Zipper Club local fliers!

I've devised another great way that you, gentled reader, can help Brenda and I on our road to making The Zipper Club a sooner reality. The ongoing promotion of our IndieGoGo campaign has entered it's final two weeks and I'm working like the devil to try and see us through to victory.

FLYERS!

That's right, folks! We're about to take it old school, posting up a ton of fliers in any business or gathering place that'll allow us to spread the word, and the best part is, I'm making PDF copies available right here, to everyone who might feel like giving a hand to us! I'm doing two versions of the flyer, one with a special message to patrons of my hometown in Louisville Kentucky, and another copy to be posted up anywhere that people can speak and/or read English!

Print off one copy, print off a dozen, print them off until your printer runs out of ink and hit the streets of your town on our behalf! Anywhere that might allow you to tack one up on their walls for a couple weeks! Each flyer comes complete with a pair of bar codes you can scan with your cell phone to make things nice and convenient for passers by. One code leads to our IGG page, the other to our new and growing Facebook fan page. Post them at comic shops, coffee shops, college community boards, children's hospitals, etc. If you can think of a place, I encourage you to print out a copy, take it there, and ask. Worse comes to worse, they'll just say no!

All Over Flyer

Louisville-centric flyer

But that's not the best part!

If and when you get one posted up, get a picture of yourself taken, standing next to it and link us to the picture with your name and the location that was kind enough to let you post it on The Zipper Club Facebook page, or @ me with it on Twitter @LenNWallace. By the end of the campaign, the person who posts up the most fliers and sends us pictures will get a special treat courtesy of Brenda and I. (Haven't decided what yet, but probably some kind of weird piece of original jam art between the two of us...?)

You don't need to be a donor to the project to participate in this endeavor, either. Money can be tight these days and the effort of helping us out from wherever you are is big enough in my book to deserve it's own reward... Although I will say, if you can donate, even a dollar, it'd help tremendously.

Again, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support, past, present, and future. I just know we're going to make this book happen in a big, big way!

Thanks,
Len N. Wallace

Crowd Funding 101 – A Course For The Not-So-Technologically Inclined

So, I’ve gotten a few emails from people who dig what we’re doing, but have no idea for one reason or another how to donate to The Zipper Club through IndieGoGo. At first, this concept was pretty baffling to me, because it’s become as easy as second nature to me now, and I use these kind of sites all the time. Then I remembered I’m a dude who sits around, burning out his retinas on a screen all day. Not everyone is like me, so what follows is a very simple crowdfunding tutorial for any donors out there who may have been confused about how to give to our project, or even any other one down the line that might strike their fancy.

As much as I’d love to take your personal checks and cold hard cash, alas, there’s a system in place and for us to take all of the money we need to pay for printing this thing that we’ve pulled in so far from all of our donors, we need to meet our goal on the site. If our level doesn’t read $4,000 or higher by May 14^th, 2013, all the money goes back to the individuals that donated to the project and Brenda and I go back to the ol’ drawing board. (We still fully plan on producing the book with or without the money from this campaign, but getting it paid for with these donations will save us a lot of time, headache and our own personal funds.) Plus, going by our perks list, you get some pretty cool Zipper Club memorabilia that you wouldn’t be able to obtain anywhere else. Plus, after the campaign goes on and we (hopefully) get funded, everyone who donated will get updates with all sorts of behind the scenes goodies for the project on our journey to see it in print. In short, we know asking you for your hard earned is somewhat of a tall order we don’t take that lightly. Helping crowdfund projects like The Zipper Club through IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are a fun and rewarding experience that gives you a chance to take part in the creation of all forms of new and wonderful art. I’ve donated to a number of different crowdfunding campaigns in the past on both websites over the years and love doing it.

The bottom line though, is that we can’t do this without you, so without further ado, here are instructions for how to donate to our cause…

How to donate to an IndieGoGo campaign:

1 - Find the campaign you want to donate to. (For purposes of the same shameless self-promotion I’ve become known for, we’ll say maaaaaybe for my book, The Zipper Club.)

2 - Cruise through the campaign’s information for any information on it and see if it raises any concerns for you. (IE: Where your money is going, when you’ll receive your donor rewards, etc.) If you have questions or concerns not answered on the page, hit the "Contact" button on the IGG page to take your questions directly to the person running the page and they should answer.

3 - Now comes the “fun” part. In order to donate to a campaign, you’ll need two things. A membership to IndieGoGo (http://www.indiegogo.com) and a membership to a website called Paypal (http://www.paypal.com). 

The good news is, starting both accounts are free in and of themselves. The reason for the dual memberships are as follows.  IndieGoGo is a site that sends and receives its money through Paypal, which is basically an online resource for you to pay for goods and services online. You can pay for orders through almost any online shop you can think of, quickly and easily via Paypal. Starting an account there is pretty simple and the best explanation for it can be found at the link below.

http://www.ask.com/question/how-to-start-a-paypal-account

4 - After you’ve got your Paypal account set up, you can also use it to pay for any large number of goods for sale on all sorts of different websites throughout the internet. (eBay, Half.com, Overstock.com, etc.) It’s the world’s most popular way to send money online, so mark my words, it’s something you could definitely get a lot more use out of down the road.

5 - Once you’ve got your Paypal account made and secured, head back to the IndieGoGo page that you want to donate to, click on the according price level/perk that you’d like to have shipped to you, and then it will take you through asking you to log into your Paypal account. Once you’re logged in, it’ll ask you to confirm your donation and the amount. Press “Pay” and everything’s done.

Hope that helps!

The Zipper Club is BACK!

So, we're running two weeks strong into our IndieGoGo campaign to fund and expand our first run of short stories for The Zipper Club into it's own full 40 page graphic novel and we've had some pretty incredible donors popping up so far as we stand two-thirds of the way from our goal with plenty of time to spare and plenty of wicked perks yet to be grabbed, including personalized sketches, personalized comic strips that put you in your own three panel Zipper Club adventure, and spots where your name and/or likeness can be used in next year's Zipper Club story!

So, to help encourage more buzz on the book and the story itself, I wanted to share a little something with everyone. Here's an introductory preview in the form of our first two page short story from Grayhaven Comics' THE GATHERING #2. Our first Zipper Club short story!

The Zipper Club is a personal project to me, as a life-long survivor of a congenital heart defect and as someone who has counseled a camp for children like myself and the ones I write about in The Zipper Club for many years. The campaign is to fund a print-run for our book so that we can not just have copies to sell to you fine folk, but also a few to donate to kids growing up with these heart problems who might really need it. Plus, a percentage of any profits Brenda and I make on the project will go to the American Heart Association to help further research in the fight to stamp out all forms of heart diseases.

Join the fun and donate to the cause here: 

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/welcome-to-the-zipper-club

STRAIGHT TO THE HEART

In honor of Creator Owned Comic Day, I figured I'd share another fun little short story I did in the past. A couple years back, I was on a big kick and wrote a rash of off-beat romance comic short stories for an anthology I was hoping to put together, called "Less Than Three". (And kudos if you get the reference.)

One of the few stories that ended up getting fully produced was illustrated by an artist named Brian Defferding, whose work I had become aware of through his own creator-owned comic, School: A Ghost Story. Brian's horrific painted style seemed like an interesting fit for a little horror/love story I called 'Straight To The Heart'. One of the few instances to see Brian's great work in full color.

Hope you enjoy!