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- KC Newsletter! May 2025
KC Newsletter! May 2025
beautiful and fast
This issue: Postcards, call for advance readers, Another Cover!
This month’s finances and what all got done!
another one of those months where it feels like i haven’t stood still. I got three pages up I think, but we’re hitting the point with The Next Book that its gravity has reached critical mass and it’s basically all I’m thinking about all the time, so I am working constantly even if it seems quiet from the outside.
I’m pretty sure my income is still at 870, but I’m about to go in and organize my supporter list and that MIGHT involve cleaning out some folks who slipped out the back door on Patreon without Patreon telling me about it. But let’s be optimistic! Let’s say it’s staying steady.
On a slightly less exciting note: some internet social things got Weird for a minute there and came to a head earlier this month, and after ten-ish years of mostly good experiences I finally had to close my DMs and friend requests on Discord. Sorry about that. From now on, if you really need to get at me about supporter stuff, please send an email, and please keep in mind that I’m a fellow human being with my own range of human feelings!
Anyway, news!
Shop stuff!
There’s a new Ulrich poster in the shop to go with the Agatha I added not too long ago! That’s all I got for now.
Postcards!
It’s time for postcards again! I’m locking everybody in on June 5th, so if you haven’t got your pledge set up and you want to get anime mail from me please make sure you get it done! I have to order physical materials for these, so I can’t accommodate you if you show up two weeks late; please make sure you’re where you want to be! Ko-Fi is the best place to browse the membership tiers these days, but as always, the support page on the main site has all the different payment methods you can choose from and all the other postcard sets for you to browse.
Please make sure your mailing address works!! If you haven’t been getting cards when you should, it’s because your mail is bouncing back to me and you haven’t responded to requests for updated information! I’m sorry! You still have until the end of June to get back to me and fix the issue if you have to, even if it’s been a while.
By the way: Now is the time to get in the book club if you want to get a physical copy of the novel when it comes out or get your name on the book club list page in the next book. The five dollar folks will be getting an epub too! I’m, going to have to reconfigure this system going forward so people who ONLY want comics or novels don’t get inundated with things you don’t want, but I wanna get through this first novel release without further complicating it. More on the logistics of all that next time probably.
okay the rest is novel news, so much is happening good lord
I am feeling overwhelmed lately! But it’s all exciting stuff. I have a big to-do list with sub lists and here is the sub list for the novel release this summer, in order:
-Finish the draft, polish it up
-Send it to beta readers
-Get notes back, additional polish
-Send out proper Advance Reader Copies
-Publish!
EASY. Well actually it is in fact Easy because it turns out there are a shitload more resources for publishing novels than there are for making comics, my god, coming over to this from trying to get a goddamn comic printed is wild. When I got my first comic printed by The Single Place You Got Comics Printed Back Then I had to write in with my own templates because their official ones were broken, meanwhile the novel distributor doesn’t even require me to bring my own typesetting.
Yeah! The Distributor! THAT’S simpler than I thought too. I like to keep y’all in the know about how I do things around here, so I’m gonna get into the gritty details of the novel process here for a minute.
I am not looking for any more Beta Readers at this time; several of you have the first half already, and there are exactly two of you I’m sending a finished draft to. I’m going to try very hard to get y’all something to check over this month.
I will need advance readers soon! I am trying to use this novel as a way to attract a bigger audience and keep this whole operation the hell alive, so as much as it pains me, it will be available on Amazon. Sorry, that’s always the first question I get asked about any of my books, and running my own shop has clearly not had the results I’ve hoped for so it is what it is. If we’re going to bother doing the Amazon thing at all I want to at least make it worth our while, so it would REALLY help me out if I could collect some reviews! I’m looking into stuff like Booksirens and Booksprout just to try and cast a wide net, but Kidd Commander is about as far from romantasy as it’s possible to get and I’ve heard the folks on those sites respond badly to anything outside that genre. I’d like to try and get some good press from people who understand this bizarre little world and also avoid dropping a grenade at my own feet asking the wrong type of audience to look at this thing.
I’m going to try and send out copies three weeks before the publication date so y’all have time to fit the reading and reviewing into your schedule! If you’re interested in getting an advance reader copy epub in exchange for a review (Goodreads reviews are also helpful probably?), shoot me an email and I’ll put you down on the list of folks to send it to. I’m not picky, and there’s no cap on this! The most common thing I hear when asking about this is “I wanna help but I’m no good at writing down my thoughts,” so I’d like to remind everyone you don’t need to be a wordsmith yourself! Remember, reviews are communicating to other readers just like you, and most of them aren’t writers either. Literally just having reviewers is helpful, so anything you’re moved to share is contributing a lot! There is no way I’m going to get Too Many Applicants, and just showing up for this is a huge help, so don’t be shy.
These books will have ISBNs. This is a big deal and a new thing for KC books!
I know many of you may not be familiar with this concept and what it means for self publishing, and there’s quite a few things to cover, so let’s do a
✨KIDD COMMANDER PUBLISHING FAQ✨
What is an ISBN?
It stands for International Standard Book Number! Anyone can purchase them, and once you attach them to a publication that publication is able to be looked up and inventoried by people and businesses who do that sort of thing. It’s essentially the barcode on the back of a book that the library or book store scans when you take it to the counter.
Why does that matter?
In this case, because I’m ALSO getting the novels printed by a distribution company, anybody anywhere with the ISBN will be able to look up my book and order copies of it!
Distributor?
With my comics, I have to physically travel to a local printer and get them made by hand, so every single copy of a KC volume has to be ordered, packaged, and sent out by me. This is mostly fine for my small business, but working with the novel distributor means every single order doesn’t HAVE to go through my own hands, which means more places will have access to these books and I can spend more time working. The novels are looking like they’ll be MUCH cheaper to produce too, which is good news for all of us.
