Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Help Launch an all new prose mini-book + bring back a classic!
Kick off a series of personal online workshops for anyone seeking to better understand the business of making comics + break into the industry
Find a likeminded community of others with the same goals.
Noticing a void in the publishing space for a book that covered the business tasks required to make your own comics, Josh Blaylock launched How to Self-Publish Comics: Not Just Create Them in 2006. First released as a series of booklets, it was later collected into a prose nonfiction book, and later updated three more times, most recently in 2021. In 2018 it became required reading at SCAD University, a renowned school for aspiring comic book talent. While a humble circulation of the book exists in the many thousands, it is a “best kept secret” of this cottage industry.
The book has received praise from hundreds of industry professionals, with many crediting it as helping them get their start. It has even received forewords from acclaimed Top Cow president and author Matt Hawkins, and famous cartoonist Art Baltazar.
Now, for the first time in nearly two decades, Blaylock has taken to writing a completely new booklet, once again returning to the original format, to address the concerns of the times.
Have you felt this way as a newbie trying to enter the industry, or even as a veteran struggling to keep up with the changes happening all around you?
This book may be the key to helping you decide where to focus. As an industry veteran of over 25 years, author Josh Blaylock took this project on to truly explore all of these changes and new challenges (and opportunities) now facing us.
Topics covered include:
- The Myth of “Breaking In”
- All the GOOD things – the Medium is booming
- Self-Publishing – A Magic Key
- The Long Game – Passive Income
- So Many Options. Maybe TOO many?
- A Path Forward – real life scenarios
- Handy tips and templates
This is not a a book about the creative process of making comics.
This is a book about how to think about things before you create. It’s about strategies, industry dynamics and psychology that persist among successful comic book professionals. There are incredible resources out there to help you make perfect your comic book craft, from classics like How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, to Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, to a billion youtube tutorials. There’s also an incredible looking series coming from Ryan Benjamin & co. called Comic Book Bootcamp. The author is as much of a student of these as anyone, so if that’s what you’re looking for, this is not for you. What we’re offering here though is arguably much more rare. Mostly because there are probably only a half dozen people or so, if that, with the mix of qualifications and perspective Josh Blaylock has in this space.
As of January 2nd, this project has raised $1,500 of their $999 goal. This project has 11 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $7, you will get one physical booklet. For a pledge of $15, you will get two digital books. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshcblaylock/breaking-into-comics-no-more-rules?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
