The Hiveworks Artist Guild Statement on Hiveworks Comics (& my own experiences below)
Making comics better for everyone!
Hey there friends and readers, I thought it was important to share this open letter from the Hiveworks Artist Guild regarding both the state of Hiveworks and the treatment of creators throughout its history. If you've looked for my comic on the Hiveworks site or my book in the Hivemill store and found it missing, this is a good overview of why I left. (Never fear, it's still at its usual home of gothwestern.com.)
I'm putting more details on my own experience below, covering how the process of getting GOTH WESTERN to print took longer than the entire run of the comic. It's under a readmore because it's fairly long. Even if you skip it, I encourage you to read the open letter linked above. Other former Hiveworks creators are also sharing their experiences on various platforms, so please give them your support. It's been a heck of a ride getting here.
For a little background, GOTH WESTERN was entirely independent while I was working on it from 2015-2018. I did pitch to Hiveworks once in 2016, but my pitch was rejected. When I finished the comic in 2018, I began looking into getting it printed. I got as far as contacting printers for samples before a mutual friend suggested I reach out to Isa for advice, since she'd handled so many book crowdfunds for Hiveworks. In the meantime, I'd done some work with Slipshine, so Isa and I were acquainted through that.
When I asked Isa for advice, though, she offered to sign me to Hiveworks for the express purpose of getting my book printed. They'd build me a shiny new website where I'd get ad revenue, put me in their catalogue to send new readers to my comic, and run the crowdfund for me. I was over the moon! It felt like being recognized for all my hard work. I signed on in mid 2018. Erin Burt redesigned my website on Hiveworks' own ComicControl platform and did a stellar job.
The first contact I got from Hiveworks about the plan to print my book was an offer to do a joint Kickstarter with two other books, from creators I wasn't acquainted with. I was quite dismayed by this. I'd been ready to do all the work myself, because printing the book was a sort of celebration of what I'd accomplished with the comic. It was important to me. It felt as if I was being told that I (and these two other artists) was not important enough to Hiveworks to be showcased on my own. I said I wasn't comfortable doing a shared Kickstarter, and it seemed like that was received well. We would start working on my solo crowdfund; it just might take a bit longer.
I started working on book prepress with Isa and Gisele, another Hiveworks staff member. (FYI, I'm reconstructing a lot of this from our chat logs, as I was feverishly working on comics for Slipshine during this time in an attempt to draw fast enough to pay my rent and don't remember the specifics very well.) Throughout 2019, we went back and forth on cover design, Kickstarter assets, my progress on the bonus story that would be in the back of the book, and things of that nature. Throughout this, I wasn't given an exact date for the Kickstarter until mid-December of that year, where Isa told me she'd put it on the calendar for January 6th of 2019. Then communication fell by the wayside for a while. I hadn't worked on the book cover, but I'd also had no further input on when they needed it done by. Then the pandemic hit, which understandably scrambled everything. That said, I'm fairly sure the mismanagement that was already occurring, which I didn't know about at this point, contributed significantly.
We finished up that round of prepress in mid-2020. I checked in in June of 2021 about whether we had a date yet. I was told there were 4 campaigns ahead of me in the queue. I checked in again in March of 2022 to ask if there was still a Kickstarter schedule, since Kickstarter the company had recently gotten into cryptocurrency and everyone was pissed about it. I was told there was still a schedule, and it'd been on Isa's list for the month to reschedule GOTH WESTERN with a proper date. I checked in yet again that June asking for updates on the timeline, and was told we would aim for late 2022/early 2023.
The crowdfund finally launched on September 23, 2022. It launched through Hiveworks' own bespoke crowdfunding platform which was integrated into the Hivemill store. This was their decision, and I was on board because I'd been iffy about Kickstarter since the aforementioned crypto thing. However, this did mean I wouldn't benefit from the discoverability of having my project on Kickstarter. As the campaign wore on it became apparent that, now more than four years from the end of my comic, and with my fairly limited web following since, the crowdfund would struggle to make its goal. I shared these concerns with Isa and asked how much of the marketing was meant to fall to me. She assured me that Hiveworks handled promo, and there would be paid ads in various places and mentions in the newsletter.
