Kick­starter is my favorite crowd sourc­ing ven­ture, espe­cially for startup comics. It looks as if it’s going to be fac­ing some com­pe­ti­tion from iVerse, the com­pany that brings us dig­i­tal comics. The press release is below, but in a nut­shell, it looks as if iVerse is posi­tion­ing itself as a one-stop-shop for creator-owned comics. Very interesting.

iVerse Media, cre­ators of some of the world’s most pop­u­lar and widely used tech­nolo­gies for read­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing dig­i­tal comics,
announced today the launch of Comics Accel­er­a­tor (www.comicsaccelerator.com), an inno­v­a­tive crowd­sourc­ing ini­tia­tive designed to bring more new projects to mar­ket more quickly, while pro­vid­ing comics cre­ators, pub­lish­ing part­ners and related con­tent
pro­duc­ers oppor­tu­ni­ties to retain a greater per­cent­age of monies raised.

“Unlike other crowd­sourc­ing avenues, Comics Accel­er­a­tor was designed so that the vast major­ity of funds raised go directly to the project being sup­ported, not the web­site man­ag­ing the process,” said Michael Mur­phey, iVerse CEO. “Project cre­ators will also have ready access to iVerse’s pio­neer­ing exper­tise in dig­i­tal con­tent devel­op­ment and deliv­ery, as well as a suite of tar­geted mar­ket­ing tools that sim­plify and speed the
fund­ing – and sub­se­quent sales – of their fin­ished products.”

Cre­ated expressly for the comics com­mu­nity, Comics Accel­er­a­tor dif­fers from other crowd­source fund­ing mod­els in a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant ways, including:

• Pub­lisher Hubs – A sin­gle des­ti­na­tion where a publisher’s fans can find all their lat­est projects and at which all social mar­ket­ing related to a project can be centralized.
• Dig­i­tal Reward Deliv­ery – Imme­di­ate ful­fill­ment of dig­i­tal incen­tives to back­ers after a project has been funded, through iVerse’s pro­pri­etary Comic­sPlus dig­i­tal comics platform.
• Reserve Fund­ing Option – Project cre­ators may set a reserve goal so that they can choose to accept funds from sup­port­ers if they get close enough to their orig­i­nal tar­get to pro­ceed with production.

But per­haps the most dras­tic dif­fer­ence offered by Comics Accel­er­a­tor con­cerns fees. Like other plat­forms, Comics Accel­er­a­tor charges 5% of a project’s attained fund­ing (though cre­ators may also take advan­tage of iVerse exper­tise, mar­ket­ing sup­port and other added value ben­e­fits like those cited above). Unlike other plat­forms, how­ever, Comics Accel­er­a­tor caps its fee at $2,500 per project. “We saw how suc­cess­ful some projects had been on other sites,” said Mur­phey, “ and then saw how big a chunk the site was tak­ing. I couldn’t help but think that all those con­trib­u­tors thought they were actu­ally con­tribut­ing to the project – not the site. Sure, we’ve got costs, but we’re look­ing to grow this indus­try fairly and respon­si­bly. We think that pub­lish­ers and cre­ators should receive as much as pos­si­ble if one of their projects hits it big!”
iVerse con­sulted with a num­ber of pub­lish­ers and cre­ative teams in the devel­op­ment of Comics Accel­er­a­tor and is already pur­su­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to broaden the nature and vari­ety of projects that are brought to fans. “Lim­ited edi­tion hard­cov­ers, ‘one day only’ vari­ants, dig­i­tal singles/printed trade com­bi­na­tions – they’re all fair game,” said Steve May, iVerse Direc­tor of Busi­ness Development.

“We’re also deter­mined to remain non-exclusive,” added May. “Project cre­ators can run a Kick­starter cam­paign simul­ta­ne­ously to their Comics Accel­er­a­tor efforts. What­ever accel­er­ates the mak­ing of good comics.”

For those of us who couldn’t make it to Sand Dieog this year (or ever, in my case), G4TV.com is post­ing fairly up to the minute news, videos, and tweets about Comic-con on its web­site. Even thought the event long ago stopped being just about comics, you can still hear some cool updates on your favorite books.