This is going to be the last in the series of posts, at least for now. It’s turned into a massive epic — sorry! But I’ll try to divide it into short sections so you can skim to the parts you find useful.

If I’ve missed anything, please do comment below and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Previously in the Draw The Line story

If you’ve read thus far, you’ll know that we’d been crowdfunding on the Unbound platform with the aim of getting the book into print and distributed to bookshops — but that, for various reasons, it wasn’t working for us. We were stuck at around 50% funded and the dial was only moving upwards very, very slowly. So many people had pledged and I was getting anxious about the fact that they’d paid for a product that hadn’t yet materialised.

(If you haven’t been following along, start here and keep clicking the ‘next’ link at the foot of each post).

What finally gave me the impetus to leave Unbound was that their graphic novels editor left the company. This person had been the champion of graphic novels within the publishing house and to the best of my knowledge, when they left, their experience and advocacy went with them — there was no-one left with the same degree of passion for the artform and knowledge of the market.

By this time, my friends Simon, Michi and Zara had offered both the practical and emotional support I needed to decide that we could go it alone. Clearly, by going down this route, we’d lose the main reason I’d been so keen to sign up with Unbound: the mainstream distribution that, we’d believed, would have seen our book available in high street bookstores. Instead, we’d be printing a very limited run: just enough copies to make sure that everyone who’d ordered one would get it.

We did the maths and worked out that we could easily cover costs with the sum already raised: of course, we wouldn’t need to factor in Unbound’s contributions of design, printing, distribution etc, as we’d be doing all that ourselves. This was what would have been covered by the remaining sum of money that — had we stuck with them — would still need to be raised.

So, in this post I’ll detail the expenses and logistical considerations involved in producing and shipping out a few hundred books.

The details so far might be unique to us, but I think that everything from this point on in the post will be of use to any self-publishing venture.

A last push

In arranging our departure from Unbound, we agreed that we’d keep the crowdfunding page up for a final month. This proved beneficial: remember when I mentioned that I didn’t know whether the lack of a hard deadline prevents people from pledging?

Well, more pledges certainly did come in these last few weeks, as people realised that it was their last chance to get the book (especially with the new circumstances where we only planned to make a single print run).

Another factor really boosted our numbers at this point, as well: the charity we’d chosen to be the beneficiary of our profits began to mention us in their social media.

Choose Love (or Help Refugees at the time we picked them) had previously said that they could only promote fundraising efforts where 100% of the money raised would be going to them. Of course, that wasn’t previously the case, since Unbound would have been taking a proportion of profits.

But now it seemed Choose Love could promote us with a clear conscience, and just a few mentions from them meant our list of pledgers grew in leaps and bounds. It was amazing to see, for a couple of hours each time they posted, how the total raised leapt up every time I refreshed the page.

It was the crowdfunding experience we’d been longing for all this time!

Finances

Scroll right to the end of this post if you’d like to see the final breakdown of costs and profit.

But here’s the top line: in all, we raised £7,887.35 (this includes the money we collected through Unbound, and subsequent direct sales), and as I’ve already mentioned, we ended up with £3,106.27 to donate to charity. So our total costs were £4,781.08.

I was really keen to ensure that we donate the maximum possible to Choose Love, so wanted to do everything as economically as we could. I was equally anxious to keep an accurate record of every outgoing and incoming sum — not that anyone has questioned me about this, but I was acutely aware that the money was sitting in my own current account, and I wanted to be able to show everything transparently!

Numbers

Once it became clear we were going to be printing the book ourselves, of course, our promise to provide every artist with a copy began to seem quite ambitious, especially given that many of them are scattered around the globe.

So, just to be sure, we asked the artists to confirm whether they actually wanted the physical book, or would be happy with the digital version; we also stressed that they did of course have the option of paying for their book and that sum would be added to our charitable donation.

Approximately half the artists did still want their free copy. Fair enough, and we’d managed to cut our costs a little.

So, from Unbound we had 228 pledgers, buying 241 physical books between them, plus an additional 26 who had pledged only for the digital version.

Once we added in artists, and a few late direct sales, we needed 304 printed books to send out.

We decided to print a few extra copies as we reckoned that once people saw it in the real world, we might be able to sell a few more; but on the other hand, I didn’t want to cut into our charitable donation too much and then be stuck with a load of books we couldn’t shift!

