Today’s topic was inspired by Jay Busbee, from something he said in the comments section of my final “Here’s the Thing…” column. Josh Fialkov helped me shape it a bit.

When you take on the publisher’s role, you need a hell of a lot of seed money. Ideally, there’s at most a writer and an artist (who inks his own work) and one of them does the letters and book design; there’s a lot of faith in the project; and all parties involved are doing it for the love of the story. This way, all you need to pay for is printing, conventions and marketing, and you have a decent chance of at least breaking even. However, once you start adding inkers, colorists and letters into the mix (AHEM, and editors), your cost goes up significantly and your chances of at least breaking even go down substantially. Those guys don’t work for free, no matter how good the story is.

With that in mind, these next discussions are going to focus on methods that can be used to raise a little seed money and increase your chances of not being stuck in a big, fat money pit. This way, if your lettering skills are sketchy at best, you can pay someone to do it for you and not have that eat too much into your budget.

Let’s start out by suggesting we do something a little differently -- we hold off on the printing for a little bit.

The thing is, we all have this rush-to-print mentality; we estimate when our book will be done and we send in our solicitations to Diamond with the agreement that the book will be ready to go to print in four months. That’s a lot of pressure for a book that will likely not do more than 1500 copies in the direct market.

There’s a little something I first likened to the video game pre-order gimmick, but Josh told me that there are RPG companies that essentially do exactly what I’m going to pitch today.

Let’s say you have an OGN. Hardcover, dust jacket and 144 pages; you set the retail at 20 bucks. You start building “the Juice” on it early -- effective marketing once the project is a definite go, to both comics fans and non-comic fans; the website is getting a remarkable amount of hits, linked to from a the variety of print and online publications you’re advertising on (as to what those print and online publications are we’ll discuss when we finally get to marketing).

Now, let’s say the book is finished. Instead of rushing to print and putting thousands of dollars on your credit card (and adding interest to your cost) you decide to let the printing slide for a few months and have a fund-raising pre-sale targeted at all of the people who’ve been supporting the book’s development for the past several months. You sell them the book before it’s even printed -- not reserve it; you’re not trying to gauge how many books you should order -- you’re actually taking their money and using it to print as many books as you can.

I’m going to pause for a second, because there’s something very important here; in order to do what I’m suggesting the book needs to be finished. Not partially finished, not almost finished -- it needs to be 100% complete; every page needs to be finalized and proofed, and the only thing that’s stopping you from going to print is the fact you haven’t clicked “Submit” on the printer’s upload site. Because if you don’t deliver this book you’re taking pre-orders on, your career is over. You will give out refunds, sure, because the only thing that’s funny about a class-action lawsuit is when you get that check in the mail for $1.97 without doing any work. But even after giving out refunds, you still have a glorious, time-consuming and highly public failure on your hands; you will lose the market’s confidence and you will be labeled as a person who cannot deliver.

OK, warnings of career suicide out of the way and continuing on. Saying the book is done is one thing, but you need to give more to your potential customers beyond, “Trust me, the book’s done.”

Here’s what I’m thinking: You make two versions of the book available. The first one is roughly equivalent to the printing cost of your book. At this price, the buyer has complete access to a digital copy of your book, minus any bonus features (or even minus a story if you can still convince people that there is, indeed, a completed final story). So, let’s say for 5 bucks, 75% off cover price, your customer can read this book at his or her leisure; they get a password and username and have access to the book using something like this page flip program so they don’t start emailing the PDF all over the place. The second version is 25% off the cover price, or 15 bucks in this example. This gives them access to the same incomplete digital copy of the book, and a hardcopy mailed to them as soon as it is back from the printer.

Essentially, every copy of the book you sell (whether digital or the eventual hardcopy), will pay for the printing of at least one additional book. So if someone buys the digital only, they still pay for a hardcopy. If someone buys the hardcopy, they pay for the printing of their copy and at least one additional copy. If you get 200 people to pre-order (which is a modest estimate considering family, friends and “the Juice” your book has thanks to your successful marketing) you have enough money in hand to pay for the printing of at least 400 books (and likely more depending on where you set your prices and how much you’re getting the books for).

Best part about this plan? You keep the infrastructure in place after the book goes to print in order to satisfy impulse buyers. It’s still an attractive offer at a higher profit margin for you -- although if it gets too popular, you’ll start to scare off the higher volume retailers. That’s a difficult line and something that needs to be discussed -- how do you do something like this without pissing off your retailers?

So, that’s what we’re talking about today: a pre-order system for comics designed to raise money for printing and offset all of those additional costs we rack up when we make our books. A few points for discussion:

• 1) Getting and keeping our customers’ confidence. Are a discount and a promise -- showing them that the book is actually finished and ready to go to print -- enough to get someone to give you money in exchange for a book they won’t receive for several months?

• 2) An alternate system for 22/32s. It’s not cost effective to take online orders for a 3-dollar book; between credit card fees and shipping, you’ll see little-to-no profit. But what about just offering up a digital copy for fifty cents to a dollar? People always say, “I remember when comics were 50-cents;” now you can give them that option while raising money for your printing.

• 3) What to do about shipping? If you charge for shipping, the price now equals that of waiting to get it at a bookstore. If you give them free shipping, however, your margin narrows drastically. What about media mail? It’ll only cost a buck to ship, but there’s no tracking options and a significant probability that the book will be lost. If you have any information on discounted shipping options, please share it with us.

And, of course, if you have any ideas on a pre-order system that goes beyond this one, throw them out, please. But let’s keep this to pre-orders only; I have two more funding discussions planned, and if you have any innovative ideas please email them to me and we’ll work it up together.

This is a big topic; one that’s not discussed enough. Right now us small pressers do two things: a) we try to get a publisher to pay for the printing cost of our book in exchange for rights, fees, etc., or b) we take on all the costs by ourselves (or with a partner). So if you have any ideas, despite how crazy they may seem, please email them to me. When Jay first threw this idea out I didn’t think it would work and had to think on it a bit before coming up with a workable concept -- any idea can be turned into a moneymaker if enough people talk it out.