If first you don’t succeed….
If you’ve been following the Sullivan’s Slugger’s controversy—catch up here and here—you know that writer Mark Andrew Smith has gotten a lot of criticism over his handling of the fulfillment of last year’s $97k Kickstarter for the story about a minor league baseball team going up against a monster invasion. Among the problems: stores got copies before paying customers, international customers still hadn’t gotten theirs and artist James Stokoe has disavowed the book, prompting writer Smith to accuse him of ending his marriage via stress among other things.
Last month Smith started a second kickstarter for SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS, with the stated goal of raising money to pay for international shipping on the first kickstarter. The mechanism for this was simply selling MORE copies of SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS, which goes against the general rules of Kickstarter. Amid outcry, the campaign was suspended a few days in.
But now Smith is back with an Indiegogo campaignto raise the international shipping money
The book grew in size/uprgrades to an omnibus edition and the costs of shipping (3.5 lbs) jumped up a lot with the extra weight. International shipping prices from the USPS skyrocketed this year as well.
I didn't freight directly from China to the UK, EU, and AU which would have saved a lot of time and money and now I have to freight the books from California to these destinations. All of these factors added up to a huge price jump.
I need to raise more funds to get the book to international backers. That's where you come in.
The campaign is asking for
$16,000 — just how many international copies did he sell anyway? Well, let’s do some spitballing. Admittedly, it is expensive to ship a 3.5 lb book overseas — perhaps as much as $40. So $16,000 would ship 400 books, and if you look at
the original Kickstarter under “International edition” there are 387 orders—so that kinda checks out. Except that in the same price bracket are people who chose to get a print with their copy of the book, so we’ll never know just how many of those 387 are international and how many are orders for a print.
It’s clear that the new campaign is also geared towards selling more copies of the book: Smith’s Indiegogo includes the same level of retailer orders as the last Kickstarter — $500 gets you 24 copies of the book, $1000 gets you a 60-pack.
Meanwhile, some purchasers took to Twitter to complain:
According to his Twitter feed, White is from Newfoundland, so this would come under the dreaded international orders.
This whole matter doesn’t seem to be getting cleaned up any time soon. After Smith’s mishandling of the earlier campaign, at the very least hecould be more transparent about how much money he needs to raise for international shipping. And those customers who paid for their books should get them, regardless.
More to come, we’re sure….
Well, that didn’t take long. The SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS thing we reported on a little while ago has now blown up everywhere.
First off, Kickstarter has suspended the campaign, which seemed to be being used for selling new stock, which is against Kickstarter rules:
Hi there,
This is a message from Kickstarter Support. We’re writing to inform you that a project you backed, ‘Sullivan’s Sluggers’, Baseball Horror Graphic Novel Ext. KS, has been suspended by Kickstarter. Your $35.00 pledge has been automatically canceled and you will not be charged. No further action is necessary.
As a policy, Kickstarter does not comment on specific reasons for a project’s suspension to the creator or backers, but included below is information from our FAQ regarding suspensions. Project suspensions are not reversible.
Thanks, Kickstarter
But before that, writer Mark Andrew Smith released a statement rebutting artist James Stokoe’s distancing himself from the campaign, blaming Stokoe’s lateness for everything from ending Smith’s marriage to…kicking his cat.
I hired James Stokoe for Sullivan’s years ago starting in 2009, and then he’d go missing for months and months at a time, one year turning in about 8 pages total. 8 pages in one year! That said, I was foolish enough to bet the house on Sullivan’s Sluggers with Stokoe and things didn’t go at all to plan with the schedule. That said, I’ve been trying to make the tastiest lemonade from three years of James Stokoe lemons.
My life fell apart and took all kinds of turns because of Stokoe’s pace with the book. It was fuel for the fire of me getting divorced in Korea because of money and trying to turn comics into a career and having prospects other than being an English teacher forever in South Korea. So I’ve suffered enough.