We ended up settling on getting 375 copies printed. It turns out we were way too cautious here. I’m used to selling my own self-published stuff, slowly and to a limited audience: it’s a whole new feeling for me to have under-ordered.

As it turns out, within the next few weeks, enquiries coming in from all directions made it clear that we could have easily sold another 50 copies on top of what we ordered, and presumably we could have shifted many times that in the coming months, if comics festivals had still been running.

I hadn’t grasped quite how desirable our finished product was going to be until I held it in my own hands (and until people started asking where they could buy more copies). And that’s a shame, because of course although there would have been an initial outlay in getting more printed, we would have made way more profit for the charity.

Printing

First it’s worth mentioning that we made the decision to make a larger book than originally planned: as some of the artwork is quite intricate, it benefits from an A4 page where it can be seen clearly along with the accompanying text.

From our previous forays into self-publishing our own comics, we were all familiar with Rich Hardiman at Comic Printing UK and knew that he’d do a good and well-priced job. He charged us £2,918, or just about £7.78 per hardback A4 volume.

We were slightly racing against time at this stage, because I wanted people to have their books before Christmas, and getting the details of pledgers and the money transferred from Unbound had taken longer than expected, as these things always seem to do.

I was updating all the pledgers as we first made the decision to go solo, and then as we went through the various stages of production, and had thought I’d left loads of slack in my predicted timings of “going to print in October, shipping in November”. Apparently not!

At the last minute, Rich emailed to say his case binder (the machine which constructs the hard covers) had broken, and there was going to be a delay. Fortunately it didn’t set things back too far, and we still took delivery of the books and got them sent out in the first week of December.

Rewards

We also needed to remember that some people had pledged extra for a set of rewards, including original artwork, comics, prints and bookplates.

• For the original artwork it was just a matter of emailing the artist and hoping they hadn’t sold or disposed of the piece in the intervening years (phew, they hadn’t).
• The popular choice of a bundle of comics from David Blumenstein had to make its way to us all the way from Australia, so we hurriedly asked David to put them in a packet to us and reimbursed him for shipping costs (£55.25).
  The comics arrived a little later than would have been ideal, so one thing we could have done better would have been to arrange this earlier. While we were waiting for them to arrive, we held back the relevant orders for a week, and then finally made the decision to ship them out and send the comics along later.
  Of course, the box of comics arrived on my doorstep at the exact moment Simon was queuing up in the post office. Fortunately he saw my frantic message telling him to turn around. As you may have noticed if you were one of the recipients, we then had to unstick all those parcels and carefully slide the comics in before re-taping them up.
• Simon designed the bookplates and Michi got them printed at a local printers’, which I was so grateful for because at that point I was swamped in spreadsheets about postage costs and felt incapable of making any artistic decisions. Michi also arranged for the artwork prints to be made on good quality archive paper. In total, bookplates and prints came to £87.77.

Design

We were super lucky to have the services of two top designers. Simon, who also helped so much with all the other practicalities, is a graphic designer by trade and offered to do the entire layout for us.

He did such a good job, patiently dealing with the back and forth conversations when I thought something hadn’t quite worked or could be refined; in particular he came up with the eventual labelling system that allows you to thumb through the book and see which actions are in a specific category, from the page edges.

He also gave the book its signature look with bouncy fonts throughout, AND set up the digital versions.

Simon gave his services for free, which was great of course, but if you don’t have a designer on your team and you’re wondering how much you’d have to raise to allow for one, here’s how he breaks down his costs:

“For a corporate client I’d have said £3,500 to £4,000 (plus VAT). If it was for a charity or educational organisation I’d have given a 50% discount on that.

“If I’d just worked at my hourly rate (something I rarely do but some clients have insisted in the past) it would have been nearer £5,500 I think.”

So as you can see, we’d have already bitten very deep into our reserves if we hadn’t had his services for free. Simon had time on his hands because of lockdown meaning he was being sent less paid work, which was rubbish for him but great for us in terms of his having spare time.

Meanwhile, Woodrow Phoenix, who you may remember was — like Simon — also one of the artists in the book, messaged to say he’d be happy to lend his design skills too. And so it was Woodrow that came up with our superbly memorable front and back covers.

Woodrow has also kindly laid out how much his services would normally cost:

“The usual fee for a front cover is £500-800. For a front and back cover £1k.”

He also helped us fill an empty space by providing the image on the last page of the book, but had we paid for it this would have cost “anywhere from £250 to £500 depending on the publication.” This cost is variable, he notes, according to size and whether the work is for the UK or the US.

