WATCH: ”Advice for creators starting their crowdfunding journey” from our panel at GalaxyCon Richmond ’24

As a part of GalaxyCon Richmond 2024, we hosted a panel featuring three indie comic book creators — Charlie McElvy (known for “Milestone: GodQuest,” “Spider-Squirrel” and more), Anthony Stokes (known for “Tap or Die,” “Decay” and more), and Pat Shand, the force behind the publishing company “Space Between Entertainment.”

Our panel was all about crowdfunding, and we asked the creators a few different questions (here is the complete conversation, including questions from the audience). But, after some requests, we went ahead and broke up the panel into short snippets, so you don’t have to watch the whole thing if you don’t want to.

Presented here is the portion of the panel when we asked “What is your advice for creators who are starting their crowdfunding journey?”

The following is the transcript of session:

INDIE COMICS ZONE:
I wanted to start out just a generic question for anyone. What is your advice for creators that are starting out in the crowdfunding world?

CHARLIE McELVY
Don’t stop. Oh, yeah. I’ll kick it off, though. Yeah, seriously, don’t stop. Like I think we talked about this a little bit last year for those who were here last year. But we were in an unprecedented time for comics, like indie comics is absolutely available to every creator out there now, right? We’ve got crowdfunding tools, we’ve got all these other sourcing vehicles. We got folks like Eric who really are promoting us all left and right, more and more cropping up. It’s your time, right?

Find your find your team. If you need a team, if you’re a cartoonist, and you’re fortunate enough to be a cartoonist or mangaka, and do your own thing, do your own thing. But there’s an audience out there for you. You know, find your audience, build your audience, promote your book, get yourself out there. And then as your book launches, you’ll you’ll be ready to go for success. I mean, there’s a lot of tools out there for you to be successful. So now’s not the time to stop, now’s the time to start.

ANTHONY STOKES
Also, I think I’m gonna like double down on what Charlie said. I mean, you got to think you just want to get a foothold. There’s so much expansion and so much movement. I think getting in early and establishing that footing is super important, you know, don’t have to have it be perfect. You know, just, you know, just get started, you know,

PAT SHAND
I’ll say this. Imagine if whatever skill you want to sharpen, the roadmap is there permanently three to watch … Kickstarter campaigns don’t go away. They don’t change over time. Once you build one and fund it, it’s locked in. It’s all there. The rewards that you see on campaigns from 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, it’s all visible, you can go to these old campaigns, see what sold see what worked over time, and just apply it to what works for you, you know, the, all of the things that you need to know about Kickstarter about all these Indiegogo, probably not Zoop all these different platforms.

They’re all they’re all still there. The roadmap is open for you to study any questions that you have. beyond the basics. Cool there’s experts to learn from but the basics see how people actually did it. It’s all there all my campaigns since 2016. Every single reward I’ve sold is visible to you now to see what sold well and what didn’t to template, right.