Webcomics can be a lonely road to walk if you’re only ever sticking to your own story. But collaborative projects with other creators can really be worth your time! Sometimes these take the form of printed or digital releases of books or zines.  Sometimes these are centered around a theme or fandom. Or sometimes they’re just “your-character-here” style single graphics. Folks have done all kinds of things over the years as collaborations, and for webcomic artists, it can not only be a ton of fun, but also be a way to cross-promote to similar audiences. So let’s talk about what you need to think about when starting your own collaborative projects.

In this Episode:




• What is your history with running or participating in collaborative projects?  What were some of your favorite ones?
• What challenges have you found with collaborations?
• What is your advice to someone who is looking to start a collaborative project, but isn’t sure what to do?

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Episode Release Date: April 23, 2025

Episode Credits:

Ally Rom Colthoff (@varethane) - she/they, chirault.sevensmith.net wychwoodcomic.com

Christina Major (@delphina2k) - she/her, sombulus.com

Renie Jesanis (@renieplayerone) - she/they, kateblast.com

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The Intro "DO IT (feat. Shia LaBeouf)", and the Outro "It's Good To See You Again!!", both by Adrianwave, have been used and modified in good faith under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licensed. Edits include: Fade IN/OUT, and a repeat added to the beginning of "It's Good To See You Again!!". For more information on this creative commons use, please reference https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.

Transcription

00:01.17

Renie

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Screen Tones, where we talk anything and everything webcomics. Today, we're going to be talking about collaborative projects.

00:13.04

Renie

I'm Renie, I use she/they pronouns, and I make the webcomic Aether Star.

00:17.72

Delphina

And I'm Delphina. I use she/her pronouns, and I make the webcomic Sombulus.

00:23.53

Varethane

And I'm Varethane, I use she/they pronouns, and I make the webcomics Chirault and Wychwood.

00:30.08

Renie

Yeah, webcomics can be a lonely road to walk if you're only ever sticking to your own story. But collaborative projects with other creators can really be worth your time. Sometimes these take the form of printed or digital releases of books or zines.

00:45.58

Renie

And sometimes these are centered around a theme or a fandom, or sometimes they're just a “your character here” style with simple graphics. Folks have done all kinds of things over the years as collaborations.

00:57.82

Renie

And for webcomic artists, it can be not only a ton of fun, but a great way to cross-promote your own webcomic to similar audiences. So let's talk about what you need to think about when starting your own collaborative projects.

01:12.09

Renie

So we'll start with you, Delphie. What sort of projects have you ran or participated in as far as collaborative works? And what were some of your favorite ones?

01:23.86

Delphina

Oh my gosh. I feel like I got into webcomics because specifically I wanted to be part of communities and part of community projects. So this is very near and dear to my heart.

01:36.60

Delphina

I feel like I've been a member of the SpiderForest Webcomic Collective for more than a decade now. Jesus.

01:48.23

Renie

Time.

01:49.08

Delphina

I know. And there's so many good collaborative projects over there that we've done over the past 13 years. So like, you know, you've got your standard Secret Santa sorts of things or someone will draw background and draw little positions for putting your characters in, and that's what we call a “your character here” (or YCH if you see that around). So those are fun little things. And I think I really like a space where some of those are going once a month or something like that because it's low stakes, it's low effort, you can kind of throw together things.

02:33.76

Delphina

There's also kind of holiday centric things. I know we've done page exchanges on April Fool's. So I have my webcomic. Somebody else has their webcomic. But on April Fool's Day, I draw a page of their webcomic and make a little joke or something and vice versa. And so we kind of post those and, you know, “We got a new artist, guys. Look at this thing.” So I think that's pretty fun, too, if you can

03:01.06

Delphina

make that work around April 1st. I'd also count group tables at conventions as a type of collaboration. I know at TCAF last year, we did a little stamp rally with some other artists, and so that was a little collaborative project.

03:20.14

Renie

Oh, I love the idea of the Stamp Rally. Like, one of my favorite things to do at conventions is the little scavenger hunt thing. So tying that into your and other webcomics is so fun.

03:36.80

Delphina

Yeah, yeah. And like, the idea is collaborating and making—guiding your audience to somebody else's place, right? And so there's that.

03:48.61

Delphina

Those are kind of smaller scale things, I would say. It's one day. Maybe you planned it for a month or so, but it's done after one day, and everybody has fun.

04:02.22

Delphina

I think there's also some longer type projects, or projects that involve money. Anthologies, we try to do those in SpiderForest quite a bit, where there's a few people who contribute small, short comics and we print them all in a book, in a physical book, in a digital book, and we run a little Kickstarter to fund the printing of that.