Either way we were extremely fortunate to have both these superb designers donating their time and skills. If you need a designer, hire Simon or Woodrow!

Looking for typos

Proofing was time-consuming, but thanks again to the generosity of my friends, it didn’t dent our bottom line. Michi and I did it ourselves, and Simon pitched in too.

We really needed every single pair of eyes and every pass of the several we did. It felt like every time we did another proofread, we’d find another typo.

I’m pretty sure we got them all in the end though, and here’s how: I sent my Dad a copy and he had nothing to say about misspellings or grammar. And he always has something to say on those subjects.

Shipping

After some research, we plumped for these cardboard mailers, the cheapest we could find. I’d been on the verge of buying some more expensive ones which were advertised as particularly eco-friendly, when I noticed that these were equally sustainable, but the shop just wasn’t shouting about it quite so loudly.

We paid £105.23 for 250 mailers.

As we were using online postage I also bought these labels to print addresses out onto – again, the cheapest I found at £6.99 for 400.

Getting to grips with postage was quite a learning curve. I learned about Click And Drop online and Drop And Go from our local post office, but couldn’t find any comparison, especially the one thing I wanted to know: was one cheaper than the other?

Essentially, as I finally discovered, unless you set up as a business with a certain quantity of shipments per year, the costs are the same. With Click and Drop, you upload your spreadsheet of names, addresses and weights, then pay for the postage online. It sounds easy but it took me a good couple of days to learn the ropes and tweak the variables for each recipient (and then remember that I should take myself off the list as I wouldn’t be paying to deliver a book to myself).

After I’d put all this time in, I learned the real difference between the two services from my local post office. “Click and Drop is killing local post offices” they told me, because with everyone doing the work at home, it is putting staff out of a job.

With Drop and Go, you just print out your list and dump the whole consignment at the post office for them to weigh and stamp in their own time, keeping them in work. Unfortunately, by this time I’d invested so many hours setting up everything that it was too late to switch — but I will remember this next time.

Postage costs were… high. There just wasn’t any getting around it. OK, we could have made a smaller book, but even so, as soon as you send a parcel out of the country, the costs are breathtaking. So, other than the actual printing, shipping costs were our biggest expense.

We sent all the UK post and some international post through Royal Mail, but anything above 2kg (ie more than two books) had to go by courier; we chose Hermes, but prices seem much of a muchness.

Local delivery

Simon is a keen cyclist, but that’s nothing compared his partner who is a really keen cyclist. Between them, they promised they’d deliver all the orders that were within the bounds of Brighton and Hove. This not only cut our carbon footprint, but it saved us a bunch in postage costs.

I keep saying ‘we were lucky’ but what it boils down to is that Simon is a really useful friend to have, and as you can see from this post, he saved the project a lot of money. I haven’t calculated what we saved on local deliveries exactly, but with 30 addresses on the cycle delivery list, it was at least £100.

Time

No matter how much money you can save by doing everything yourself, you can’t escape the other cost, which is time.

And it’s always more than you’d think. Michi, Zara and Simon all helped when it came to the big, obvious task of stuffing the cardboard mailers and slapping the labels on; then driving them all down to the sorting office so that our local Post Office wouldn’t know that we were killing them…

We’d always planned to do this as a sort of party (if you have fairly dull ideas of what constitutes a party): when Brighton was put into a tier two lockdown, we were a bit concerned about whether we could go ahead, but in the end we decided it counted as work; and kept all the doors open while we packed.

The actual packing only took a few hours, but remember I’d also spent a couple of days setting up all the labels, Michi and Simon had prepped the rewards, etc.

There was also fiddly stuff to deal with during this period, with messages coming in via a variety of channels from people asking if they could make an order; or update the address they’d given; or change the quantity; or pick up their book rather than have it delivered.

What went wrong

We were so glad to have got the bulk of the books into the post before Christmas, but then the UK went into a sudden and even stricter lockdown, meaning that millions of people had to cancel their Christmas plans at the last moment.

Many of those people then had to send their presents by post instead of handing them over in person; while at the same time, post offices were understaffed because of COVID cases and quarantines. Thank goodness Brexit hadn’t quite hit yet at this point.

So, several of the books took longer than they should have to get to their destinations (and some still haven’t arrived, so we’re assuming they’re lost, and sending out some of our very few reserves).

