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- KC Newsletter! July 2025
KC Newsletter! July 2025
Milestones and housekeeping!!
This issue: Supporter credit/address check-in, postcard stuff, revisiting KC’s goals, not necessarily In That Order
This month’s finances and what all got done!
We got three pages in July; comic work was a little stunted by my final readthrough of the draft, which took significantly longer than I expected it to BUT. It is now in the hands of the editors, and I’m back to just focusing on the comic for a while!
By the way, I know the archive and a few things on the website need updating, I promise they’re on my to-do list and I’m gonna try and get to it this month.
My income is sitting RIGHT at 901 dollars a month, which means! We hit KC’s very first funding milestone!! Twelve years in I am officially making rent money with monthly comic support, hell YEA. I wanna talk about all this stuff more in-depth and there’s a lot to cover today, so let’s get to it!!
Postcards!
They’ve mostly been delivered I think! Seeing as the novel is coming out real soon, I thought it would be fun to revisit Last Chance.
I don’t usually do this, but folks really seemed to be into those bookmarks, so I listed some of the leftovers in the shop. Doing this ALSO alerted me to the fact that I had never actually put the Volume 4 bookmarks in the appropriate listing, so there are actually two designs you can pick up now if you like.
 Bookmarks! |  For books! |
Hey a year later let’s reconvene about finances
First of all, holy shit thank y’all so much for all your continued support. I know these are wildly uncertain times and I don’t take it lightly that anybody still chooses to support an operation like mine. I try hard to be self-aware about what exactly it is I’m doing, and even though I feel very very strongly about the importance of making subversive stories while the powers that be are hellbent on making sure people like me don’t get the chance to do that, I also know art is often the first thing to go when things are tough. A lot of us are struggling to put on our own oxygen masks already and don’t have the resources to access art, which is one of the reasons I’m so adamant about keeping the comic Free Forever. But I’m only able to do that because those of you who are able to DO make the effort to help keep KC afloat, so thank y’all very much for sticking around and helping me to not only keep making art but also share it so freely, on its own site while it’s rapidly being legislated out of every other storefront.
With all that in mind, and being optimistic about the future where I get to keep doing this and you get to keep reading it, here’s what I’d like to accomplish.
$900 a month keeps me in my housing, but unless we have a convention or I have a really good period in the shop, the rest is pretty dodgy most months. $1500 would cover rent, utilities, and other monthly bills (including various hosting costs), and leave a little bit for groceries and such. I do want to be clear: unlike last year’s panicked sprint to keep me and mine in our little trailer, there’s no real time limit on this goal yet, assuming our con appearances keep going well and I’m able to keep making books. But if I can get stable stable, we can start cutting in to the good stuff.
The real pipe dream here is 3,000 USD a month, which would enable me to start paying for art assistants to get this thing made faster. Seeing as the novels have now been moved up to equal priority with the comic, I’d also be using this to pay my editor a better wage for their services, although that expense wouldn’t be as constant as the page work. I broke down the estimate for page rates and stuff in the original funding goal post, and that’s still mostly accurate! But realistically, we’ll almost certainly have to revisit the actual numbers if/when we get far enough for me to consider hiring anyone, so let’s worry about that bridge when we can see it in the distance.
I’ve been pretty candid about the fact that arc 5 is looking like the last comic arc I’ll be able to reliably finish if I’m still doing everything myself, and nothing has really changed there, besides the additional concern that the internet model itself might not still be viable by then I suppose. This is not meant to be a threat, or even an indication of burnout! I am still healthy and able as far as I’m aware, and we’ve got several years at LEAST until we’re staring down this particular exit ramp. KC is simply a very long comic, and if it’s going to end prematurely I don’t want to leave it hanging in the middle of an arc or change the format or anything like that; we will go out on our own terms. But my drive to get this thing made is still very much here, and if all else fails, the story WILL continue in the novels as long as I have any say in it.
Anyway, I’m very aware this amount is batshit. Barely crossing the basic rent mark after over a decade does not indicate that this community has that kind of growth lmao. But hey! Nothing ventured nothing gained. Maybe the novels will pick up enough steam to get some new eyes on the series and the support will appear over the next two arcs. Frankly we’re already much much further than I thought we’d ever get, so there’s no harm in laying out the goal at least. The time will pass anyway, and I will still be here plugging away at the project regardless.
Advance Readers
Still lookin’ for them! I think we’re going to get a late October publishing date, with the advance reader copies going out early that month. Three weeks out from the publishing date I will email you an ARC epub so you have time to read it, then come back to amazon (or possibly Goodreads, still not sure which is more helpful tbh) and leave an honest review to help the book’s standing in the algorithm. Just send me an email (you can reply to this newsletter even) and let me know if you’d like to be on the list! Even if you can’t commit to that sort of thing, there’s a tumblr post here you can boost if you’d still like to help out! I’ve also updated the novel samples on the shinesurge site with what I sent to the editors, if you wanna read ‘em.
A reminder for the concerned: you will be able to get a copy of this book through my shop just like the comics! But I’m trying to play the game a little bit more than usual here so I’m putting it up everywhere I can, and unfortunately Amazon is consistently the first platform people ask for.
This is the exact same Book Club segment from the last letter but it’s somewhat time sensitive so make sure you’re Aware Of It
With a new book coming out in the next few months now is the time to get on the book club list if that’s something you want to be part of. Ten dollars a month gets you your own physical and digital copy of anything I publish while you’re pledging, but since that shit gets expensive and I can’t afford for folks to abuse the system, I generally require a couple of payments to go through before I start sending these sorts of mail rewards. That means about now is when you’d want to get your support set up! You can find details about all the different tiers on my ko-fi page, but I do also take recurring donations through paypal if that’s something you’d prefer to do (there is also, technically, Patreon, but for both our sakes I would highly encourage one of the other options.) If you choose to go the paypal route and want to participate in rewards, make sure you email me your mailing address!
Speaking of mailing addresses: If you aren’t getting your postcards, your address has probably been marked as Not Functional on my side, and that means you won’t get any books either! If you’re worried, send me an email and I can confirm what address I have for you or update your info. If you’re cool with this arrangement, no action is required.
Less Urgent since we went through this not too long ago and most of y’all were here for it, make sure your screenname wherever you’re pledging matches what you want your book credit to be! I don’t use anyone’s payment information for their names. If you’d like your credit to be something completely different from any of your forward facing info, or you need to change it from what it was last time in volume 4, send me an email! You can also opt out of having a credit entirely, of course.
State of the Artist
I’m gonna be honest I crashed hard after I sent out the editor copies, but I’ve been ironing out the finale chapter of GTS and it perked me right back up hehe. I love getting to work on this big crazy thing, thank y’all again for letting me do it.
There’s a convention coming up this month! I even did the poster for it!
They really wanted the senior center venue in there lmao
Come see me at Fort Collins Comic Con if you’re around, I will have various trinkets and objects for your perusal AND ALSO I am tabling next to my friend(s) Chunderfins! Lee will be there with their full stock of plushes! We’re all gonna have a good time!
Or else!!
-Aria