04:28.53

Delphina

So that takes a lot more coordination for sure. But the result is always really cool. And I think it has a lot of value because people sometimes are scared in the webcomic realm to dive into the print side of things, because they don't know about the specs or working with printers or running a crowdfund.

04:49.93

Delphina

So doing that as a team is kind of a nice way to get your feet wet when you're nervous about all of those aspects of things. And you can kind of see it in a little more personal level than just as a consumer.

05:03.08

Delphina

So that's a really valuable project too. Podcasts. Gosh, I don't know. I guess we do podcasts sometimes around here.

05:12.04

Renie

You think?

05:14.24

Delphina

And I personally have been on three different webcomic podcasts. So SpiderForest did have a webcomic podcast once upon a time. And we did little interviews and roundtable discussions for that.

05:29.95

Delphina

Webcomic Alliance was my second podcast. And that was mostly convention folks. But we had a little team of five people who got together every Wednesday and talked about a topic or whatever we were struggling with for a while. That was pretty fun, and of course Screen Tones!

05:49.16

Delphina

So these to me are really interesting! They don't have a set end date. We're not particularly making any money at this, but it's just so much fun to talk to other comic creators on a regular basis And I've heard so many great things from all of the podcast years that I've done where people just really appreciate a podcast episode. They know they're not alone or something like that. And so it's one of those things where you're making something for the community, but you're not necessarily seeing the impact of all the people it's reaching

06:34.56

Delphina

But it's so cool to see. I'm so proud of our community and everything we've done with you guys. It's so good. But yeah, just so many good things. I think on the money side of things,

06:52.38

Delphina

The Cartoonist Co-op has been doing some things. I am a member of the Cartoonist Co-op and they do Itch.io bundles where people contribute digital comics to group, like a bundle.

07:08.68

Delphina

And so you have a specific timeframe where you're selling this bundle and everybody gets a little cut of the money.

07:20.03

Delphina

That was a really cool experience. I'd never done that before and it actually worked pretty smoothly. And another pretty unique one that I was part of a while back, I guess last year now, was the Booktopia event with Backerkit. So Backerkit is kind of moving into the same space as Kickstarter. People can fund projects on there similar to Kickstarter, but Backerkit is really working on the collaborative angle of doing campaigns. And so you can actually be part of their Topia events. And they've got Pintopia, they've got Booktopia, they've got Comictopia, and they gather 20 or so people who all run a campaign at the same time and all offer

08:12.73

Delphina

cross-collaborative awards. So if you back my campaign and you back this other guy's campaign, you get you unlock a little special thing for your—that's available only to people who back both.

08:26.07

Renie

Special combo!

08:30.78

Renie

That's really cool! my god.

08:32.09

Delphina

Yeah it's a combo thing, I'd never heard of that before. But I think it's, yeah, I think it's really unique compared to Kickstarter because it does feel like Kickstarter is more like you're competing with other people maybe, or maybe there's some cross collaboration things if you can reach out to somebody and say, “Hey, can you mention me in your update?”

08:49.02

Delphina

But I think that's the differentiator that Backerkit’s going for, is they want to be collaborative. And so they have opened up tools, even if you're not part of their Topia events where you and another person can say, “Hey, we're linked and we want to link our accounts. So keep track of who backs both of our campaigns and we'll do a special thing.”

09:11.51

Delphina

So I think that's pretty cool on the collaboration front as well, and something that I hope more comic people take advantage of.

09:23.36

Varethane

The book bundle thing is a really neat idea. I think actually way back in the day, SpiderForest did one of those too. And more recently, the Chimera Comics Collective did an itch.io book bundle that worked really well. It's a great way to kind of collect people together.

09:42.16

Varethane

it's a bit of logistical work to kind of get everything organized there. But otherwise, it's usually stuff people have already. And that's a neat promotional tool. For my own history of these things, I feel like I'm doubling up on a lot of what Delphie has done because of the SpiderForest thing.

10:00.49

Varethane

There's just so many SpiderForest projects that are very collaborative and interesting. Like the anthologies way back in the time of the dinosaurs, I helped out with kind of getting the first one.

10:15.13

Varethane

I did pre-press and stuff like that, and contributed stories to, I think the first five, but not the sixth. Mostly just helping out with them, like running the Kickstarters and stuff like that.

10:29.73

Varethane

I also—the TCAF stamp rally was a ton of fun. It was really not a lot of work. I did the stamp printing, organized that locally, which was probably the most kind of out there thing.

10:47.11

Varethane

And then the rest of it was basically just like, “Let's print some flyers, make sure everybody has a stamp,” and then just kind of put the flyers somewhere that con attendees could find, and then they will just find us. And it worked really well! People kept coming up with the flyers, and people would come just to, like—they really wanted to fill the sheet.

