Wednesday Crowdfunding: Help Fantagraphics!

 

Today we’re sharing a slightly different kind of Kickstarter. To be honest, it’s one of the best-written, most compelling campaigns we’ve seen in awhile.

Comics fans will know that the indie comics publisher Fantagraphics had a rough time this year. One of the company’s founders Kim Thompson passed away from lung cancer earlier this year. Thompson had been editing 13 of the European books scheduled for release  in spring/summer 2014. Unfortunately these releases have now been postponed, leaving a gap of much-needed revenue for the company. So they’ve turned to crowdfunding, asking longtime readers and new fans alike to consider donating some coin to help the company raise $150,000 to publish these titles.

The perks are amazing, obviously – lots of signed advance copies from the likes of Joe Sacco, Jaime Hernandez, and others – and for $30, a few lucky souls will receive a Skype conversation and portfolio review with associate editor Eric Reynolds (all gone, alas!)

The aspect of this campaign that spoke most to us, however, was the writing. The post maintains the acerbic Fantagraphics tone but it’s also genuinely heartfelt and honest without sounding overly needy or self-pitying. In fact, the company seems to have drawn a renewed sense of strength and conviction in its values during these hard times.  Their tagline for this campaign on their website sums it up:

We don’t want to sell out, so we need you to buy in.

To us this truly represents the essence of crowdfunding. This is a way for hardworking independent folk to quickly (and ethically) attain funding and maintain their autonomy in the bargain.

Below is one of the most concise and articulate arguments for crowdfunding that I’ve ever read. It’s long, but you should read the whole thing. Then you should go to the Fantagraphics Kickstarter campaign and give them some money to ensure this ethos – and their amazing work – survives. Fantagraphics are doing this thing right. They deserve your attention, your support and your donations.

 

We are not going to bullshit you. If we were a big corporate publisher (or perhaps an avaricious smaller one), we’d have plenty of money to weather this temporary crisis. But, we’re not. Ours is and always has been an intrinsically difficult commercial enterprise, and we have survived due to a combination of good taste, sheer will, good luck, and reasonable business acumen. Still, it has never been easy. Fantagraphics has always been a guerilla publisher — lean and mean. In order to do what we do, we’ve always kept our overhead low and our lifestyle modest. No fancy offices, no limousines, no frills. We publish 100 books a year with a staff of 20 — a level of efficiency unheard of in corporate publishing. We work hard! We would never be mistaken for a bottom-line oriented, bean-counting commercial publisher with their blockbuster mentality, bloated budgets, and eagerness to pander to the lowest common denominator of consumers. We pride ourselves on taking risks, publishing work based on merit, and a commitment to serious artistic standards.

And we take pride in our professionalism; we are a publisher with a highly skilled, dedicated, and passionate staff, who shares our values and the values of our authors, believes deeply in what they do, and who edits, designs, and markets our author’s books with great love and care. We have created an infrastructure that is specifically tailored to sell the kinds of books we publish — great works of comics, art, and literature. But, this infrastructure costs money and it’s not always commensurate with the fluctuations of income from selling books.  Our fixed costs stay the same throughout the year: rent, payroll, health care premiums (over $1 million paid over the last 15 years!), utilities, etc.  But, the postponement or cancellation of so many books in a single season causes a precipitous drop in income.

We have always managed to weather the lean times. Sometimes wealthy patrons have loaned us money and on one or two occasions we have campaigned directly to you, our readers, pre-Kickstarter, and asked you to buy books when we were on the edge. We have throughout our history flirted with the idea of looking for an investor, but rejected it on principle: unless someone invested in us in the spirit of being a patron of the arts —highly unlikely— that way leads not only to madness but to the slow erosion of the core principles the company was founded on. (Does everyone remember what happened to Kitchen Sink Press when investors got their claws into them?).

We’ve has never existed comfortably within the traditional capitalist model— ruthlessly competitive, obsessed with growth and the endless accumulation of surplus money.  Our artistic values have always tempered our profitability. Fantagraphics has always managed to scrape by, but we realized that with the advent of crowd sourcing, we are in a position to make an end-run around the most brutish strictures of the marketplace and appeal directly to our readers. We now live in a world where artists as diverse as Spike Lee and Amanda Palmer can ask their fans to help finance their art and, in that same spirit, we are asking you to help us continue this quixotic enterprise.