Stokoe was a grown man, he agreed to do a job for a certain amount like many of you do every day, and took three years to finish that job which was only to deliver art for the book. He was paid for the job in full. I offered to pay more but he declined. I don’t look at him like a brilliant artist but more as someone that built a house for me, finished, and moved on to what’s next. If things went smoother on the book that wouldn’t be the case but they didn’t.
I can understand the sting on his end from the perception that this Kickstarter made a billion dollars and that people think I should write him a check for half of it but this guy ruined my life. No one cares when books don’t make any money which most of mine haven’t for the past ten years under Image.
Any project that takes three years to get turned in is going to have it’s amount of bad blood. It was absolute hell for me on my end, and it’s a shame that people continue to make it a hell for me saying that I ripped him off and by spreading the story and other stories that aren’t true. I paid on the front end for two years of hell, and now his camp has been stirring the pot and causing so much commotion and trouble posting every story of story, most of which aren’t true or have been warped again and again.
Really, it’s like having an ex and they’re not happy and are going to say all of the worst things about you, and get people worked up to try to take sides.
It’s a shame that this laundry had to be aired, because it’s really no one’s business but they’ve done a good job of doing that. Personally, I want the book to be wrapped and over with.
In the past few months have just been nonstop bullying, targeted harassment from his camp, comics alliance doing hit articles (And I’m the only one they’ve done for their Kickstarted reviews to date, 3 of them), and people anonymously on 4Chan posting the worst things that aren’t true and reposting and are spreading misinformation.
As promised, David Brothers weighed in with a long examination of the whole controversyand revealing a few things that I didn’t mention earlier, such as the way books were being sold in COMICS SHOPS when they hadn’t even been shipped to backers yet.
That smelled fishy to me, so I started paying more attention. The comments section on the Kickstarter are full of people who have yet to receive their books and people who are upset that comic shops have received copies of the book before backers, in addition to fulsome praise.”
[snip] This week, comics creator Dustin Harbin asked Smith about the problems with the Kickstarter on Facebook. Smith responded with vitriol first, saying that Harbin was a “HUGE bully” and decrying a “nonstop orchestrated online bullying campaign.” Harbin defends himself well in the thread, and Smith’s response is another thing that makes me question his behavior and motivations. He’s extremely defensive and paranoid every time someone asks him anything but a soft question, and that’s not good.
Finally, Kickstarter is not a store. It’s not meant to help someone sell backstock of pre-produced material. It’s meant to fund a project that will result in the production of a thing. Mark Andrew Smith has set the goal for this new Kickstarter at $1. That goal means that he has gamed the system and ensured that no matter what happens, he’s guaranteed to make money off the project.
That’s not how Kickstarter is supposed to work. You come to Kickstarter with a project and a firm goal in mind. Smith claims that he made a fifteen thousand dollar mistake by screwing up the shipping. Why isn’t the goal for this project $15,000, or $15,000 plus whatever is required for the shipping of the books that he’s selling on Kickstarter? Again: shady.
A couple of historic notes here. This isn’t the first time Smith has fallen out with an artistic collaborator. In 2008 he and Paul Maybury, artist on the fantasy AQUA LEUNG, also had a falling out over Maybury not being credited for writing. Although Maybury’s original complaints are gone to the sands of the internet, Smith’s rebuttal is still out there:
“Paul is a terrible thief and a huge backstabber and he shouldn’t be trusted at all. Working on Aqua Leung with him was the worst experience of my life and he did every single fucked up thing you could imagine on the book. There will never be anymore Aqua Leung. Paul owes me thousands of dollars as well that he just kept. Everyone you should not trust Paul at all and he’s a horrible human being.”
Hm, sounds familiar. Sounds like Smith hadn’t learned his “lesson” by the time he hired Stokoe for SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS.
Finally one more interesting piece of corroborative evidence from the internal annals. Last year after the successful Kickstarter for SULLIVAN’S, he wrote a much-quoted manifesto called “The Creator as Retailer.”
In order for comics to grow the creator has got to take the center stage as one of the retailers and we need to start cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship among creators so that they take their own destiny in their hands. In 1988 a group of creators got together and came up with the ‘Creator’s Bill of Rights’, I think now with so many technological breakthroughs that it’s time to update that bill of rights to include a new right which is the right of the creator as retailer.
