Doug TenNapel's Blog, page 7

Doug TenNapel – Spider Boy

This is a commission of my favorite web-slinger. I don’t usually draw other people’s characters, but in this case, I’d been working on a Spiderman story just to see what I would do with that great American icon. Here’s Spider Boy:

(Click here for bigger image: http://tennapel.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/spidemantennapel.jpg )

The name Spider Boy is my first change, because to me Peter Parker was always about being a high school kid. He’s a boy, and the idea that he’d be this huge, ripped, adult-looking man betrays the innocence and clumsiness of being an awkward teen.

In my story, the world is rooted more in fairy tale than Marvel’s usual Materialist “believable” universe. So magic is real, and is the primary explanation for how things work in contradistinction to science being the reason. Dr. Octavius is a tomb raider who comes across 13 animal idols, each representing an ancient, pagan, evil spirit. He hired Peter Parker as an assistant over the summer, mostly because he’s a great (and cheap) photographer who would document the expedition in the heart of the Congo.

PP accidentally handles a tiny spider idol and a curse falls on him… Curse of the Spider Boy! When he holds the idol he is transformed into the above image. He turns bright red and blue, his lips are black his eyes, glowing orbs. Little spider spirits cling to his fingers and arms and spray webs according to his thoughts that allow him to soar around New York’s skyline. He can climb walls, and spiders around the world obey his wishes.

Every hero needs a great villain and Spidey has 12 of them! Dr. Octavious handles an octopus idol… and brings home the other animal idols that include a rhino, a vulture, a beetle, chameleon, hammerhead shark, jackal, lizard, wolf, puma, scorpion etc. Soon Dr. Octopus and his gang of evil animal-men want the 13th idol which is held by the Spider Boy!

Marvel, I’m here to help.

Kickstarter 3 – Getting Backers for the TenNapel Sketchbook Archives

 

I got this question from a pal on Twitter about my Kickstarter campaign:

 But may I ask how you were able to get so many backers? It’s incredible! How did you promote, advertise and spread the word about your project? What’s the trick? I would really like to know how this works.

Any help would be hot. :)

I didn’t go into Kickstarter knowing anything about the process. I was in contact with a few friends who had successful kickstarter campaigns: Kazu Kibuishi, Jake Parker and Jason Brubaker. They didn’t make it sound easy, but they made it sound possible. That was all I needed. At the time that I launched my own campaign, I looked up every project that launched within my category of book making and comics and I looked at what failed and what succeeded. The problem is that most of the things that succeeded weren’t necessarily the kind of project I was thinking of, while the projects that fail are from every type and style of book imaginable.

There’s one great thing about Kickstarter, which is that it doesn’t cost anything to fail. There aren’t a lot of things in life that are like that, so all I had was my pride at stake to get kicked if it didn’t work, and my pride has a lot of scar tissue on it by now, so why not?

My backers aren’t entirely from my list of Kickstarter friends (4,000) or from Twitter (5500), but that gave me a good head start. About 500 of my donors came from those lists. One thing I didn’t anticipate was that I would gain about 1,000 followers on Twitter from having run my Kickstarter campaign! It was the new people that spread the word to their own networks that I didn’t have access to. They did it, not me.

The project itself is what ends up driving the donors, because people don’t buy things from me they don’t want. I could just as easily have made a different project and the exact same bidders would have said, “We don’t want this.” I’ve thought of doing a board game, a card game, a video game and an animated short, and it didn’t seem like the right timing, the Sketchbook seemed like the best idea… and my audience confirmed my hunch.

The launch of the project is when it’s at its greatest risk of failing, because after one day I might have only had 50-100 or so donors. You have to get those donors to be proud enough of the project to think their friends would also want to buy into the project. That’s why Kickstarter is just like any other free market idea… people don’t spend their money on well wishes and good intent. They really do want to be excited about something and they can’t fake their interest in something they don’t want or need.

I’d like to pause for a second and offer a consolation for projects that don’t work out. Don’t be discouraged. I have a ton of projects and ideas that I try to launch that fail or fizzle out. I’ve read enough about all of our great inventors and idea men that their past is littered with more failures than successes. The one attribute that separates successful people from failures isn’t creativity, but perseverance. Are you the kind of person to try something even after failing in a big way? 

Let me get back to answering your question. I don’t consider 1,725 people that many donors. Other guys like Jake Parker and the Creature Box guys had many MORE donors than I did and they didn’t even have the notoriety or fame of making Earthworm Jim and Neverhood in their corner. That’s how you know it’s the actual project that people want… it’s not based on the fame or marketing, it’s the thing itself that gets the donations. There are lots of great people making projects and I just don’t really want the project. Guess what? They still can’t get me to donate. It’s the project, it’s the project, it’s the project. Ask yourself if you didn’t know you, what would you buy from you?

While you can advertise your campaign, you don’t have to because Kickstarter already is a marketplace. Hot projects float to the top because even Kickstarter gets a cut of projects so that if they want to remain profitable, they want popular projects to rise up. They don’t want you to fail. If a project fails, it fails for very good reasons.

So the trick ends up being what all of us in mass media stay up at night thinking about… what do I want to make that enough people want? I’m still baffled by this and I’m the author of 14 books that haven’t lost money. My most popular projects aren’t necessarily what I would bet money would have been popular and some of my favorite “sure fire” projects were my biggest market failures.