Add to this the people who thought they’d ordered a book but had actually only ordered the eBook; or the people who had moved house but we’d sent books to their old address, etc etc, and – well, there were a lot of messages to investigate and respond to.

Disappointingly, as well, our cardboard wrappers didn’t stand up very well to the rigours of the postal system. At least one parcel arrived with no book inside, to our dismay. So if I were to do this again, I’d look for something a bit more robust.

Finally, one mystery: we never got a reply from the pledger who had paid for a piece of bespoke artwork from the artist of her choice, despite multiple emails and a message written on her parcel telling her to get in touch. If it was you, do let us know.

What went right

Everything else! Can’t complain there. In all, I reckon it was a job well done. There was so much to think about, execute, and follow up on, but our little team managed it all as best we could.

I’ve thanked them multiple times, but I’ll continue to do so at every opportunity – and to everyone else who offered help along the way. I think I’ve namechecked most of them in this series of posts.

Finally: if you’re really wishing you’d ordered a copy now, don’t forget you can add your name to our list and we’ll let you know if we’re ever crazy enough to do it all over again.

---

Costs breakdown

Incoming

• Pledges; direct sales of book, etc: £7,887.35

Outgoing

• Printing costs: £2,918.00
• Bookplates and prints: £87.77
• Shipping Blumenstein comics: £55.25
• 250 cardboard mailers: £105.23
• 400 A6 labels: £6.99
• Postage costs (Royal Mail) £1,389.36
• International courier costs (Hermes): £218.48
  
  TOTAL OUTGOINGS: £4,781.08

PROFIT

£3,106.27 – donated to Choose Love.

Want to thank me for this ultra long series of blog posts? Boost our contribution to Choose Love with a donation here.

This is a series of blog posts documenting Draw The Line, a project that brought together over 100 cartoonists from around the world, each depicting a positive political action. This is part five.

• You can find part one, documenting the final product, here
• then part two, which explains how the project was born
• part three describes how we wrangled such a big group of artists
• and part four talks about the launch of our website.

Now comes a more difficult section to write: this covers a move that resulted in a much longer delay than we’d intended in getting the book out into the world, and which was ultimately the wrong decision for this project.

The pitch

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’d spoken to another artist who’d just signed up with Unbound, to ask her whether she thought it would be a good fit for us, and she was broadly positive.

By coincidence, shortly after that, Unbound’s graphic novels specialist came down to talk to our local comics group, Cartoon County, about how the whole set-up worked.

Unbound describes itself as a unique hybrid between crowdfunders like Kickstarter, and traditional publishing houses, giving authors the benefits of both.

In subsequent years I’ve seen several more small publishers switch to the same model, and in fact this specialist has now left to set up their own (smaller and graphic novels-only) publishing house, which also works by crowdfunding.

But at this point, the whole concept was pretty new. It had been conceived and funded by one of the people behind the TV show QI, who had invested in good developers to make a web platform with all the functionality needed to promote and sell books in this innovative way.

What really appealed to me was that once the book was funded, Unbound would be doing all the heavy lifting of getting the printing organised, marketing it at comics fairs and into bookshops (“our titles go into the catalogues that shops like Waterstones pick their stock from”, they told me), and shipping it out.

All this would have required a steep learning curve and a completely new set of skills for me, and I’d been worrying about how we’d manage these logistics, so having the professionals take over that side was a weight off my mind.

Signing on the dotted line

Unbound’s Graphic Novels editor and I met up in a coffee shop the day after their talk in Brighton, to discuss their taking on Draw The Line. They were enthusiastic and it felt like a great fit: they’d do some maths and then get me the contract to sign.

Unbound works to an algorithm to figure out how much needs to be raised before your book is published: as you’d imagine, this takes into account the size of the book, the number of pages, and the number of copies to be produced. I asked that we also allow for a free copy for every participating artist, which may have been an error in terms of pushing the target higher, but which reflected a promise which we’d made to the artists from the beginning.

Of course, Unbound also make their own profit from each book, as any publishing house would – this, too is factored into the algorithm and is added to the target.

In return for their slice of the profits, they provided a page on their website (again, much like a Kickstarter page) with all the rewards laid out on it and a full description of the project, the ability to send out updates to all pledgers, and a backend where authors could see useful stats like the sum still to be raised, who had pledged how much, and where (down to the level of the precise tweet) people had arrived at the page from before making a pledge.

