF Batman-on-Robin exhibit.
I should package and submit Captain Miracle and Fetus Christ to Comixology. Sure, they're available free on my web site, but Comixology customers don't know that, and it's another channel of exposure.
Dress me in silk and call me "Eustace", because the Anything That Loves Kickstarter finished with $31,883 from exactly 1,000 backers. Each of whom will be getting at least a digital or print copy of the book. That's a lot of eyeballs. And that's before the book even goes on sale. Ulp. Is it too late to fix up the art and punch of the dialog a little more? Maybe. Better move on and not look back though.
Because of the dollar amount raised, I'll be getting a total of $231 for my story! Which would be so-so if it was a WFH page rate. But it's my story, I own it, and I have other plans for it ... and I was originally willing to contribute it "for exposure", so that's a pretty good payment by my standards!
Drub finished the inking of "Hardcore", and I've been plodding thru coloring the pages. Not the fault of the material ... I've just been having an unproductive week.
The script for "Hardcore" was pretty short: it fits 5 pages of story onto 1 page. That's possible because there's no dialog. The sketchiness of the script apparently gave Drub the license to improvise ... because he did. For example, the script for page 3 called for 4 panels, and he gave me this:
It was possible to draw what I asked for in 4 panels, but this splits all of the action-reaction bits into separate panels. And it works better, so I'm not complaining.
I've been working out a schedule of deadlines for myself for the next few months. I don't have any external deadlines (the Best Gay Erotica and Anything That Loves stories are delivered), so I need something else to keep my feet to the flame. What I have now is a list of 8 works-in-progress, and the time I figure it'll take me to finish each one. Add them up, and you get the date of a vacation me and the Wayward Boys are planning in July. Or at least you did a couple weeks ago, before I stalled out coloring "Hardcore". Here's the list:
"Hardcore" - which I just finished.
"Assault" - a JAQrabbit Tale with strictly black-and-white subtractive art, mostly drawn, but there are quite a few panels that don't work.
"Intruder" - the first Tale I drew, which still needs color.
"This One Time, At Church Camp" - I have pencils from Zlatan, which I need to ink and color.
"Vibe" - same situation, but my pencils. All of these so far already have the lettering done in Illustrator, by the way.
"Everybody's Doin' It" - needs the gray tones converted to color for digital publication.
"September" - I've already finished and published pages 2-3 of this, but there's a 1st page that sets them up better, which I haven't even roughed out yet.
"Cruising" - a 14-pager that I have mostly roughed or penciled. This is going to take a month by itself.
When I get these done, I'll be almost "caught up". That is, any story that I've currently started illustrating, will be finished. But by then I intend to have at least one or two stories in the hands of other artists, so I'll be "behind" again by the time I get there.
The good news is that the weather has gotten nice enough that I can work on the front porch in the evening, where usually the only distractions are the neighbors (and the occasional drugs-seeker from the suburbs) walking/biking/skating by. Summer tends to be a productive time of year for me, for that reason.
The bad news is that the unused office that I got access to a while back for working in over lunch, is going to become occupied. That has lately been my most consistently productive time. The next-best spot for me to work is literally a closet, and even there I get interrupted sometimes. So I may have to switch my regular Doing-The-Work-Out time to my lunch break, and (for the summer, at least) focus on evenings on the porch Doing The Work.
When I approached Drub about illustrating a Tale, I gave him two scripts to look at, and he agreed to do the one he liked more. It turned out great, I colored it, and gave him copies of the results. Apparently he enjoyed the experience ... because he just said that he'd like to do the other one too! So as soon as he finishes what he's working on now, he'll get started on "Hawg", a 5-page story involving my old motorscooter and a biker on a Harley (subject matter also up Drub's alley).
I am making very little progress lately. A bunch of factors contributing: some kind of viral thing for a while, the day job spilling over into evenings and weekends, losing my lunchtime work space, frustration with the art, personal matters, depression about all of the above, and no deadline forcing me to work regardless. Now some family responsibilities (more hassle than stress, fortunately) are going to take me out of town for the weekend (and then some). Maybe getting away from my routine entirely will help me get back to it afterward.
Here's a status report on the overall JAQrabbit Tales project:
11 stories totally finished (59 pages) Plus 6 stories with art started (42 pages) Plus 53 stories fully scripted (195 pages) And a bunch of stories with scripts started.
So you can kinda see why I want to get those art-started pieces finished. But I really need to get some of those scripted-but-no-art stories in the hands of artists (whether that's me or someone else).
Once upon a time I imagined that I'd get my productivity up high enough to get 1 new story (3-10 pages each) out the door each month, allowing me to justify a monthly-subscription approach to selling it. Or at least publishing it free and building a regular audience. (I've been sitting on those completed stories so far in order to build up an inventory to compensate for production delays.) But unless I get fired from my day job sometime soon, or I win the lottery so I can hire all the artists I need, I can't see even an almost-monthly schedule happening.