11:08.19

Varethane

It was like collecting Pokemon. It scratched that itch for them. So that was a ton of fun. There was one other project that I organized along with Krispy, which is these little zines.

11:23.72

Varethane

We used the name Sevensmith to kind of publish them, which is my old website handle. And the basic idea was just that we would pick a theme that we were really interested in, that we knew a lot of our artist friends were also interested in.

11:36.79

Varethane

And we would just all do an illustration about those themes. And we used—the themes in particular were like “Battle Damage” and “Death and Decay.”

11:50.11

Varethane

It was basically letting people just run wild with their unhinged interests and then collect it together into little books. So we did small Kickstarters for each one. Nothing too elaborate with these, just little stapled volumes that would have one illustration per person. And I think there were only about

12:15.27

Varethane

16 in one and 19 in the other. So they weren't very long either. But really beautiful stuff got put together for them. And it's just very nice to kind of see something at the end of that.

12:27.00

Varethane

And then, of course, there's Screen Tones. This little known, you might not have heard of it, podcast. Yeah, they've been a ton of fun.

12:38.05

Delphina

Yeah, I think the zines too are cool. Like, again, because you have something that you can put on your table if maybe you're just starting out with conventions and you're not really sure about how to get books together, or you only have your one webcomic series and that's it. So if somebody's not interested in that, there's nothing else there.

12:59.72

Delphina

Zines are so cool. I feel like I always want to get involved in more of them and then I don't.

13:08.31

Renie

And zines can be a very low barrier entry first for certain types of zines and zine festivals. I know a lot of more the underground zine festivals.

13:23.12

Renie

You can basically just make a zine on whatever you want. Whether it's like, “I really like these characters from the show I like, so here's a side story about it.” Or, “Here's an artsy piece about politics or whatever.”

13:39.21

Renie

And you can do whatever you want with zines. And they're just folded pieces of paper. So they're very low cost, low stakes entry point for a lot of people into different types of projects.

13:53.61

Varethane

Yeah, we deliberately—like with those zines, our goal was like, they weren't comics. It wasn't like “do a whole short story”. We wanted to keep things pretty low pressure for the creators who were getting involved in it, especially because we knew that it was not going to make enough money that we could pay people beyond sending all the contributors copies of the zines as, “here's your reward, thank you.”

14:19.06

Renie

Yeah.

14:19.20

Varethane

So just one-off illustrations, one page, cool picture of something that you already like. We're going to put it together and at the end have a big credits list. So it kind of functions as a cross promo as well.

14:32.03

Varethane

And yeah, it went over pretty well, I think. A lot of fun.

14:35.68

Renie

Yeah It definitely looked it. I know for myself, I’ve been more active in the anthology side of things. I was one of three editors on two different projects, both with the Boston Comics Roundtable.

14:53.40

Renie

One of them was an anthology called Being True, which was a compilation of different stories, fiction, nonfiction, all around the theme of being true.

15:08.63

Renie

And the other one was Starbound, which was same sort of premise, but with, you know, a space theme for sci-fi, and looking to the stars.

15:20.08

Renie

And both of those were intended as projects that were to be printed, and that creators would make some money from it. It wasn't much.

15:30.60

Renie

It ended up being pizza money, but there was an expectation that if you contributed to those anthologies, you were going to get paid. So there was a certain level of pressure added to that.

15:44.77

Renie

Which, for those works, we curated those with a specific plan for, you know, what we were going to be selling at conventions, what each creator would get, each creative team, what expectations were, and did the work sort of fit the overall themes of each of those projects.

16:09.81

Renie

And the key thing for that was it was a collaboration on multiple different levels. As far as we had the team of three of us running the actual behind-the-scenes organizing and doing the editorial part, actually reviewing each comic and helping people sort of keep things on track, and then collaborating with many different creators, some of which were in different countries and had different sort of backgrounds and setups for their work.

16:45.30

Renie

So it was a lot of fun, despite how many times I wanted to pull my hair out. But I...

16:52.19

Delphina

It's so much.

16:53.21

Renie

I feel like with every collaborative project, there are multiple different phases where it's… you enter with excitement and it starts climbing and you're riding the wave. It's great.

17:07.97

Renie

And then you reach funding stage and it becomes stressful. And then by the end of that, you're like, “I just want this book out of my house.” And then about a year later, you're like, “yeah, I want to do that again.”

17:24.23

Delphina

The cycle continues.

17:25.54

Varethane

In fairness, I go through that cycle even with my own projects that are not collaborative.

17:29.86

Renie

It's so true. But yeah, so I have a lot of experience based on those anthology projects.

