Links

Patreon

 

Webtoon

 

Tapastic

Merchandise

We set up a Redbubble account in order to sell T-Shirts and other merch based on the comic. Redbubble takes a rather large percentage of the money that you gain by selling an item, but they do print the designs into shirts/mugs etc for you, so it seems fair. Also, I have purchased products from Redbubble before, and they are all very high quality.

These are some of the prints that we currently have available:

 

Going Public / Final Presentation

 

Since we presented this slideshow, many more pages have been released, and the comic has received hundreds of more views. The figures are steadily climbing, and we have made over £150 between the two of us since we first started.

Promotional Speedpaints

 

I posted both of these speedpaints on my YouTube channel, which has over 56,000 subscribers, in order to promote the comic.

Dividing the Work

Though we both shared the duty of building this fantasy world, it was Callum that was in charge of writing the comic, as he is much more skilled at writing than I am.

I was in charge of designing the visuals of the world, and doing most of the comic pages.

Callum also runs the Studio’s social media accounts, and is in charge of interacting with the audience. I made a cute little print for anyone who subscribes to the comic or pledges to the Patreon:

Patreon Rewards

As incentives for people to pledge money to our project, we would allow anyone pledgers to view not only the finished pages almost a week earlier than everyone else, but also the chance to view unfinished pages and concept art.

 

 

There are also exclusive Character Dossiers which detail a little more about the characters you meet.

 

 

Our Plan

We planned to upload a page of the comic every week on the sites Tapastic and Webtoon. These are the two most popular platforms to upload comics and stories, and they also provide financial benefits to creators if their comic gains enough views. These are done through monetisation of the comic so that advertisers may promit their material on the same page, and if a comic gets popular enough, Webtoon itself will donate to the comic’s Patreon if there is one.

 

We created an uploading schedule that we felt was frequent enough that the audience would not lose interest, but also long enough so that we could draw the pages and maintain a certain level of quality.

We also set up a Patreon for Small Bean Studios where we could upload high definition versions of the comic pages (uploading to Tapastic and Webtoon requires you to lower the quality so you can upload multiple pages) as well as exclusive content for paying supporters.

We created three tiers of Patreon rewards for anyone wishing to support us financially:

 

 

These are the three tiers of Beans. Each tier will allow a supporter to view the comic 5 days before anyone else, and in high definition. They will also get to see concept art of locations and characters, and even scrapped story ideas. For the £20 pledgers, they will get to submit a character of their own creation, and we will work it into the story! As the minor details of the story are certain to change depending on future events, it is possible to work in new characters.

Creating our Product

My first idea of a potential money earner was a simple Virtual Reality game that worked similar to the game Tilt Brush, in that you would draw a shapes in the air. However, my idea would have the player draw certain simple shapes, such as a lightning bolt or a rain drop, and those shapes would translate into magical attacks to be used against enemies in a game where you play as a mage/wizard.

The only problem with this idea is that neither I nor Callum have any experience in working with VR or with simple coding, and we wanted to create a product that would churn out some sort of profit by the end of the 10 week Business Course, so we took a step back and decided to make something that was a lot more manageable.

We decided to stick with the Drawn Runes = Magic concept and develop the idea more. We are both massive Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons fans, and wanted to build a colourful fantasy world where this Runic Magic is utilised.

After much thought, we decided to create a webcomic based in this new fantasy world we had created, called the Vale.

For the actual story of the comic, we wanted to give it a bit of a unique edge, so we decided to go down the path that Season 19 of South Park went down; which was that they had an overarching plot, but in between they focussed on topics that were socially relevant, but still fit into the main narrative.

Creating a Brand

First of all we had to create a company name and logo. Our very first idea was to name the company after my new cat, Bean.

Anyone who has met Bean knows that he is incredibly friendly, yet very silly and quite hilarious, so we decided that he would be a perfect fun mascot for the company, and we decided to name the company Small Bean Studios (the “small” referring to how tiny Bean was when we first brought him home, and a reference to how small and humble the company is in it’s early stages)

Bean is incredibly expressive (especially for a cat) and I thought it would be a fun idea to create a company logo based on his silly face.

This is the current Small Bean Studios logo. I wanted to keep it simple but still recognisable as a black cat. It started off as a bean-shaped black blob before I added the curled tail and pointy ears. I decided to keep the tongue out as I felt it light clutter the logo. This is just a first draft, as you can see the shape isn’t entirely smooth. I plan to remake it in the future with much cleaner lines.

Business Classes

One of the options we were given at the beginning of Placement Year was to begin our own start-up company. For the longest time I ruled this out as a possibility as I had neither the funds nor the confidence to build a business from scratch.

It wasn’t until Greg mentioned the beginning of a Business Course for anyone doing start-ups that I started to think about it. I had been out of work for a month and needed something to fill up the remaining weeks of my Placement Year.

The first week of the Business Course was an exercise in determining your audience and what your audience wants from a product or service. This was very interesting as I had never really considered all the thought and planning that went into creating the very idea of what a business could be.

The next couple of weeks of the business course consisted of the class bouncing ideas back and forth on what their businesses could be, as we were expecting to have a business up and running by the end of the 10 week program. It was around this time when Callum Luckwell and I decided to team up to work on the project together. I didn’t feel competent enough to start a business by myself as I feel I lack the confidence or the people skills required. Callum is a lot better at all of that than I am, so I thought I could learn from him while he could learn from me as I worked on most of the design and product development.