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Welcome Back
I have a campaign that is live on Kickstarter called Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 2, and you can get it through December 19th. If you’re paying attention, you may notice that December 19th is very, very close to Christmas.
Did I make a horrible mistake in doing so?
Hard to say.
I had a very good launch day, while being very careful not to launch on the week of Thanksgiving, which I was getting very close to. (By Thanksgiving, I mean American Thanksgiving. Hello from Canada!)
Thank goodness I did because it was dead quiet during the Thanksgiving weekend. This is understandable since most backers are from the US.
That’s just a matter of fact, even with this campaign where I’m seeing a lot of backers from the UK and from Canada. The majority always come from the US, and that is no exception here. Avoiding their holidays makes a ton of sense.
However, I’m still doing this in the thick of the holiday season. I had a Black Friday sale, which was really just an early backer sale that you would have any time of the year, but calling it Black Friday I think may have helped.
The Truth about December
The truth about Kickstarter in December is it’s a dead zone. People aren’t shopping for themselves—they’re shopping for other people.
You can’t rely on Kickstarter for gift-giving.
It wouldn’t be a good idea to say, “Hey, I backed the campaign. They say they might deliver in March. We’ll have to see. By the way, there’s a survey for your address that you’ll receive in February.”
That’s not a reasonable ask.
Not a lot of people are going to be on Kickstarter for that reason. They’re looking everywhere else.
This is why Iusually tried to avoid the month of December entirely.
(To be fair, I didn’t launch in December this time, but I did give this campaign a little bit longer of a stretch.)
This campaign will end on December 19th, which is just a few days before Christmas. I may have burnt myself a little bit. It will be interesting to talk about in the post-mortem when I do that in the new year.
The Good News
Although the holiday season is slower and may be harder to get new backers in, I did see a lot of people returning this time out.
The numbers are roughly 50/50 in terms of total funded. New backers are spending a lot more, thanks to catch-up tiers, so although the count of backers isn’t 50/50, they’re carrying nearly equal weight.
This goes to show that building an audience and having people aware of campaigns you’re launching, regardless of the season, is the most important thing you can do.
We did about 80% of our business—which is still only about two-thirds of the way through this campaign—with backers on day one.
That means it was a lot of people who were in pre-launch, who were paying attention to the newsletter, or following on all the various socials (on YouTube or on Substack) knew to look for Big Smoke Pulp and made sure to back it as soon as humanly possible.
What Can You Do?
I’m on the fence about whether or not to launch holiday Kickstarter. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea, but I do think there are some things you can do to make yourself succeed.
I have three strategies. Let’s go through them…
Strategy #1: Gauge Your Audience First
Unless you already have a massive audience and have people that you can draw in that are not sensitive to the Kickstarter algorithm, then avoid November and December if you can. Just wait till January.
I’ve launched in January. It’s arguably a weird time because a lot of people have been spending through November and December on other people and all kinds of gifts and parties.
Common sentiment is it’s their time to breathe and not spend. Yet, a lot of people got gift cards and monetary gifts, so they’re ready to spend in January.
I’ve always done well with my campaigns in January. I will continue to launch then, including…
The New Book: SNIP
And with that, that’s my segue into something that I have launching in January with my good buddy, Riccardo Faccini. We have a new comic series called SNIP. It is available in pre-launch on Kickstarter right now.
What’s different about this campaign than anything we’ve done in the past is this is double-shipping. From Parts Unknown was a “double-sized” issue. This is going to be two separate issues shipped out to you as they’re ready.
Issue one is nearly finished and will be ready to ship to you as soon as the campaign is over. Then, because you’ve backed the campaign, you’ll receive number two as soon as it’s ready shortly after that.
We’re trying something a little new with how campaigns go in the new year.
If you’re interested, join us in January, which isn’t a bad time to launch campaigns. To that point…
Strategy #2: Extend Your Campaign
One experiment I would run if I ran another campaign during the holidays is to extend my campaign through January.
The limit set by Kickstarter is 60 days. The >30-day campaign isn’t a rule, more of a norm. It’s a nice round number and us creators seem to enjoy that.
But realistically, you could run a campaign for 60 days. If you don’t care about those days where you might get no backers or you might get negative backers, but you are ready for the spike in January, then it might be worth it to just run an extra-long campaign that goes through the holidays.
And this way there’s no pressure for backers to back you during a holiday season.
Strategy #3: Build the Mailing List
The most important point of all of this—build a mailing list. If you do not have a mailing list as of right now, go build one.
You can build it for free using Substack, although there are other providers like Ghost and MailerLite. Whatever your platform that you’re interested in using, go use it and start collecting emails.
Start getting people to follow you.
If you don’t have that much to say, that’s okay. Think of something to say once a month, once every two months. As long as you’re checking in so that when you do have something to say.
Wrapping Up
I hope you have a good sense of what the pitfalls are and what you can do to try to make a Kickstarter campaign during the holiday season a success.
I’ll get into a lot more detail about how Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 2 went in the new year when we do a post-mortem, and I’ll give you all the details of exactly how the campaign went. Some mistakes I’ve made, some things that went well.
The key thing I want you to get out of this whole conversation is you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment.
Yes, it might cost you, but it could work out very well too. You never know until you try it.
I’ll keep sharing my experience and how I see things with everything I’ve done with Pesto Comics and beyond. You should always be willing to experiment and try things on your own.
It’s a cop-out answer from me, but I hope you enjoyed it.
What’s To Come
I want to keep things a little bit light for this holiday season, but this is the last op-ed style post I have for 2025.
Now through the rest of the year, we’re going to be looking back at 2025.
We’ll start next week talking about the Year of Substack and all the things I learned about running a newsletter.
Then we’ll look at Pesto Comics as a whole through 2025 and how the year went.
For the last post of the year, we’re going to do a preview of all the things coming for 2026 with Pesto Comics. I’m very excited to get all that out to you.
If you’re a paid subscriber on Substack, we’ll get into the numbers of Big Smoke Pulp in the video version. There’s just over a week left, so this will be the second-to-last check-in.
And with that, I want to thank you for being here.
Until next time…
Project Links
Here’s just some of what’s coming in 2026 - we’ll be announcing more on December 31st, with even more big announcements coming late January!
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Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 2
Live until December 19th! Support it while you can!
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Naked Kaiju Woman #3
The third Naked Kaiju Woman is in prelaunch! Rafael is well underway with this issue.
Get updates by following it. Aiming for a Spring 2026 release.
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Snip #1-2
NEW COMIC SERIES!
Erase Someone Else. Save Yourself.
A double-issue campaign! Get the first two issues of Snip with one pledge!