17:40.53

Renie

And those were, you know, mostly on a local basis. So, but we also worked with people online and people we didn't know.

17:51.79

Renie

So it's, you know, you don't want to be too afraid to sort of open up and broaden the appeal for your work and for who you want to be represented in it based on what your goals are for the work.

18:12.03

Delphina

Yeah, absolutely. It's just… everyone's got something different going on in life, right? So it's just trying to keep everything together and keep everybody aligned. That's so important.

18:26.02

Renie

Yeah, you know, the herding cats is the phrase of many a collaborative team. And on that, I guess we'll move on to our next question, which is what sort of—what are the biggest challenges that you faced in getting your collaborations across the finish line?

18:48.25

Delphina

Okay, so for me, it all boils down to communication, I feel like. Because the first thing is, if you're leading a project and other people are following the same pattern, people need to know technical things like the size of the thing, the resolution they need to work at,

19:09.43

Delphina

the deadlines that they need to meet. And you're going to have to tell them over and over again in various different ways. So working out how that's going to happen, if that's going to be a group email or something, is the most important challenge to address right off the bat, because otherwise people are going to be kind of… you're going to run into one of two things. You're going to go radio silent and everyone's going to forget, or you're gonna go a little too hard on things and just do these, “The deadline approaches! Where was your stuff?”

19:47.49

Delphina

And that can be a little demoralizing and make everything a little harder. And especially for collaborations where there's no significant money involved,

20:00.66

Delphina

people start getting what I call “wiggly.” Like, ”Oh, you know, I know I said I would do this thing, but I'm not done with the thing. It isn't coming together super easily for me."

20:11.77

Delphina

There's a lot of other things in my life right now. And this is looking more and more like something I want to drop.” So they start wiggling. They want to wiggle out. And this is normal. We're human.

20:22.55

Delphina

That's going to happen and like in anything, you do have to expect it. And you know, even the most reliable person in the world, there are some life situations that cannot be foreseen and will take somebody's availability away.

20:38.69

Delphina

So, just knowing that going in is something that will preserve your sanity as an organizer of a collaborative project and not feel like you're doing a bad job or something like that.

20:57.55

Delphina

But communication is definitely going to help with that. And yeah, morale is another challenge. Things are gonna take a while sometimes, especially if you have a really big idea, like for a zine or an anthology or

21:17.29

Delphina

something with a non-defined deadline. It's going to keep going and people are going to have stuff to do and it's not going to be as cool and shiny anymore at some point. And so you do have a role as a organizer to keep things exciting, change things up when you need a breath of fresh air or you need to take the project in a new direction that makes everybody excited about it again. And I think the other thing too is, a challenge can be when you think that it's all on you, as the person who came up with this idea

22:03.16

Delphina

to bust through it, to take charge, to make all the decisions. But the beauty of collaborative projects is that there's a lot of other people involved.

22:17.09

Delphina

You're asking for help from other people who are intelligent and that you respect on some level. And so I think you can make a big mistake by isolating yourself from them or pretending that you're the boss and they're the employees or something. I think I see it a little bit sometimes when people feel like they're the ones who are like, “Well, I'm doing everything around here and you guys aren't doing anything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you can't go in with that. You absolutely cannot. You have to make sure that everybody feels

22:56.69

Delphina

valued and respected and that we're all sitting at the same table trying to achieve the same goal. And that can be challenging.

23:10.91

Varethane

Yeah, I think the stamina is definitely the biggest, like probably the single biggest challenge that goes through it, because it's very easy to stay excited in a project during the honeymoon phase when it's all new.

23:24.32

Varethane

And you're just like, “Wow, the potential of this thing, it's going to be so cool.”

23:29.19

Renie

Ooh, shiny.

23:29.32

Varethane

And you've got those daydreams, a beautiful glittery shape to move towards. As soon as it actually starts taking shape, that's when it starts feeling a lot less glamorous and a lot more like work.

23:41.60

Varethane

And that tends to be when people start to have their—their energy starts to flag. Like there's other projects coming up. There's life. Everybody's got to live their life. And things are generally going to like—

23:55.17

Varethane

It'll appear like things are slowing down. People might need a bit more poking to stay involved in things. For the most part, making sure to have a plan for communication is probably the best way to kind of keep that up. Scheduling communications in advance, just making sure things are still rolling, that those reminders do ultimately go out.

24:20.33

Varethane

Because especially if you're the organizer of the thing, if you disappear, that's a big problem for everybody else. So staying in touch with everybody is huge. I think generally for marketing as well, it follows a lot of the same kind of trends as that. You can make a beautiful, shiny graphic for it that gets everybody like, “Wow, I'm so pumped for this. This is going to be so cool.”