And so, we agreed the tier levels and the target needing to be raised, and our page went live.

During that initial chat, I was told the average sum that customers pledged on Unbound, based on a spread between those that pledge the lowest and those that go all out for the big tier rewards. It was a reassuring figure that allowed me to do some quick calculations to figure out our feasibility.

Because, remember that we had over 100 artists involved in the project. With every artist acting as a promoter for the book, we worked out that if each could bring just 2 or 3 pledges from their friends and family, not to mention the pledgers I assumed we’d gain from general marketing activities, those browsing the Unbound site, etc – well, we’d meet our target in no time.

Rewards all round

The price for the basic hardback first edition book was set at £20, with an eBook thrown in and the chance to have your name included in the back, as one of the people who helped bring it into being.

We were in a great position of being able to ask artists to provide extras, like comics, bespoke or original artwork, workshops and talks that you could add a few quid to your pledge for. There were bundles of multiple volumes for bookclubs and schools, etc, and comedian Joanna Neary even offered to perform a stand-up gig at the occasion of your choice.

We also added cheaper tiers, with add-ons such as bookplates and prints; and there was always the option of the eBook for a tenner, as well. So in theory, there was something for pretty much every purse.

Telling the world

Our rudimentary marketing machine went into action. We pushed the project on social media, wrote blog posts, and I gave talks anywhere that would have me, including podcasts, comic blogs, our local Sunday Assembly, LDComics, and a sprinkling of salons across the south coast.

We printed out hundreds of flyers and sent them to any of our artists who were willing to distribute them in their local area; at one point I even made badges for anyone brave enough to wear the message ‘ask me about Draw The Line‘ across their chest.

As with most crowdfunding campaigns, we went off to a strong start. Some extraordinarily generous pledges were made (we honoured these prime donors by printing their names more prominently in the back of the eventual book); and ingenious ways were found of adding to the coffers.

For example, Nye Wright made his own comic and donated proceeds; Rachael House ran a workshop in Helsinki and her fees came to us; and a wonderful lady in Hastings, upon hearing about the Raging Grannies, promptly set up her own chapter of this loose but outrageous affiliation of wayward women, then invited friends to a series of seven-course rainbow dinners (each course was a different colour of the spectrum) with a pledge being the entry fee.

But unfortunately, when it came to my own talks and interviews, they all had one thing in common: they would always be well received; people would always come up afterwards to say how much they liked the project; they would take a flyer… and it would result in, on average, somewhere between 0 and 1 pledges.

For anyone reading this and hoping to learn how to do it better: of course, the better route would have been to collect all these people’s email addresses so that we could have sent out regular updates to them, and we did start doing this eventually (but to only small effect).

Still – I was undaunted, because, as I say, we had this enormous network of artists to help share the crowdfunder.

Tumbleweed

That’s when I learned another important truth, though. Artists (in the main) like to make artwork, but they don’t necessarily want to be involved with a long, long marketing campaign.

As with every other aspect of the project, there were artists who were very keen and went above and beyond in their efforts to help spread the word; and continued to do so doggedly. And there were others who, quite understandably, having submitted their artwork and shared it on social media, moved on to their next project. Let me stress again that this is entirely reasonable and I am not criticising them for having other priorities!

One aspect of Unbound that differs from Kickstarter or any of the other crowdfunding platforms is that it does not set an end date on its fundraising. I don’t know what would have happened if we’d had a much shorter, much more intense, defined period – it is, after all, well known that lots of people make pledges only when the end is in sight. Psychologically this makes sense: it’s now or never, and you could miss out if you don’t pledge then and there; plus, when the end date is on the horizon, the book is going to be in your hands in a defined amount of time.

Anyway, once the first burst of pledges was over, that was it. Silence. Months went by when we’d see only a single pledge, or none at all.

It began to weigh heavy on my mind that we’d accepted payment from those early pledgers – in some cases, really quite substantial sums of money – and we hadn’t delivered them anything in return. I kept trying, kept giving talks, kept tweeting and Instagramming, but it was an uphill struggle when there was so little payback.

Each Monday, I’d get an automated email from Unbound to tell me how much we’d raised that week. Often, it was £0.

Clearly, I’m not a decisive person. This state of affairs ran on for two years before I finally thought, ‘that’s enough’. About which, more in the next post.