Two thirds of the way through the crowdfund, the pledges weren't keeping pace, and I was beginning to panic. We were barely over halfway to the goal. I'd been firing off promo on all channels available to me, but there had been comparatively few mentions on Hiveworks' social media. Was this standard procedure? Would they be doing more promo if I was a bigger name? Would I be the first artist in Hiveworks' history whose crowdfund failed? Was this because it had been four years since the comic ended, and no one remembered it anymore? Would it have been different if I'd run a campaign myself back in 2018, or was my work just lacking in some fundamental way? (I was very much spiraling at this point.)
I turned for advice to a friend who'd done multiple successful solo Kickstarters, and she was shocked that Hiveworks had gone with the Hivemill platform instead of Kickstarter for a project as small as mine. She was of the opinion the reach of Kickstarter would have helped tremendously. I also worked up the courage to ask Isa what would happen if the crowdfund didn't meet its goal. She told me that, if they went over 60%, they would simply lower the goal and cover the rest, and that it had happened once or twice before; otherwise, they'd refund the backers and get it printed directly. Either way, my books would be printed. (She also said she'd probably mentioned this before in a previous meeting, but I had no recollection of this.) This was a huge relief for me, though it did raise other questions about how they landed on the initial amount to begin with if that was an option. At the time I wasn't particularly concerned with the answers to those questions, but the information shared in the letter does clarify some things. I hope money from someone else's Kickstarter wasn't used to pay off mine, but there's no way to know for sure. At the time I assumed Hiveworks must be doing quite well if they could afford to cover the rest of a crowdfund that was short.
All the waiting and stress aside, the final book did turn out beautiful. I know at least some of the book layout was done by Katie, whose last name I was never given. I'm not sure how much Isa contributed to the layout design, though she did thumbnail the back cover and provide input on the front cover. (I had a cover designed already, but Isa wanted me to do a new one.) This is presumably why "Editing assistance by Isabelle Melançon" is printed inside the front cover, despite the entire comic having been completed before I signed with Hiveworks. (I didn't notice this text was there until today and am unsure how I feel about it.)
Also the Discord chat where we discussed my comic's relationship to Hiveworks had the name of my comic wrong from June 2018 until I changed it in in August of 2022.
I became aware of the Hiveworks Artist Guild last year and, as stated in the letter, found a lot of my own concerns echoed in the experiences of others. I officially left Hiveworks in November of 2025, moved the comic back to my own webhost (with significant difficulty, due to my incredibly baroque server configuration; shoutout to Rarebit for allowing me to actually get the comic up and running despite no extant webcomic CMSes being able to run natively on a Caddy2 webserver), and began trying to get my remaining books out of the warehouse. There were a few months there where I thought I wasn't going to be able to, because Xel still owed money to the warehouse holding our stock and they wouldn't release any of it until the bill was paid. I tried to make my peace with these hard-earned books being consigned to limbo. Fortunately, after I and a number of others reached out to Meg (the Hiveworks merch lead) and Xel, the bill did get paid and the warehouse was able to begin shipping out people's backstock.
I was never a particularly large player in all of this. I generally found Isa to be friendly but disorganized, a descriptor I'd often generalize to Hiveworks as a whole when I talked about it with friends. Even so, "friendly and disorganized" is no way to run a business, and the legacy of mismanagement outlined in the letter is an excellent elucidation of why. In many ways I'm incredibly fortunate to be a small fry whose livelihood doesn't depend on my work. My heart goes out to all my colleagues who have been more severely affected than me. I hope the folks reading this will support them, and I hope that having this information out in the open will lead to better conditions for webcomic creators in the long run.
I'm hoping soon to set up a way to sell my books myself, so if you missed them in the Hivemill store (and you've read this far), please watch this space. In the meantime, if you happen to be a bookshop owner in Indiana and want to purchase some, I can drive over with a box.
Thanks for reading. Be kind to one another, and keep making art.