24:45.73

Varethane

But to actually keep your project in front of the public and to get eyes on it and to keep that attention and interest, especially during—both during the campaign itself, but also throughout, how do you keep coming up with more messages for that? So thinking about that kind of ahead of time is going to be good.

25:07.61

Varethane

So, marketing as well. Another thing that is going to be a headache for any project that takes physical form, it's like the shipping side of things, once you have your amazing project printed.

25:23.09

Varethane

I find that that tends to be where people also tend to run into the biggest problems, especially if you're new to the whole thing.

25:34.44

Varethane

Like, how are you going to package this thing? Also, something to keep in mind is that a lot of postal services often raise their rates.

25:45.51

Varethane

And they do it once a year usually, but some other times a year, at other points. So if you do a campaign in the fall and then ship it after January, there's a good chance that the rates will have gone up since you charged people for that shipping.

26:05.34

Varethane

And keeping that in mind, building a little bit of padding into those numbers is going to be a good idea. If you're doing something that involves financial spending like a crowdfunder and you're going to have to pay for shipping and you're going to have to pay for printing all these things,

26:24.58

Varethane

it is a really good idea just to make sure that you're personally in a good financial place or at least an okay financial place before jumping into that.

26:36.34

Varethane

‘Cause if there is any shortfall, it's possible for the campaign to make every single goal and you still end up having to pay out of pocket for some of the shipping because things go up, packages bounce, unexpected expenses come up. So, just make sure that you have a plan to deal with that ahead of time.

26:58.17

Renie

And piggybacking on that, if you are doing a multi-year project where you are paying collaborators or there's a financial element where, like say, you do a crowdfunding campaign and get a large check coming into your account base for the project,

27:21.06

Renie

depending on where you live, you may have tax implications on that. So, making sure that as you're man at going through that, keep every receipt and keep every payment to people because each of those things are things that you can deduct on the taxes or manage as far as making sure that the finances stay stable.

27:45.29

Renie

And that includes shipping.

27:49.89

Delphina

Yeah, I think that's the thing. You do have to have a financial person. It doesn't have to be the person running the show, but it has to be somebody that everybody trusts because you will kind of need to take personal responsibility for getting the money and using the money

28:07.63

Delphina

in your Paypal or your checking account. And sometimes it also means fronting some money even if you're going to be reimbursed later. So to echo what Thane was saying, make sure that you're in an okay financial spot where that's not going to financially ruin you, and just again with the communication. People get really nervous about money. People get really nervous about when they're being paid. And if they're not being paid when they were told they were going to be paid, that can really destroy trust. So being as open as possible, like, “Okay, we haven't received the money from the Kickstarter yet. I will let you guys know when we do.

28:52.50

Delphina

And this is the plan going forward. First, we're going to buy the books, then we're going to buy the shipping things, then we're going to be mailing things, and then we're going to be paying you. So we'll keep you updated every step of the way.” That can do a lot financially for that kind of trust.

29:09.22

Renie

Yeah, and I think that leads sort of into my biggest challenge that I've had, is making sure that that plan actually is sort of... Managing all the different moving parts of the project is very difficult.

29:27.27

Renie

So going into the project with any of the collaborators you’re going on, it's always important to have a solid plan and have it written down and have that plan be specific. Like say you want the inks submitted after the pencils.

29:48.59

Renie

Like, okay, duh. But when do you want the inks? Do you want the inks from them on next Tuesday at midnight? Or do you want them in 2077? Be specific.

30:00.49

Renie

Because if you are not specific, people will not follow it. And it's just human nature.

30:15.81

Varethane

Oh, I just wanted to mention that the other—another challenge that I personally ran into, which is probably a bit different from the other two here is just that I'm in Canada.

30:26.65

Varethane

And so a lot of the financial side of things and the shipping and fulfillment side of things—most people who buy things online, in general, not just from Kickstarters but from everything, like all the stores and whatnot, are largely based in the US, which means that almost all of my shipments are international. So I have to make sure to take that into account.

30:49.99

Varethane

My dollar does not go as far. And I'm going to have to—basically, I assume from the get go that about 90% or more of my sales are going to be across an international border.

31:06.40

Varethane

So that's been something that I just have to think about and take into account and plan these things.

31:10.88

Renie

Oh, a thousand percent. And I know that's the case with—I know a lot of creators in the UK and Europe have similar issues as far as getting your work into people's hands. And part of that that I've found is getting copies to your creators is important. And I know one of my projects was during the pandemic where shipping these books to like Australia was very difficult at points, but it's important to have that plan in place,

31:50.26

Renie

where someone's going to place an order and it's going to be shipped to a place that has 200% higher shipping costs than you anticipated.