I just got a preliminary digital copy of Anything That Loves. Not that I don't already know what my story looks like on my computer screen, but seeing it context with all the other stories like this, feels substantially different. I'm in a book with Ellen Forney, Leanne Franson, Roberta Gregory, and Maurice Vellekoop (among many others)!
I gave Zan two versions of one page, one with a word balloon strategically covering an erect cock, the other not. He used not. :-bd Which I think makes mine the porniest story in the book, especially since most of the other comics showing nudity are more cartoony. So I'll be the one who gets someone arrested for selling this book to a 17-year-old.
I'll be getting a couple comp copies of the book, but I have the option to order more at half price. A part of me is tempted to get twenty copies and make another $300 selling them, but another part of me knows that I'll probably still have 19 of them a year from now, since I have no obvious way to do that.
I opted to just take my full payment rather than have some or all of it converted into wholesale copies of the book. My two comp copies will do.
Zan sent out an updated (but not quite final) digital proof, with updated and rearranged material. I'd sent him a revised version of page 1, with my credit intact, which he swapped in. And (for whatever reason) my story is now immediately before Leanne Franson's!
I guess. I'm just spinning my wheels the last few weeks, though. That 14-pager I was going to try to get done before taking a trip at the end of July... I won't be starting that until after the trip.
Thanks to Anything That Loves going to press, I'm about to have my name and web address in front of a lot more people, so I'm focusing some attention on improving that online presence. The current web site is crappy even by 1990s standards, so I'm setting up WordPress with a little customization ... basically replacing it with a site that's merely crappy by 2000s standards. The goal is that I'll be able to use it as both a directory to the stuff I already have online (Captain Miracle, Fetus Christ, Neverpedia, etc) but also a place to show off old stuff that's just sitting in folders on my computer, and new stuff as I'm working on it. Toward that last point, I'm trying to integrate it with Facebook, so that things I add to the site will also show up on my FB timeline, and help turn that time-sink into a promotional platform.
At the same time, I'm giving my rabbit mascot a little bit of a makeover. His ears – overly inspired by Matt Groening's Life In Hell rabbits – looked stupid, so I redrew them to be more rabbit-like (and a little devilish), and since he's supposed to be kind of a furry stand-in for me, I gave him a more Questy hairstyle.
The new http://JAQrabbit.com/ is now live. Not a lot of content on it – mostly just static pages for each of my major projects, another page for one-off bits, and an empty blog – but at least it no longer looks like something I threw together in an hour.
I've been fighting with Facebook and their what-the-fuck-are-they-thinking plug-in that's supposed to integrate WordPress with their site. It was written by some idiot savant who apparently thinks that building Facebook apps is like tying your shoes, so it's no biggie to require every person who wants to use the plug-in to wade into Facebook's development tools and start making incantations. And documentation never needs to be updated, no matter how much you change the software.
Some of the features work pretty painlessly (e.g. Facebook-ID comments, Liking articles on my site), but the one I most want – to automatically post a status update each time I post a new item on the blog – works like crap. At first it would post an update, but the only one who could see it – regardless of the privacy settings – was me. Now as far as I can tell it just doesn't post on FB, at all. Part of the problem might be that my site is running really really slowly. I've talked to my host about it, and he's going to set me up on a new server, but that might be a week or so. The good news is that I'm starting to get a little traffic on it (thanks to some manual status updates), including my first the-art-sucks comment! Woohoo.
I worry about Facebook. It has become heavy on the advertising / promotion / profiling and such. I'm not sure if it's too big to fail -- like MySpace did. But with SO many options out there it makes me wonder if placing so much emphasis on Facebook is wise.
But nowadays, there is no single go-to place. It's a densely crowded environment, and to actually drive traffic one has to reflect on all sides of a cut diamond. I am failing on this. I don't have Tumblr, I don't tweet enough, I barely use LinkdIn, or whatever fill-in-the-blank pop social network.
It's even worse for people like you and I because we're not just talking about what we ate for dinner before watching some blockbuster movie. We actually have products to sell, promote and build awareness. That's a slightly different track with a different focus and a different audience.
I got the web site transferred over to a new server, where it is much faster in responding. (Try it!) As a result, the WordPress plug-in that posts status updates to Facebook ... now does. Speed wasn't a problem with the old site because that was just static HTML files. But this has a database and PHP code behind it, and that needs more horsepower. My hosting provider says the new server runs from a SSD instead of an olde hard dryve, and has more RAM, which accounts for the responsiveness.
Maybe I should get back to work on producing new content.
Comments
The original plan was a flat per-piece rate, but Zan realized that would be unfair to people who'd done longer stories (I think there's going to be a 20-pager in the book). So he suggested a per-page rate, but one of the long-story contributors objected that this approach wouldn't properly value someone who'd done a concise well-executed 1-pager. So Zan put together a formula that combines the two approaches: $X for the first page, then a smaller $Y for each page after that. (I swear: nobody does sociopoliticoeconomic correctness like a bunch of queers.