While this is sound advice, it seems Smith may have taken it a little too far by using Kickstarter as a retailing platform. As one of my comics pals put it: “That’s what Etsy is for.”
This one is like one of those baseball games that goes into the 17th inning, long and murky with no real payoff.
SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS by Mark Andrew Smith and James Stokoe has a rather interesting history. An irresistible tale of a baseball team that has to go up against a team of monsters, it’s drawn in Stokoe’s choice style, and since the first images started circulating, it’s looked great. In 2010 it was to be published by Image Comics, and a big round of promo for this followed. However, that book never came out—although it was released digitally as a creator-owned comic—and instead it bounced back as a Kickstarter last year. With over $97,000 raised, surely this was a big success. Although the book was long drawn, copies only started shipping recently, after a bit of complaining over the delays. However it was worth the wait, as a super deluxe edition was declared to be worth the international postage:
The real unsung hero in this entire project is Sullivan’s Sluggers creator Mark Andrew Smith for the constant communication with the backers, and making sure everyone is still in the loop after all this time. Who could have possibly foreseen how massively successful this project would have been? Smith has remained professional throughout, delaying his other projects such as Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors and the eventual Sullivan’s Sluggers sequel, Pele’s Pounders. Has he learned a thing or two for the next Kickstarter project he starts? Absolutely.
Although this sounds a little like one of those mysterious new poster “I plan to go there again!” restaurant reviews on Yelp, it’s written by an actual person,
Cameron Hatheway of
Cammy’s Comics Corner.
As someone who desired to read SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS but didn’t get in on the Kickstarter thing, I was happy to find you could now purchase it again…on Kickstarter. Smith started a campaign with a $1 goal, so people who want various levels can just pledge and get the package they want.
The new Kickstarter is, in part to pay for postage, says Smith. Part of the delay was what is becoming more and more common with Kickstarters: not figuring out how much it is really going to cost. As Smith wrote on his tumblr
Yes, there will be another opportunity for those that missed Sullivan’s Sluggers to pick it up this next month. I was a bone head and hugely underestimated international shipping because I saw another Kickstarter that was doing huge numbers at the time, and it said “International Orders Please Add $10”, and I said to myself “They know what they’re doing” and copied it FOOLISHLY. So lesson to be learned, look up the shipping costs by weight for international next time if you’re doing a Kickstarter. I’m going to do an adjustment Kickstarter to help out with international costs, so that I can eat the difference and not ask for more money from international backers, but to ship for the low low original price of $10 per book. But it’s only for the US, and the other books are going to post first.
This whole situation led to some snarking on Twitter—you can follow along with the various conversations in these tweets. Basically people felt that Smith was just using Kickstarter to sell copies of the comic.
While I understand the ire, for those who want a copy of the book it seems like a simple transaction. But Kickstarter doesn’t allow you to just sell things that are lying around your house.
And now more clarification: it turns out Stokoe, whose always spectacular art is the draw on the books, is not involved in ANY of this. He drew the book for a page rate and has now publicly distanced himself from it.
First off, I want to make abundantly clear that I’m in no way involved with the direction of either of the Kickstarters, or any other other outlet where that book is sold. The Writer and myself had briefly talked about working together on the KS, but due to some disagreements, I decided to remove myself from it completely.
There’s been talk on my behalf about fair compensation from the KS earnings, but I have to say that it personally doesn’t bother me. I have been paid what I was contracted for, and I’ve been very content to keep my nose out of anything involving the book post-Kickstarter. In other words, there’s really no reason to be offended on my behalf. I’m doing fine. I understand that some backers may feel mislead in that they were supporting me financially by backing the book, and for that I apologize. There was very little I could do once the ball started rolling in that regard, shy of shitting on the whole parade.
Blogger
David Brothers has long been
critical of the whole way this was handled, and I understand he has another post on the subject coming out today.
Complicating matters even more, SULLIVAN’S SLUGGERS is in development as a movie, billed as “Major League meets Zombieland”—although that was last year and we know how these things tend to fade away.