32:03.25

Renie

But as was mentioned earlier, if you have that buffer, you can absorb it. Whereas if you don't plan on that buffer, it's going to be tight.

32:17.19

Delphina

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that was really attractive to me. I mentioned a little bit about BackerKit and itch.io too. It's just like, you can kind of circumvent some of the personal responsibility of that when you have a platform that allows individual accounts contribute to the group goal, because then everybody is kind of responsible for their own taxes, responsible for their own shipping, or in the case of itch.io, it's all digital and you don't have to worry about that. So those are some things too, if that aspect makes you nervous.

32:57.63

Renie

Which I guess, that brings us to our last question, which I guess is, what is your advice to someone who's looking to start a collaborative project but isn't really sure what to do?

33:09.50

Renie

Delphie.

33:11.71

Delphina

All right, so I think you kind of have to establish some roles. The coordinator, who is kind of the person with the vision and the person who wants to spearhead what the project should be, or at the very least, the one person who has the calendar in front of them at all times and will be able to make the final call as new decisions need to be made.

33:33.76

Delphina

We talked about the financial person, the person that you trust the most with the money, if that is a thing that you're doing. If you're nervous about that, don't do a thing with money, I think.

33:44.71

Renie

That's great advice.

33:46.06

Delphina

Yeah. There's also kind of, what I'm going to lump into as the editor role. This is going to mean different things depending on the kind of project, but someone who is doing the technical setup work to get it out there. So podcasts need audio editors. Anything with a website needs a website editor. Crowdfunds need someone to write the text and make the pictures that appear on the page and post them up there. Printed projects need someone with Affinity or InDesign assembling the book files. Like, there's the person who has to do the

34:21.51

Delphina

assembly in some way, whatever that means for that kind of project. So that could be one person and that could be a team of people. It's good to split that part up, I think. You've got the internal communications, the person who lets all the participants know of what's going on in the official updates. And in creative projects, you might have a work in progress space. I think that's actually a really good idea to encourage asking questions or showing progress if anybody is, along the way, wondering what's going on—

35:00.25

Delphina

both to keep everyone's expectations aligned and also to have this morale boost as, “Hey, things are happening, this project is not dead in the water.” And maybe this is a little passive reminder that I need to make progress on the project if I haven't done so already.

35:18.63

Delphina

And then separate from internal communications, I think there's an external communications role. If a project needs outside support to happen, either because you need to attract new artists to contribute to your zine or you need buyers to buy the zine or your bundle or whatever.

35:37.97

Delphina

So this person might have to take control of an existing social media account or make a new one, source pictures and words for posts for that, and schedule them up so that the supporters of your project know what's happening. So those are kind of the main roles that I would define as—get those clarified for you, split them up as effectively as you can.

36:08.79

Delphina

And that's going to make your life easier than just stumbling in and saying, “I want to do a thing,” not necessarily knowing all the pieces, how the pieces will come together.

36:21.63

Delphina

And I think the other thing is morale. I feel like longer term projects, people do genuinely want to keep their word and do the thing that they signed up to do.

36:33.38

Delphina

And they signed up because they believed it would be good or fun. And the more you can remind them of those reasons, the easier time they'll have. So I think the first thing is to create an environment where you're regularly reminding people, “This is a good and fun project.

36:52.24

Delphina

And even though there are responsibilities, it's not meant to be a chore or a source of pressure. We're all doing this because we feel like it's worth doing on some level.” Work in progress spaces help with that. I would definitely make a habit of regularly showing your enthusiasm for people's work on an individual basis.

37:11.52

Delphina

The goal is to make everyone feel like their contribution is being positively noticed because people get into the mindset that when they're too absent or far behind, they're being negatively noticed.

37:25.46

Delphina

And that's just going to compound everything with this guilt and shame, which are the very worst motivators that you want on a collaborative project. Do not go for guilt or shame. It's not good.

37:36.05

Delphina

Things you can do is, work on your tone as an organizer when you yourself are behind or maybe feeling discouraged.

37:46.64

Delphina

You want to stay as optimistic as you can. You want to emphasize the progress that you've made. You want to highlight the things that are going well so that everybody feels like stuff really is going to happen and the work that they have done is being noticed and appreciated.

38:03.48

Delphina

But you're human. You're not perfect. Sometimes things are going to fall behind. And so in those cases, I like giving options.

38:16.95

Delphina

Like, “Hey... We're a little bit behind on this. We're trying to decide on a direction to keep moving forward. So maybe here's a few options. Option A, if we just don't have the bandwidth right now, we could drop this part of the project entirely.

