WATCH: ”How To Crowdfund Your Indie Comic Book Project” panel at GalaxyCon Richmond ’24

For GalaxyCon Richmond 2024, we were so happy to host a panel of experts to talk about how to run a campaign to crowdfund for an indie comic book project. The indie creators featured in this talk are Charlie McElvy (known for “Milestone: GodQuest,” “Spider-Squirrel” and more), Anthony Stokes (known for “Tap or Die,” “Decay” and more), and Pat Shand, who runs the publishing company “Space Between Entertainment.”

Presented here is the entire conversation — including audience questions. “How To Crowdfund Your Indie Comic Book Project” was well-attended and was a lot of fun.

The following is the transcript of the introduction and first portion of the Q&A session with our panelists:

ERIC PESOLA of INDIE COMICS ZONE:
Just wanted to welcome everyone to our panel. How to crowdfund your indie comic book project. And my name is Eric Pesola. I just want to plug my website real quick. It’s called Indie Comics Zone. It is a free website, so if you have an indie comic book, you can publish a free listing, and I add you to my social media promotion list.

I do interviews, I have to do stuff, articles on there. And I’ve got almost 500 independent comic book projects listed on there. And it’s all about trying to support people who are making their own thing and being creators. Here’s my website, and I’m on all the socials. I’d like to introduce our panel today, Mr. Charlie McElvy, and he’s at a table I-8 and you might know him from spider squirrel and a bunch of other really cool projects. Mr. Anthony Stokes. He’s known for “Tap Or Die, “Intrusive Thoughts,” and “It’s Fun to Kill People.” He’s getting ready to crowd, ask for your assistance, and supported that.

And then we have the godfather, Pat Shand. This is a picture of Mr. Pat Shand down at his booth. The gentleman to his left is his bodyguard — do not touch Pat’s gold chain or the bodyguard will just destroy you immediately. He’s the creator and boss of Team Space Between and he is responsible for over $1 million in crowdfunding success, so he knows his stuff.

So 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
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, that’s Kickstarter, 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.