- Kidd Commander Supporter Newsletter
- Posts
- KC Newsletter! August 2024
KC Newsletter! August 2024
Let's Review!
This issue: we talk about money for a loooong time, Volume 4 cover, Weird Stickers!
This month’s finances and what all got done!
This month we got in 5 pages, a convention, and a little over ten thousand words of prose, all of which I’m very excited about! But I’ve been getting a lot of questions about some financial stuff so I’m going to take most of this letter to recap the whole thing, which has improved pretty dramatically over August. This is gonna be long and full of numbers; feel free to cut to the next heading if you’d like.
First, it’s been a minute and folks seem to be getting a little murky on what the actual goals look like, so let’s go over those again real quick.
The little Phin Meter on the main site is set to 900. If I can make 900 dollars a month, that will cover my rent and probably reliably keep this thing in business. My rent usually comes out to about 830, so 900 overall ought to comfortably cover that even after various platform fees and such. JUST covering rent is obviously not the most stable paycheck, but with Lee and I both making convention money and shop sales we’re usually able to make up the rest most months. If nothing outside the house changes too drastically, this would be enough I could justify continuing to work on KC full time; if we can keep our dang trailer we can figure out the rest lmao.
1550 would cover rent, utilities, insurance, and still leave some money for groceries. Again assuming we maintain our current cost of living, with that number there's no reason I couldn't keep at this indefinitely. If rent is covered the rest of these expenses are squishier, so while I’d obviously still like to make it eventually this goal is much much less dire and time sensitive.
Anything beyond this money is gonna start going towards the real lofty goal: I'd like to hire an art assistant so we can crank out KC pages faster or, really, help me keep making this thing beyond arc 5, which is when I’m estimating my body is going to refuse to make more comics at the rate things have been going. They'd mostly be helping with flats and background inks, and I'd like to pay them at least 100 dollars a page. This goal is very loose, I've never even been able to consider this option before so I'd revisit the finer details once we got closer to it, but if we assume that's 300 dollars a week (I’d like to get back to 3 pages a week if I could get the help) the next goal would be 1200 on top of the 1550, so around 2800 a month. Probably closer to 3000 if we account for platform fees or whatever other weirdness comes with working with additional people.
Until we hit Assistant Money, making more than basic housing money per month would also help pay for things like website hosting, which costs a few hundred dollars a year. If I could pay my assistant for the extra pages then the eventual ideal is nudging production speed up to five pages a week. This is like pipe dream stuff, we'll hash all this out more thoroughly if we can manage the first two numbers first haha
With me? Okay: In July we were pulling in $565 a month. Here at the end of August, I’m sitting at $794. I’m still sort of coming to terms with that kind of growth honestly, I don’t even know what to say about it that doesn’t sound like Kickstarter Falsetto. But thank you so much, good god, I cannot overstate how much weight this has taken off me the last few weeks.
Part of this ridiculous growth came from a few people upping their pledges significantly, and more than one person has reached out to me about money with variations on the question “if the goal isn’t met in time, should I send you enough money to make up the difference”, followed up with “is that a weird thing to do”. I’m assuming people are getting antsy because we’re reaching the end of the year and haven’t made our goal yet. Me too! This is a complicated question! I think I answered it pretty well in one of my email responses, so I’m going to paraphrase that here.
My thoughts about people sending me what I consider to be serious amounts of money every month mostly boil down to not only do I not really have the luxury of being able to turn down any help that comes my way, but I also ought to LET folks make the decision to help out without interfering. Y'all are adults, and I try very hard not to twist anyone's arm! If you wanna give a dollar or a hundred dollars that's your decision, and other than making a fool of myself communicating how extremely grateful I am for whatever I get it's part of my job to let y'all let me do my job and leave you alone about it otherwise.
As far as the questions about whether this sort of thing might make me uncomfortable, I HAVE had folks try and use financial support to be weird at me in the past! Those people are essentially throwing their money in the trash, because I'm of the opinion they're breaking the Social Contract first by trying to purchase a stranger on the internet, so I'm usually happy to block them and not look back as soon as they come to collect. If you’re supporting for genuine reasons, in whatever amount you can, we’re almost certainly cool. But thank you very much for considering my feelings! Y’all know by now I’m pretty catastrophically mentally ill, but that does come with the benefit of me being particularly aggressive about my boundaries. I will also pass up a paycheck in exchange for peace of mind to the point of self destruction every time lmao. What I mean is: if you’re freaking me out, you’ll know about it.