38:31.52

Delphina

Option B, if everyone is behind but feels like another couple of weeks would make a big difference, we can push back the deadline. Or option C, if someone feels like they have availability this week to make a 500 by 500 pixel banner and write a paragraph of copy, we can still stick with our original plan.

38:51.19

Delphina

Thoughts and feedback are welcome.” And this tells people, I don't have all the answers. And I don't expect you to either. We are all equals at this table trying to figure this out.

39:02.41

Delphina

And I feel like that just gives a nice little air-clearing aura, that you're not really interested in blaming anyone. You're just looking for a discussion on the best way forward. And I feel like people like being invited to solve a problem or feel like their opinion matters.

39:21.12

Delphina

So folks who are coming in with no bandwidth for ideas can just say, “Well, I like that second option you said.” Or someone might come up with something better that you hadn't even thought of.

39:32.60

Delphina

So just being attentive when you're in a situation like that can go a long way.

39:43.26

Delphina

And making sure that you keep it a collaborative process in all stages, I think, goes a long way.

39:53.42

Varethane

It's funny because, I mean, we're talking about collaborative projects and definitely, making sure to give your collaborators room to use their own strengths, both for the work that they're making for the project itself—obviously, you want them to, like, you know, make a nice art if that's the thing that's being made.

40:13.17

Varethane

But also organizationally, especially if it's your first ever project and one of your collaborators turns out to have experience in some side of the whole thing that you don't have experience in, using the strengths of multiple people together to make something bigger than you could do alone is the biggest reason to do a collaborative thing in the first place. So definitely, making sure to keep room for that kind of thing to come up. Have conversations with the people that you're working with about the shape of the thing that you're going to make together.

40:49.47

Varethane

I think trying to be too strict about things when it's your first time running it would be kind of a mistake. So just try to work with the people that you're in this with.

41:00.61

Varethane

My other kind of piece of advice for collaborative stuff is to try to keep things as compact and small as possible,

41:11.62

Varethane

especially when it comes to the timeline. Part of the intent with the zines that I was running was that I wanted to have something that could go from project inception to a finished thing that was in the hands of the Kickstarter backers within less than a year.

41:32.83

Varethane

Eight months was usually the goal for basically completion, ten months for everything being fulfilled. And we did meet that each time. It was mostly just keeping an eye on like the scope of the thing and setting down a timeline before we even approached people about, “Here's when we want the art by, here's when the campaign is going to go up, here's when the thing is going to be printed, and here's when it's going to be sent out to people.”

42:01.02

Varethane

And keeping those dates as close together as we could without making things impossible for the collaborators, because it was a one-page illustration, definitely that side of things was less lengthy than it would have needed to be if we were doing multi-page short stories or something.

42:17.84

Varethane

But the tighter the project is, the less you'll need to worry about that stamina thing, about people kind of running out of morale.

42:29.46

Varethane

And you can kind of take advantage of that initial burst of energy and ride on it for most of the project instead of riding on it for 5% of the project and then spending 90% of your time in the slog of the middle where everybody's like, “Ah, this is a lot of work and I don't see where we're going yet.”

42:48.57

Varethane

So that's something to keep in mind. Generally, especially when you're getting started, don't jump straight into a, “We're going to do like a 200-page anthology and it's going to get a hundred million, a hundred dollars on Kickstarter,” whatever, a huge thing, that's going to be a lot,

43:07.58

Varethane

so…

43:09.90

Renie

I totally agree. And I think that part of that is also making sure that people get involved at the right stage. So, you may have an idea for a project, and rather than tell everybody, “Yeah, we need to get on this project now.

43:28.36

Renie

And I discovered this idea like 10 minutes ago,” it's sit down and take time to sort of come up with your plan. And then when you're at the phase where you're, “Okay, I am ready to start actually getting into the meat of the work,”

43:43.77

Renie

that's when you get a lot of the other participants involved so that you can keep that excitement and attention immediately, and keep that focused.

44:16.87

Renie

And the biggest thing for me, for keeping focus, is making sure that you have what you need when you need it. One of the biggest challenges that I think a lot of new collaborative work creators have is getting into the weeds of it and then discovering, “Oh, wait, in order to do this step, we needed to have three others done a week ago.”

44:37.32

Renie

And then you'll get into the project and that's when delays start happening. So I think one thing that you can do is, ahead of time, plan out, “Okay, what's the critical path for what we need to get from point A to point B?”

44:56.77

Renie

For instance, you can't start printing books without the work. Or you can't start a Kickstarter without X. Different things like that, that you can identify that, “Okay, this is going to be a point of contention, not contention, but a point where delays could start.”

45:15.99

Renie

And those are the things you start prioritizing early. And the other part of that is making sure that everybody on the team knows the dates and knows what the expectations are.