Footnote

I want to be clear that I’m not criticising Unbound or their model in this post: I am saying that it didn’t work for Draw The Line, and setting out the reasons why.

This is part 4 of the Draw The Line story: you can find part one here, then part two and part three.

So, at the end of the last post, we were just getting artwork in from the 100+ artists who had each illustrated whichever political action they had been allocated. My inbox was bulging and everything was looking great.

During this period, Karrie Fransman had suggested that we concentrate on a digital launch before thinking about a physical printed book: that way, she reasoned, the project could have more impact more immediately, as images and links could be shared quickly and easily through social media, etc. This seemed sensible, so that’s what we agreed to do.

Around this time, Karrie also designed the Draw The Line logo of a fist clutching a pencil, which we were able to use for our site banner and as an avatar across social media.

Incidentally, Karrie’s own artwork contribution, on the theme of welcoming refugees, was one of the ones which got a lot of admiration all round:

Building the website

Copywriting came as no problem to me, as that’s what I do all day long at work; and we’d already crafted all the action titles and descriptions when sending out the artists’ briefs, so in fact there was very little writing left still to do.

Thanks to my day job, I also have just enough experience to set up a WordPress site and apply templates, etc, but unfortunately that’s really as far as it goes. You could say it was a case of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

This is an area where we definitely could have ended up with a better result by calling in a developer or designer – I did ask my colleague Martin Wright for help at this point, and he did what he could, but by then we’d made a few decisions in terms of hosting and design that made it difficult for him to do more that tweak.

That’s not to say it was a complete disaster: the Draw The Line website is functional. It’s still live at www.drawthelinecomics.com so you can see it for yourself. I use WordPress every day at work, so the big benefit for me was that I know its interface well, and there was no learning curve required for me in terms of building and editing the site.

The template we chose allowed me to arrange the actions within categories, all of which can be seen on the homepage – the set-up I’d always envisioned. The images within each category act like a slideshow, and the banner is different on each page load.

But there are some obvious flaws as a result of such choices: each page, and especially that homepage, is slow to load; and that template also had the effect that it’s hard to link to any one specific image within the category pages.

As with so many aspects of the Draw The Line project, I was happy to spend a bit of time on it, but didn’t want it to become an enormous time-sink on top of my other responsibilities, so we’ve never gone in to try and fix those flaws.

Telling everyone about it

Despite all I say above, it was (and is!) a functioning website, allowing us to show off all the illustrations in one place, and have an official launch.

The collaborative nature of the project came into play again, as different group members helped write and translate a press release, and crowdsource a list of journalists to send it to – journalists from every country represented among our cohort of artists.

We set up accounts on Instagram, Twitter and a public-facing Facebook page (in addition to the private group for participating artists) and let everyone know the project was open for business.

Don’t forget the book!

Meanwhile, what had happened to the plan of a kickstarted book? Well, our ambitions had grown rather, once we began to see the quality of the work we’d gathered together. We wondered whether it might be better to try and have the book published professionally: this would mean that it would travel further, be available more widely, and ultimately empower more people to take action.

And around this time, we heard about a publishing set-up called Unbound. One of our artists, Wallis Eates, had recently signed with them for one of her books, and it sounded good. They were a hybrid between a kickstarter, and a traditional publishing house: books were crowdfunded by people pledging for copies ahead of printing, but after the target sum had been reached, Unbound would do all the things a standard publishing house does: it’d arrange printing, distribution and marketing, and the book would be offered on Amazon as well as available for sale in bricks and mortar bookshops.

This sounded like a great option for us: after all, we’d already been planning the kickstarter part; but now we’d also have all the benefits that came from a professional publisher.

Well, that’s what we thought, but it didn’t go entirely to plan, and I’ll be writing a bit more about that in the next post.

This is the third post in a series of – oh, I don’t know, maybe five or six?

We’ve already looked at the end product of the Draw The Line project and how the idea began. In this post I’ll try to cover the practicalities involved in managing a remote art project with more than 100 participants.

An international list of artists

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that, thanks to Karrie and the power of social media, we now had a long list of artists who were willing to get involved.

We’d invited them to join a dedicated Facebook group and I also asked everyone to add their name, email address and a link to any web presence to a Google spreadsheet, so I could easily communicate with everyone en masse. Eventually I would import this to Mailchimp, which is free to use if your list of recipients is low enough, and use that to send out mass email updates.

