patronage – Lucy Bellwood

Okay, listen: I’ve been pretty consumed lately with barking up my own mental redwood tree about patronage and interdependent communities and what it means to try and support artists during late-stage capitalism, but this morning I got an email from my friend Luke Kruger-Howard that felt like turning around and realizing that this isn’t just one goddamn redwood. There’s a whole forest out there.

Luke’s email (and it was an email, addressed tenderly to many friends, which is the kind of thing I love getting) announced a new physical publication (Goes #1), released under the aegis of a new publisher (Goes Books), but it stopped me in my tracks because there was something different going on.

He wasn’t running a crowdfunding campaign. He wasn’t encouraging people to preorder. He wasn’t even asking for money.

Instead, I got to read this sentence:

This comic will be free for all readers, gifted by other anonymous readers along the way.

Hear that? It’s the sound of my heart exploding.

The only encouragement in the email, beyond asking people to talk about it which, like, DUH OF COURSE HOW COULD I NOT TALK ABOUT THIS I WILL NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT THIS, is to sign up to receive a free copy of the comic in the mail. That’s it. 2,000 copies of this new beauty are headed into the world and they will all be gifts. I already have so many questions! Is there a Mysterious Benefactor who financed the initial print run so that, potentially, every copy could simply be given away even if nobody chose to pay it forward? Or is there no initial capital beyond Luke’s own savings and this is just a massive trust fall? Is it more or less of a trust fall than running a Kickstarter?

Whatever the answer, I’ve never rushed to give somebody $20 faster in my life.

In the delightfully-illustrated financial transparency page, Luke writes:

This is an investment in the relationship between artist and reader—between stranger and stranger. Financial profit is not possible here.

The comic will always be free.

The comic will always be free.

A screenshot of the Goes Books website with the title Pay It Forward.
The body text reads: would you like to gift a copy of goes to another stranger or strangers? simply use the button below to pay with paypal or credit card. no financial profit is had in the making or distribution of
these books. money received by goes books will be put toward gifting copies of these books to other readers. any money earned beyond that will be donated to charity. it takes about $4 to make and send a copy of goes to a stranger - more or less than that is perfectly wonderful, friend. <3

Oh yeah also P.S. any money raised beyond what’s needed to pay forward all copies of the comic will be donated to RAICES. HELL YES TO THIS.

I’m going to save all the other yelling I want to do about this for Friday because you can bet your ass I texted Luke the moment I finished reading the email and begged him to sit down for an interview. If there are things you’re interested in hearing us talk about, let me know.

So some of you may have heard of this fancy new service called…

In a nutshell, Patreon is a platform that allows fans to directly support creators they love on an ongoing basis. As a full-time freelancer, a ton of my time and energy goes into taking client work that will help me pay my bills and keep a roof over my head. Because of this, my passion projects often end up on the back burner — which bothers me because I’m sure those projects are exactly the kind of content that led you to me in the first place, and it’s the kind of content that I would really love to be pumping out for your enjoyment every month. Fortunately, Patreon has an answer to this conundrum. Here’s my project video to tell you a little about how it works:

If you aren’t able to watch the video right now, here’s the gist:

On my page you can pledge to send an amount of money my way every 30 days — it could be fifty cents, it could be forty bucks — and in exchange you get access to sweet behind-the-scenes action, special PDF downloads, or even a handwritten postcard from me every month. This ongoing support allows me to devote more time to creating the comics I want to share with you the most, and hopefully gives you a neat opportunity to see what my process is like from the back end.

Sound interesting? Then…

I am super excited about the possibilities of this platform, and I’m really eager to start sharing parts of my process that I generally don’t talk about online through the Patrons-Only Process Blog. If you enjoy my work and would like to see more of it in the future, check out the page! I would love to hear what you think of it.

Thank you so much, everyone!

Tag: patronage

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Patreon is Here!