I recently postulated that Kickstarter is currently the place where individual creators make the most selling digital comics outside of manga. While down this cyber-rabbit hole, I wondered how much money that actually represented for the top campaigns. Here is what I discovered.
These numbers are educated guesses at best, but I believe they are still useful. To look at the data and see my notes for each series, be sure to download the attached Excel spreadsheet.
To summarize, here are some of my assumptions:
The most funded campaigns (as indicated by the Kickstarter discovery page) that included digital rewards would sell the most digital comics. There may be a digital-only campaign out there that got missed as a result.
Most campaigns include digital comics in every tier. I only counted the data from tiers that were actually digital tiers—i.e., where the customer sought out a digital reward specifically.
I tried to combine totals across a franchise to account for bundled PDFs from previous campaigns. That said, I basically gave up on Lady Death and extrapolated from the top five campaigns. Talk about a prolific franchise!
Ultimately, these numbers are really only good for rough comparisons and, more importantly, to give creators a ballpark idea of the current upper limit for the income they could earn from selling digital comics on Kickstarter.
There is just one week left in my Lump Dog™ Kickstarter campaign! And yes, as you’d expect, you can get my quirky science-related comic as a DRM-free PDF.