45:31.53

Delphina

Yeah, for sure. I feel like being clear about that just makes you look like you're together and again, helps with the morale because if you're floundering a lot, it makes people question like, “Hmm, you know, maybe you didn't have a good idea.

45:48.36

Delphina

Maybe this wasn't something you were ready to do. And I'm starting not to trust you with my time or my money or anything like that.”

45:59.46

Renie

Yep, exactly. And one way that you can sort of get ahead of that is, you know, we didn't have a formal contract process when I made Being True.

46:11.99

Renie

And there were a couple of points in that, from getting that project done, where, boy, that was annoying that we hadn't done that. And it ended up making even the process of paying certain people arduous. We ended up paying everybody, but there were some people that didn't give addresses or didn't—or, you know, filled out the form kind of jokingly.

46:35.00

Renie

So for Starbound, we went in with a short contract. It didn't have any real fancy language. It said, “Hey, I want to participate in this. Here is

46:46.81

Renie

what the plan is, what the dates are, what financial incentives are in there for both the creator and the editorial team.

46:58.47

Renie

And it just helps things feel way more professional and people will bring their best work when they have that. And I think being like, “Wow, I signed a contract for this.

47:10.14

Renie

This is cool.” It adds to the cool factor for your work and helps keep morale going.

47:19.89

Delphina

Yeah, just having your act together. People like being part of something that's professional. And I feel like, especially in the space of webcomics, it's easy to feel like, “Oh, I'm working on my little story with my little guys and it's like a fun time and stuff.” And we're not necessarily

47:42.55

Delphina

being recognized by publishers, we're not getting on bestseller lists, we're not making a lot of money. So collaborative projects are kind of one area where we're like, “Yeah, actually, we're all doing something kind of cool here, guys, let's celebrate that.

47:59.85

Delphina

Let's recognize it.” I think that's so amazing.

48:02.43

Renie

It's always good to recognize that. And part of that, too, is when you're done, if you're really happy with the end product, don't be afraid to boast about it or, not boast about it, but celebrate it.

48:15.82

Renie

And, you know there's lots of different small award programs out there for different tiers. You could submit your work for things like that. And even just submitting can be a fun experience. I've been fortunate that Being True was selected as a runner-up for a Prism Award once.

48:35.97

Renie

And that was just amazing to just be like, wow, even considered. And I didn’t even think—like a year prior to that, I was just like, “Yeah, this is just going to be a fun little project I do.”

48:39.98

Delphina

Yeah.

48:46.96

Renie

But if you take your time to execute it right, you can really celebrate a ton of people's work. And it's super rewarding. And I know for me that running the crowdfunding campaigns for both of those two projects were some of the most stressful months of my life.

49:07.09

Renie

Because like Delphie said, whereas if it's a crowdfunding for my own project where it's like, “it's just little old me, you know, if it doesn't work, it'll be fine.” Whereas, you know, for a collaborative project, it's, “Okay, I really want this to succeed because if this succeeds, all these people succeed.”

49:25.68

Renie

And it's a really good feeling when you get across that finish line and can share other people's work like that. It's such a rewarding experience.

49:38.39

Delphina

Yeah, I agree. It's just, I don't know. I feel like we have a very unique situation where we have a lot of communication tools in the internet. And yeah, we should use those! We should collaborate! We should make cool stuff!

49:55.22

Delphina

There's no reason not to. And I don't know if it's just my brain, but sometimes I have trouble just celebrating the things I do for me. But absolutely, if I'm rooting for a team, I'm like, “Okay, we have initiated the tribalism.

50:10.24

Delphina

Let's go.”

50:10.41

Renie

Exactly, exactly. Tap into that in positive ways.

50:15.78

Delphina

Yes.

50:23.22

Renie

With that, I think we'll end on a positive note here and call this a bacon, lettuce, cheddar wrap. I've been Renie. You can read my work at aetherstarcomic.com

50:34.56

Delphina

And I've been Delphina, and you can read my comic, Sombulus, at sombulus.com.

50:40.74

Varethane

And I'm Varethane. You can read my comics at chirault.sevensmith.net and wychwoodcomic.com.

50:49.87

Renie

Now get out there and collaborate.

50:52.43

Delphina

Yeah, let's make some pizza money.

50:53.09

Renie

Start the party!

50:54.22

Delphina

Yeah!

50:55.68

Varethane

Let's make a 300-page anthology.

50:58.10

Delphina

Yeah, sounds great.

50:59.42

Renie

Yes, let's.

51:00.15

Delphina

You're going to do all the work, right?

51:01.88

Renie

yeah

51:04.64

Varethane

I’ll get back to you.