During this stage, I occasionally had to pinch myself as I looked at who was coming on board: many were artists I really looked up to and had never imagined I would be working with. Among them were some pretty big names of the comics world, like Dave McKean, Steven Appleby, Kate Charlesworth, Lucy Knisley, Fumio Obata and Hunt Emerson.

There were also many people I knew well, both from the closeknit Brighton comics scene (Zara Slattery, Michi Mathias, Simon Russell, Daniel Locke, Joe Decie, Hannah Berry, Nye Wright, to name but a few) and the wider but equally networked UK small press community (Katriona Chapman, Una, Rachael Ball, Rachael House, Dave Crane, Karen Rubins, Woodrow Phoenix and more).

Then, thanks to my contacts with the Finnish Femicomix organisation (which itself had come about from the fortuitous friendship with Siiri Viljakka) there was a good representation from Finland (where, in case you didn’t know, small press comics are thriving); this was by far the biggest country represented but we also had artists in Australia, USA, France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Canada and beyond. At this stage I don’t think I knew how many nationalities we spanned: one side-effect of working online in this way is that people didn’t necessarily mention where they were located, and it took a Facebook post explicitly asking the question to discover that we were spread across 16 different countries.

Then of course there were also plenty of artists I’d not heard of before, and it was a pleasure to discover all their work and various styles.

An inclusive project

Everyone was welcome to take part. We weren’t going to invite artists to submit a piece and then decide whether or not to include their work: the project was inclusive, and if an artist was going to give up their time, we would accept their submission.

As you’ll remember from yesterday’s post, we already had the list of actions that the artists were going to depict. The next step was to allocate them.

We could have done this randomly, but it seemed more sensible to look at each artist’s website or social media, and try to match them to the action we thought was best suited to their style or subject matter.

Some of these pairings worked so well that I now understand how proud casting directors must be when they feel they’ve chosen just the right actors for each role in a production.

For example, Katriona Chapman, who had just published her first book Follow Me In about travelling around Mexico, was given the action about the ‘Border Angels’ who leave water and supplies for migrants crossing into the States.

Steven Appleby did great things with ‘Be yourself’ which played into some of his self-identified obsessions of identity and public perception:

Lengthy instructions

Once we’d made these pairings, we sent each artist a long and detailed brief by email.

This took a little time: while 95% of each mail could be copy and pasted, we also had to include the details specific to each recipient.

In retrospect there was perhaps a bit too much information in these mails, but they did at least cover all bases! Here’s what we included:

• The title of the action the artist had been allocated (eg, Plant Radical Roots or Question Sources)
• The text that would accompany their illustration (usually a couple of sentences that explained what the action was, and why it was a good one to do — you can see them all in situ on the Draw The Line website)
• A reference number that would help us keep track of the action, what the caption was and where it fitted in to the project — we asked artists to name their image with this number, plus their name
• Specifications for the format, size and dimensions — and Simon made a graphic to show where the bleed margins needed to be
• A deadline (that, top tip, was a week or two before the actual deadline)
• A request that people provide their work in both CMYK and RGB versions (because we were foreseeing using them on both a website and the print book)
• A suggestion that any text was added as a separate layer (so if we ever translated the project for future foreign versions, it would be easier)
• Links to any reference sources we had identified during our research phase, where relevant (for example, if the action was about signing a petition, we’d link to articles about petitions which had actually brought about change, or a piece about how to ensure your petiton got wider take-up)
• Some links to inspiring examples, which we listed like this:

If your action is suitable, ie it has several steps or dimensions, you may choose to create a ‘how to’ strip. Here’s a good example by the comic artist Cordelia.

Or you may wish to make a humorous illustration/strip based on the action, like this one by Jorge Cham.

Maybe you’ll use the theme to make a political comment. Here are some examples by female cartoonists from North Africa and here’s another by Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle.

If your action includes a case study, you could use that to make a reportage strip (and we’d then remove it from the accompanying text). You may want to research it a little more before you begin. Fumio Obata is a great example of a comic artist working in this tradition.

You could make an infographic if that’s your bag, like this one by Falara.

Or perhaps you’d like to create a single, meaningful illustration, like this one by Jeannie Phan on the benefits of mentoring or this by Veronica Lawlor depicting a demonstration.

