Alterna Comics tries 'reverse fund-raiser' on IndieGoGo
Small comics publisher Alterna Comics is running what it calls a 'reverse fundraiser' on the crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo. The term 'reverse fundraiser' suggests the company will be giving the money to us, but alas, it's not that good. What is reversed is actually the chronology of events: Alterna is looking for funding for comics that have already been published. Alterna founder Peter Simeti explains:
When these books originally went to print, fundraising sites like kickstarter and indie gogo weren't super popular so we ended up putting print runs on credit cards. I'm still in a bit of debt because of this (about $30K) but it's been getting better every year. I pay about $5K a year in interest fees though because of this, so it's been a really hard upward battle to pay off the bills, pay creators, and produce new product. Especially on a substitute teacher's salary' ($11K a year)
Compared to those numbers, the fund-raiser is quite modest; the goal is $2,500. And the rewards are pretty good: For $10, you can get a hard copy of any Alterna comic or a digital collection of 25 graphic novels in PDF format. But this does raise the question of what crowd-funding is really about. Johanna Draper Carlson recently commented that she prefers to donate to a project that is already complete and just needs funding for printing costs. This carries that to its logical extreme ' the books are finished ' but looked at another way, it is really just using IndieGoGo as a temporary storefront. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's definitely another wrinkle in the crowd-funding model.
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'For $10, you can get a hard copy of any Alterna comic or a digital collection of 25 graphic novels in PDF format.'
Isn't that called buying things?
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