And hey, if the price still isn’t doable for you, it will help me out a lot if you request them from your local library! I’ll try to figure out what that looks like and post some instructions about it when we get closer to time.
Can I still get books directly from you though?
Definitely! I can’t guarantee the shipping won’t be more expensive with me (especially for international folks), but I will have copies available in my shop just like always. You can still get a signed copy and a bookmark and a sticker and whatever else I put in there, lovingly packaged and shipped by me.
If you DO wanna save on that shipping and the signature isn’t so important to you, I won’t be offended! Sales elsewhere make me look good to algorithms and such, so follow ur heart.
I thought you were going with a local printer?
I really wanted to, but I gotta be honest with y’all: money is still Not Great right now, and I’ve been stressing about coming up with the cash to get these printed by my comic printer. The distributor copies are less than a quarter of the price, and more importantly, I can get proof copies before I commit to a large order. It feels bad, but I just don’t have the luxury of shopping local for this. Especially when I’m not sure any of these will sell at all lmao
Hey, why are the novels getting ISBN’s when the comics don’t have them?
ISBN’s in the US are very expensive (did you know they’re free in some countries? unbelievable), and they are useful only if you’re putting the book in a catalog, like a library’s or a book shop’s!
Don’t you want your comics to be in those though?
Of course, but they have never accepted them (even when the places in question WILL accept publications without an ISBN), likely because the comics are only available through me specifically and I can’t offer them at enough of a discount to be attractive to any business entities.
With the distributor, the novels will be available at wholesale prices to libraries and book shops, and if I’m understanding this right, you or your retailer should also be able to order them from a branch of the company nearer to your country so you don’t have to pay for overseas shipping.
Oh cool, but why don’t you just add the comics to the distributor?
because nobody on planet earth will print a full color manga size volume for a reasonable price except for my guy in Denver lmao. There are reasons people can make an entire career out of doing fast-fashion novels as a side hustle while even popular comics die on the vine, comics as a medium is just more complicated in every aspect. At this time, for my own purposes, there’s little reason to fool with the money involved in registering them because there’s no distributor behind it; anyone ordering them would still have to go through me directly anyway, and they are too expensive for them to buy. Maybe one day.
✨END FAQ✨
A cool thing about all this Official Publishing Junk is I had to make an imprint for myself! KC’s imprint entity is called Sprawlworks. I probably should have done this ages ago, but as I mentioned earlier there are VERY few guidelines for publishing comics compared to novels, so it just never occurred to me to set this up. Better late than never!
Although they don’t have ISBN’s right now, I’ll probably replace the little sunflower icon on the manga volumes with a simplified version of this during the next printing! Movin’ up in the world.
About the cover,
The last thing I wanna discuss today is the covers! Multiple. I believe I’ve talked about this often enough y’all are familiar with the concept, but as a refresher: People have no idea how the hell to interact with Kidd Commander. When I explain it’s a comic people don’t understand that doesn’t mean superheroes, people don’t understand that “Kidd” does not mean it’s for children, and a good 70% of people I meet at conventions assume my comic volumes ARE wildly overpriced prose novels because they’ve never met an independent person singlehandedly producing work at the scale I do. Many, many people also assume my art style denotes a more childish kind of story than the one I am telling, and while I’m not ever going to change to suit these people, I can acknowledge that this has certainly harmed KC’s success.
I’ve done a lot of field research the last few months, online and off, and I have learned: Novel covers are extremely homogenous. Eerily so. I am generally disappointed with modern cover sensibilities! But the common design choices indicate that professionals are under the impression the average prose fan will die instantly if they have to look at a stylized cover. I have to play the game a little bit here if I want to be successful enough to afford to keep working on KC, so there will be two covers for GttC at launch. The one I’ve shared the sketch for, and this one:
probably not FINAL final, but at this point I’m just nudging things around
Getting some use out of those travel posters! I think this is a good compromise; I do like my poster designs after all, and since I make a new poster for each arc regardless, this way I don’t have to do a whole ton of extra work for something I’m not feeling quite as inspired to make. This is the cover that will be on most editions sold through other retailers, but both designs will be available in my own shop. I’m gonna try and keep a tally of which cover moves more, so if we make it all the way to a hardcover edition I can build a design around the one people seem to like better.
I could be totally wrong about this, maybe the stylized cover will do great! Personally, when I see a Weird Cover sticking out on a shelf it’s like the clouds part and a single beautiful ray of sunshine draws me along, over the discarded bodies of one million Marketing Approved cover designs. But as y’all are surely aware, the way I feel about art and business and Most Things tends to be very disconnected from how most other people actually operate, and I’m trying to give this thing its best chance. I won’t learn how to work in this new industry if I don’t experiment, so let’s take the opportunity.
Whew! I’ll probably have more information about how to actually order books or how you can ask your Book Entity Of Choice to do so, but I think that’s plenty for today. For now, please look forward to publishing day!
State of the Artist
Doing much better than last month lmao
Hey, I’ve been seeing a bunch of y’all making an effort to spread the word about KC since the last letter went out, thanks so much!! Even if the financial support isn’t increasing lately, the first step to that is getting more readers on board so it all helps! Let’s try to keep that momentum going because our rent went up again this month and we still have two more months before the next show where we Might make enough money to get caught up, lol lmao
To end on a lighter note: Lee has been working on a doll pattern for a long time now, and they finally got it working! She’s not quite shop ready yet but please look at Tiny Phin
the future is cool actually
Thank you for reading!
-Aria