SFAM 5 Kickstarter: Ten Days Left

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonrosenberg/sfam-book-five-crab-city-nights 

So you may have heard: I’m running a little fundraiser to publish my next Scenes From a Multiverse collection. I’ve been posting about it as fast as my little fingers can type, and I’m sorry for the bombardment of emails and social media bleats. I’m sure it must get annoying after a while. 

This is the part of my job I like the very least. I’d much rather be spending my time making new comics for you. I’m taking time away from drawing to write this post right now — a comic I think you’re going to all be very excited to see when it’s done. 

But as much as I loathe the marketing bits of my job, I know they’re necessary. How else am I going to share my excitement with you? This is book five for my baby! I want it to be excellent for you. I want to stuff a bunch of mailers full of them and slam full cartons down on the counter in front of bewildered postal workers. I want these books to be delivered into the waiting hands of kind and hopeful readers all over the globe.  I want digital readers to get the same excellent experience zooming into their hi-res DRM-free PDF files on their retina devices. I want everyone to get lots and lots of add-ons so I can make even more goodies for you. 

Are we going to make our goal? I don’t know.

I’ve been here before. Nearing the end of a fundraising campaign with a lot less momentum that it might seem that we need to cross the finish line in time. At this point I’ll need to raise over $1k a day in the time that we have left, and the last few days have been less than promising. 

In the past, there’s always been a last-minute rally, and we squeak by, and get the book made. It’s a great story, if not entirely great for my mental and cardiac health. But this year the story is a bit different, and without the full power of 23,000+ readers following along on twitter, I’ve had to rely on other means of getting the word out. 

Bluesky has been great. I suggest you get on there (and let me know if you need an invite code, I have a couple left), it’s far from perfect but it’s the closest thing out there to what Twitter used to be before it was humped to death by a malignant narcissist with too much money. Other social media networks have been effective to varying degrees.

But the people I need the most are you: my most loyal patrons. You’re the ones that have enabled me to continue doing this for you for over a quarter century, and I am thankful for that every day. I thank you. My family thanks you. We have unique challenges and the flexibility that your patronage allows me is the ony thing that keeps us going. I want to give back to you, I want to create weird comics and more for you until I’m old and they have to claw the Cintiq away from me. 

By supporting this Kickstarter, you‘ll be helping me to do just that. This is what helps keep me going for 2024. This is the thing that helps me finish redrawing Dungeon Divers for the first collection, the thing that lets me continue that story, the thing that lets me draw more pages of the comic I started drawing earlier today. Trust me when I say you want to see those pages. 

But if we get to the end of the campaign? And we haven’t hit that goal? All that goes away. Or at least it will take me a lot longer to accomplish, if ever. It is not getting cheaper to raise a family of five and I’m sure there will be some unpleasant decisions I’ll need to make. I don‘t even want to think about it. 

I’d rather be positive! I’m not very good at it, but I’m going to fake it for now. 

So: here’s the part where you get to be the hero. Go pledge to the Kickstarter today. It’s for a great collection of comics from a cartoonist you already enjoy. There are crabs in it! You cannot go wrong here. 

I love each and every one of you, regardless of whether or not you can back this campaign. But I love you more if you do. 

-j

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonrosenberg/sfam-book-five-crab-city-nights