We haven’t yet seen crowdfunding turn into an angry mob in the comics sphere, and it’s hard to pinpoint the exact smoking gun here, but selling backstock on Kickstarter does seem to be against the spirit of the thing at the very least. And backers are beginning to feel annoyed.
Jankiness in the form of this entire kickstarter. I funded the original and still haven't received my copy and now there is another kickstarter to enable me to get my copy. I could have ordered it on Amazon instead.
And as Stokoe’s statement makes clear, the “creator owned” comics world is often not what it seems.
If you don’t want to bother with the whole mess, for a short while you can just download the first two digital “issues” for free.
Who cares? Let’s all just complain about a company POSSIBLY killing off a character. Never mind people actually getting ripped off.
Like James White, I live in Canada, (but not in Newfoundland) and the cost to ship goods here from California is not nearly as expensive as to ship overseas. To FedEx a 3.5 lb parcel from here to Beverly Hills 90201 costs $21. To mail it is $26.
To FedEx 3.5 lbs from here to London England is $138, postal mail is $23 (twenty three dollars)
There is something vague and nontransparent about this latest money request. Surely he could bulk ship many books together, or negotiate a better ulk rate.
Buyer beware of this situation, especially non US buyers. He is asking his patrons to subsidize his mistakes.
OOH OOH OOH If I say Mark Andrew Smith’s name 3 times in this comment will he appear and accuse me of being part of the massive comics conspiracy to ruin his entire life?
This is what poor planning and exectution will do. I feel for those who contributed in good faith for a copy and have yet to receive it. There’s a abundance of info about how to best calculate amounts/rewards for Kickstarter, so Smith has no excuse for all these snafus. The kickstarter money must first go to fulfillment, then what’s left over is up to him to use as he wants. It seems that he inverted that and now expects new readers to foot that bill. Sad.
See, this was a mishandled campaign from the start, the guy did no research and basically fucked-up. So instead of a very small cult book well received by a bunch of people who know, with thepotential to bepicked up by a major publisher, it is now a ho-hum book that people can’t be bothered to read as it’s too much trouble to get ahold of.
does Kickstarter offer any protections for backers who never receive what they pay for? I mean they do take your money, so they’d have to be involved somehow right?
@Chris – they don’t. It is one of the many problems with kickstarter. There is 0 accountability once something funds. I’ve only ever backed 1 and 3 years later I’m still waiting for that artist to deliver even 1 issue of the supposed 3 issue series his campaign was supposed to fund creation of. After that experience I decided to stay away.
Funny thing is that I almost got back in for Sullivan’s sluggers.
I think before anyone gives this guy another dime, he should provide an accounting of exactly where every penny of that $97,000 went. If he legitimately spent all of the money on printing and rewards and came up short, I think people may give him the benefit of the doubt and kick in more. If he used it to pay other bills, well, that’s not anyone who wants their rewards’ problem, and he should have to find other ways to make up that shortcoming. And yeah, you can say his personal finances are nobody’s business, but as soon as he started taking people’s money, they became those people’s business, for sure. Especially since he apparently used their money to print extra copies to send to stores. Shouldn’t THAT profit be enough to cover this international shipping fiasco?
So where exactly did that 97k go then?
And regarding indiegogo- the projects there all have to be carried through whether funding goals are met or not. At the rate he’s going, this will just amount to digging even more of a hole for himself., though I’d already classify him as Olney status.
Where did the 97k go? There really wouldn’t be much left over…
25-30k go straight to paying taxes–this is considered income
10k to amazon and kickstarter fees
25-30k in printing (this was probably a better idea to not print a slipcased omnibus)
Likely what’s left over accounts for shipping and packaging and any other extra the campaign offered. He probably paid his rent as well along the way.
It’s a serious dearth of planning followed up by a serious lack of communication.
Observing Kickstarter (and Indiegogo) over the years taught me you cannot plan for everything going into one of these projects, but you should always be open and communicate the real progress to you backers. In my experience, backers can be very understanding as long as they know the progress even as the initial deadlines fade in the rear view mirror.
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