How do you see the future for crowdfunding and publishing? What are its possibilities, its limits?
The limits are mostly human, ie the effort required by a time-consuming process. It takes strong nerves and patience, you need to be proactive and creative. On the other hand, crowdfunding can produce works that otherwise wouldn’t have seen the light of day. And knowing human creativity, the source is not about to dry up!
Another limit is the budget. The higher it is, the harder it is to complete the financing of the project. And if you want wide distribution, it is necessary to have a large budget. In our budgets, we plan for a first print run of around 5,000 copies (on average). Once those are sold, we need to find solutions for more copies.
The problem of circulating works that have been financed and produced is another limit. So we think about solutions (the first being our shop) for “niche” projects. The Internet has enormous potential here.
As for the possibilities, they are very wide. I’m convinced that crowdfunding will continue to grow in all areas and that other sites will be created to meet authors’ needs. Creators will find a way to be liberated from the unbalanced constraints of traditional publishing, taking their destiny into their own hands. In comic books, the author’s job is changing. Until the 80s, authors received remuneration firstly according to the storyboard (as they were published in magazines, these were publication rights) and secondly they had rights from the albums. With the disappearance of comic book titles, the storyboard became an advance on rights. Then it became a flat fee. As the number of titles published each year has become huge, average circulation has fallen significantly. And the fees too.
This impoverishes the craft. Authors – including great ones – are stopping their careers. Others are forced to accumulate “food” orders to survive. Crowdfunding, which has a distinct element of patronage about it, allows for authors to be paid while sharing the risk of publication. I think we will see a generation of author/entrepreneurs who will use participatory financing to produce and sell their books (because there is also a “subscription” element), and then use all the possibilities of the Internet and social networks to distribute them. The obvious advantage is that all the benefits are for the author. To earn the same amount, they only need to sell 10-20% of the number of copies! And I think that other helpful services will emerge which complement crowdfunding. We intend to be players in this change.