ALL OF THAT SAID please don't feel like you singlehandedly have to save my comic. Don't put yourself out giving more than you're able to! It's supposed to be a team effort here, and in any case technically it’s a lot less stable to put so much weight onto a single Load Bearing Donor. Things have been inching forward pretty steadily, I'm starting to think we miiight actually make it by December if we keep up all this momentum, so definitely don't feel like You Personally have to make a huge decision about this literally right now. Or ever tbh. You never have to answer to me about any of this; I also consider it part of my job to let y’all get into or out of this supporter-creator relationship without me breathing down your neck about it.
This segues well into my Patreon situation: enough people have come out of the woodwork to share their thoughts about it that I’ve decided to leave it open. BUT I am going to stop promoting it, and the page itself is going to get updated with information about the platform’s worrying business decisions and encouragement to donate elsewhere if possible. I am still fairly certain that site is going to become unusable for people like me sooner rather than later, but it’s no real skin off my nose to keep it open for the folks who want it. Thank y’all very much for taking the time to share your thoughts with me! I am still furious, but I like y’all more than I hate Patreon, so that’s where we’re at for now.
HOKAY that’s enough money talk for today. Here’s the news!
Book stuff!
This went up on tumblr a while ago, but here’s the full illustration and the cover for Volume 4 in case you missed it!
This is poster sized! Sorry Toulouse’s first pinup is A Bad Time lmao
wowie!!
I’m hype!! Still plowing through formatting all these dang comic pages but the work is ticking along next to everything else.
I’m gonna try and get a draft of the credits page sent out this month! One more time: I am going to default to using your screenname, because half of us are queer or internet recluses and names are Fraught. If you are giving me money your name is going in the book unless you tell me not to do that. If you don’t see your name on the credits page draft when it gets posted, or it’s The Wrong One, please get in touch with me about it as soon as you can! I want everyone to be happy with this!
I am also going to remind everybody to make sure your mailing address for physical rewards is up to date while you’re going over name stuff. I strongly suggest you do this before October for reasons.
One more time:
Make sure your mailing address is correct before October.
Shop news!
I only have a few Volume 1’s left right now, but everything I have is in the shop until Anime 307 next week. A few of the stickerbooks are up too if you missed out on the preorders!
I also added some of these stickers:
A cool thing that's been happening for a while is people will buy stickers from my shop sort of in bulk with the intention of sticking them around their town to help promote the comic. I am, delighted that people want to do that in any capacity, but I feel bad that they're paying full price for it and ALSO that none of my stickers are really like, efficient for promotional purposes? So I wanted to make it a little easier. I LOVE seeing weird ephemera in public spaces with no context so I thought that might be a fun flavor for this hehe
I'm gonna start including these as The Bonus Sticker for shop orders I think, but you can also get some on their own if you want! I DID design these to be greyscale printer friendly and easy to cut out, so feel free to make your own stickers or flyers or whatever you want as long as you don't alter it or make any money from it! If you do end up using these let me know, I'd love to see where they land lmao
Really, I am honestly touched that people even think to do this sort of thing. Thank y'all so much for wanting to help out <3
Novel stuff!
There’s a lot of novel stuff going on right now actually but I can’t share any of it yet, please stand by.
(I did not get picked up lol, it’s Something Else)
State of the Artist
I keep thinking about adding a subsection that’s literally just “how healthy is Aria this month” since that pretty directly dictates how much work I can do. I’m back at the gym regularly for the first time since I had to quit to clean out my dad’s house and I’m starting to feel Sturdy again! But I’ve got more dental stuff coming up next month and I gotta go get my yearly cancer screenings done too, and probably a physical AND get my eyes checked, so we’ll see how long the stability lasts lmfao. My suggestion this month is to eat lots of protein! You’re probably not getting enough!
Thank y’all!
-Aria