Zan's Kickstarter has reached $15,195 in donations, which means the first level of payments to the contributing creators goes into effect. Based on the page-rate formula described above, for my 7-page story I'll receive almost $60! $-) OK, not a lot of money ... but considering that I literally asked them to take a story from me, I can't complain about the rate.
Because of the dollar amount raised, I'll be getting a total of $231 for my story! Which would be so-so if it was a WFH page rate. But it's my story, I own it, and I have other plans for it ... and I was originally willing to contribute it "for exposure", so that's a pretty good payment by my standards!
The script for "Hardcore" was pretty short: it fits 5 pages of story onto 1 page. That's possible because there's no dialog. The sketchiness of the script apparently gave Drub the license to improvise ... because he did.
It was possible to draw what I asked for in 4 panels, but this splits all of the action-reaction bits into separate panels. And it works better, so I'm not complaining.
- "Hardcore" - which I just finished.
- "Assault" - a JAQrabbit Tale with strictly black-and-white subtractive art, mostly drawn, but there are quite a few panels that don't work.
- "Intruder" - the first Tale I drew, which still needs color.
- "This One Time, At Church Camp" - I have pencils from Zlatan, which I need to ink and color.
- "Vibe" - same situation, but my pencils. All of these so far already have the lettering done in Illustrator, by the way.
- "Everybody's Doin' It" - needs the gray tones converted to color for digital publication.
- "September" - I've already finished and published pages 2-3 of this, but there's a 1st page that sets them up better, which I haven't even roughed out yet.
- "Cruising" - a 14-pager that I have mostly roughed or penciled. This is going to take a month by itself.
When I get these done, I'll be almost "caught up". That is, any story that I've currently started illustrating, will be finished. But by then I intend to have at least one or two stories in the hands of other artists, so I'll be "behind" again by the time I get there.The bad news is that the unused office that I got access to a while back for working in over lunch, is going to become occupied. That has lately been my most consistently productive time. The next-best spot for me to work is literally a closet, and even there I get interrupted sometimes. So I may have to switch my regular Doing-The-Work-Out time to my lunch break, and (for the summer, at least) focus on evenings on the porch Doing The Work.
"It'll be stark and edgy... and it'll be faster than having to ink all those lines and color it!" he tells himself.
He's wrong.
Here's a status report on the overall JAQrabbit Tales project:
11 stories totally finished (59 pages)
Plus 6 stories with art started (42 pages)
Plus 53 stories fully scripted (195 pages)
And a bunch of stories with scripts started.
So you can kinda see why I want to get those art-started pieces finished. But I really need to get some of those scripted-but-no-art stories in the hands of artists (whether that's me or someone else).
Once upon a time I imagined that I'd get my productivity up high enough to get 1 new story (3-10 pages each) out the door each month, allowing me to justify a monthly-subscription approach to selling it. Or at least publishing it free and building a regular audience. (I've been sitting on those completed stories so far in order to build up an inventory to compensate for production delays.) But unless I get fired from my day job sometime soon, or I win the lottery so I can hire all the artists I need, I can't see even an almost-monthly schedule happening.
I gave Zan two versions of one page, one with a word balloon strategically covering an erect cock, the other not. He used not. :-bd Which I think makes mine the porniest story in the book, especially since most of the other comics showing nudity are more cartoony. So I'll be the one who gets someone arrested for selling this book to a 17-year-old.
I'll be getting a couple comp copies of the book, but I have the option to order more at half price. A part of me is tempted to get twenty copies and make another $300 selling them, but another part of me knows that I'll probably still have 19 of them a year from now, since I have no obvious way to do that.
Zan sent out an updated (but not quite final) digital proof, with updated and rearranged material. I'd sent him a revised version of page 1, with my credit intact, which he swapped in. And (for whatever reason) my story is now immediately before Leanne Franson's!
I'm just catching up on your activity and I have to say that you're doing an amazing amount of work. Bravo to you, bro!
At the same time, I'm giving my rabbit mascot a little bit of a makeover. His ears – overly inspired by Matt Groening's Life In Hell rabbits – looked stupid, so I redrew them to be more rabbit-like (and a little devilish), and since he's supposed to be kind of a furry stand-in for me, I gave him a more Questy hairstyle.
Some of the features work pretty painlessly (e.g. Facebook-ID comments, Liking articles on my site), but the one I most want – to automatically post a status update each time I post a new item on the blog – works like crap. At first it would post an update, but the only one who could see it – regardless of the privacy settings – was me. Now as far as I can tell it just doesn't post on FB, at all. Part of the problem might be that my site is running really really slowly. I've talked to my host about it, and he's going to set me up on a new server, but that might be a week or so. The good news is that I'm starting to get a little traffic on it (thanks to some manual status updates), including my first the-art-sucks comment! Woohoo.
Maybe I should get back to work on producing new content.