Like everything in mass media, Kickstarter doesn’t lie. Give your best project your best shot and let the audience of donors educate you about your tastes. That’s what I did, and I was completely surprised (and humbled) by the response I got.

TenNapel Sketchbook Archives: Kickstarter Communication

This is the second post on Kickstarter advice based on what I’m learning from my own campaign. The previous post was on setting a reasonable goal amount: http://tennapel.wordpress.com/2013/02...

As I ran my campaign, I made sure to regularly communicate with all of my donors through frequent updates and by responding to as many personal emails as reasonable. They don’t tell you about this part on the Kickstarter site, but maintaining communication, especially during the actual fundraising portion of the campaign, is important to build trust with donors.

Most of the donors don’t know that I’m a trustworthy person, so without going through my fiscal background, they trust me with a donation of real money. They make the first act of trust, and in my case, they were saying they would trust me with their funds for six months before they would get their rewards. The least I could do is keep them up to date on the project, even though I don’t really have time to produce constant contact.

The updates allow me to communicate with all 1,725 donors, and I can show them my due diligence by inviting them in to the process of both running the Kickstarter campaign as well as the construction of the project, in my case, a book. So I showed them images we were scanning, even showing them mistakes that we needed to fix. I got an outpouring of personal thank you’s from the donors and I was surprised to found out that other campaigns didn’t regularly communicate with their donors.

This advice comes with two warnings. 1. Some donors will send too many emails! I had to gently remind them that I couldn’t respond to every piece of communication, but I try to take care of big questions and big problems that multiple donors are asking about. 2. Don’t give too many updates! Every update sends a Kickstarter reminder to every donor and they can feel like the communication is too frequent and bothersome. If I didn’t talk to the donors for a few weeks I thought to myself, “If I donated to a campaign, I’d want to know if the guy was still alive at this point.” Usually there was some point of progress I could put together and send it out to the donors.

Earthworm Jim Commission

Earthworm Jim Commission

I did this live at the San Diego Comicon. Earthworm Jim is always fun to blast out!

Kickstarter – setting the goal

For years I’ve had friends give Kickstarter projects a try and I was always very skeptical… until my little Kickstarter project drew in over $100k in donations!

See original project over here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1812253609/doug-tennapel-sketchbook-archives

Since that project initially launched, I’ve been doing a lot of research on other Kickstarter projects, and there’s one piece of advice I can give that’s actually pretty self-evident. Don’t ask for too much money at the start.

In general, when setting the amount of money you want to get from Kickstarter, don’t ask for the amount of money you need, ask for the amount of money you wouldn’t walk away from.

I’ll use my own project as an example. I wanted to print a hard bound sketchbook and figured it would cost me around $40,000 to make the book… but I didn’t think I would get that amount, as donors would be discouraged after a week if it didn’t get over $18,000. The question is, if I could only raise $18k of that $40,000 I needed, would I not make the book? No! I was going to make the book no matter what, so $18k would be really helpful. If I got less than $18k, however, my losses would be so great that I would probably need to walk away from the project. I was willing to lose about $22k of my own money if the book got made, so that’s how I came up with the bottom line amount to ask for on Kickstarter.

There is a misconception about Kickstarter that it’s somehow supposed to pay for every single aspect of a project, and if you raise enough, then good for you. But most people are going to make a project anyways, so putting the burden on Kickstarter donors to pay for the whole taco might be asking too much.

Kickstarter

For years I’ve had friends give Kickstarter projects a try and I was always very skeptical… until my little Kickstarter project drew in over $100k in donations!

See original project over here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1812253609/doug-tennapel-sketchbook-archives

Since that project initially launched, I’ve been doing a lot of research on other Kickstarter projects, and there’s one piece of advice I can give that’s actually pretty self-evident. Don’t ask for too much money at the start.

In general, when setting the amount of money you want to get from Kickstarter, don’t ask for the amount of money you need, ask for the amount of money you wouldn’t walk away from.

I’ll use my own project as an example. I wanted to print a hard bound sketchbook and figured it would cost me around $40,000 to make the book… but I didn’t think I would get that amount, as donors would be discouraged after a week if it didn’t get over $18,000. The question is, if I could only raise $18k of that $40,000 I needed, would I not make the book? No! I was going to make the book no matter what, so $18k would be really helpful. If I got less than $18k, however, my losses would be so great that I would probably need to walk away from the project. I was willing to lose about $22k of my own money if the book got made, so that’s how I came up with the bottom line amount to ask for on Kickstarter.

There is a misconception about Kickstarter that it’s somehow supposed to pay for every single aspect of a project, and if you raise enough, then good for you. But most people are going to make a project anyways, so putting the burden on Kickstarter donors to pay for the whole taco might be asking too much.

Doug TenNapel Neverhood Commissions

These were made for Kickstarter, before pencils are erased and ink wash applied.

Ghostopolis, Creature Tech Commissions

Inks (before adding a wash) of The Bone King from Ghostopolis and Dr. Ong from Creature Tech.

Doug TenNapel Cardboard, EWJ, etc.

There’s Noah the T Rex from Project GeeKeR, Earthboy Jacobus, Bill from Cardboard and Princess What’s her Name for Kickstarter commissions.

Doug TenNapel Commission – Black Cherry

This is a quick ink of Eddie Paretti before erasing the pencils and doing an ink wash.