Some other details

A few other things it may be worth mentioning:

• We asked everyone to confirm they’d received the brief, which turned out to be a useful way of keeping track of how many firmly committed artists we actually had.
• We told artists to add their name to their work, so that even if it was copied and shared outside the context of Draw The Line, their attribution would never be lost.
• We requested that all artwork be suitable for kids, because many of the actions were child-friendly (in fact, we had a whole category that was labelled as such), and besides, it would be nice not to exclude that audience. Children were likely to be as worried as we adults about the state of the world, we reasoned!
• At this stage we also reiterated the need for non-partisan pieces of work.
• I kept track of absolutely everything on one giant spreadsheet that listed the actions, the artists, whether or not they’d received the brief, submitted their artwork, etc.

The collaborative nature of the project continued: I think some artists were surprised to be asked their opinions about key points, while others found it a natural way to work.

The set-up was loose enough to include a whole range of approaches, though: some artists just wanted to be told what to do, submit their work and be done, while others were quite passionate about the whole idea and keen to join in every discussion point. Both attitudes were absolutely fine and caused no problem to our progress.

The briefing email suggested that artists could discuss their action in the Facebook group if they weren’t sure how to illustrate it and needed inspiration. People could also ask for help if they were unsure how to meet the formatting requirements. And while we didn’t really want the extra work of artists asking us if they could pick a different action instead of the one they’d been allocated, we said it was fine if people wanted to arrange a swap between themselves.

What to expect

Here are some of the things we learned during this phase, which, if you’re planning something similar, you might benefit from knowing in advance:

• Even if they say they will, people don’t always come through (because people are human, and have other commitments, or things crop up, or… in some cases, people are just flaky). Some who said they’d like to take part initially, replied when they saw the brief to say they were dropping out. Others didn’t reply at all, or did confirm but then never submitted work.
  As noted in the last post, we weren’t paying anyone, so we couldn’t really complain about this.
  I’m not sure what the advice is here, other than, perhaps, to accept more artists than you want to eventually get work from?
• People don’t always read long lists of instructions (some people do! I guess it depends on one’s character). This meant that we received some images that were the wrong dimensions, loads without the artists’ names included, and lots of questions we’d already answered in the original brief.
  One way to try and avoid this would be to send a short email instead. This could list the various points as titles which then linked to fuller instructions on a web page.
• Even if people do read your instructions, you have to be super clear. For example, I knew what I was envisioning for each page: there would be text below the image to describe an action, with the illustration or comic strip accompanying it — but I can’t have described it as clearly as I might have, because lots of artists replied to ask whether they were expected to integrate the writing into their artwork.
• Not everyone uses Facebook (in fact, the sanest people probably don’t), and even if everyone did, there’s no guarantee that everyone will see an important message you post there. But email wasn’t infallible either: it could go into spam or just get lost in people’s overswamped inboxes. I used to use a mixture of methods to get attention: for example I’d sometimes tag artists in Facebook posts if they hadn’t replied to an important email.

Creative Commons licenses

We decided early on that, by participating, the artists would be agreeing to make their work available under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. This means that:

• the artist would retain the copyright, so they owned and could reuse the image in any way they liked in the future;
• but at the same time, the image was free for anyone else to use in any way, so long as they weren’t going to be making money out of it.
  This means, for example, that any campaign or charity, or indeed individual, could pick up the images and use them in leaflets or posters without payment, boosting the positive effect that the project could have and providing quality artwork to often cash-strapped causes.
  After the website went live, we did indeed hear from campaigns large and small (notably, among them, the Fawcett Society) who asked for permission to use them. No permission was required, but it was nice to know where they were being shared. And this was a good vindication of our decision to have artists sign their work, so that their names were carried through to these other contexts.

Deadline day

As the deadline approached, each morning I’d open up my email and find one or more illustrations submitted by the artists. This part was pure joy!

It was the first point at which I could see the whole nebulous idea really beginning to take shape. Each time a picture arrived, I’d reply to let the artist know we’d received it safely, and then save it in Google Drive, since they tended to be quite large and would use up a lot of space on my hard drive.

That’s it for today

So, in summary: everything we did at this stage was fairly straightforward, and while it was a bit time-consuming, that was to be expected. There was, however, some extra work I hadn’t foreseen here, which was:

• When people dropped out, responding to them, removing them from the central spreadsheet and perhaps allocating their action to someone else;
• Replying to artists to clarify points they were unsure about, or to ask them to alter their submission to adhere to the guidelines;
• Chasing people who didn’t reply to the initial brief, to check whether they still wanted to be involved.