by Lianne Sentar/Rebecca Scoble
Another 12 issues of women-targeted, LGBT+ friendly fiction in our digital magazine of comics, prose, and audio dramas!
Song credit (from video): Coffee Stains by Riot
Hello! We’re the editors at Chromatic Press, the independent publisher behind Sparkler Monthlymagazine. After a successful Kickstarter last year for Year 3 (thank you!), we’re back to fund another year, so we can give you more of the content you know and love and a bunch of new surprises!
Welcome to the Kickstarter for Sparkler Monthly Year 4!
Based off the Japanese comics model you might know from magazines like Shonen Jump,Sparkler Monthly runs serialized fiction in monthly chapters–so every month, you get a new piece of five different series at once. Most of our series are comics, but we also publish prose with illustrations, audio dramas, and one-shot short stories in any format. All of them are bundled together in the magazine so our audience can get a taste of everything.
Sparkler Monthly is targeted at women and girls aged 15 and up, or anyone interested in that kind of material–like the genres shojo and josei in Japan. In addition to all our series, we run features, podcasts, and bonus stories to give our readers more bang for their buck, and to help build a community. Sparkler is about Lifestyle through Fiction, and between our social media and contests, we invite our audience to become a part of Sparkler–something that literallyhappens sometimes, since we also run periods of open submissions in search of new talent!
After three years of running our magazine and releasing almost fifty ebooks and paperbacks from it, we’re proud of what we’ve built. We pay our creators advances, give them veteran editors, and release their work in a number of formats, all while keeping copyright in the creators’ names. In an era where we have an industry-wide push to support more comics for women, that’s exactly what we publish: Female Gaze content for women, men, and non-binary readers in a wide variety of genres, much of it LGBT+. And although we hire all genders, the vast majority of the Sparkler family is female–from the owners to the editors to the creators to the staff–and we’re proud that the female perspective is the norm here, rather the exception.
Regardless of genre, the core of Sparkler serials is emotional content–we want FEELS. Interesting characters, loaded relationships, and shocking cliffhangers. Anything that will make our readers scream!
Here’s a small sampling:
Most of our content is free to read online, so head to sparklermonthly.com to start binge-reading right now!
Paying Sparkler Members don’t need to read their content online–they get DRM-free downloadsof the new stuff a month or more before it’s released online, as well as special bonuses to download to their computers and e-readers. Our paying audience is both supporting our content, and downloading it to keep forever.
We have two types of memberships:
Our Cherry Bomb imprint is for our older readers (we recommend ages 17+), and features sexy side stories and art for a number of Sparkler serials. We’re always adding new Cherry Bomb pieces, so VIP Members have unlimited downloads to the entire line, including anything we add during their membership!
In addition to continuing the great series running in Sparkler Monthly right now, we have special plans we’ve been saving for Year 4. As this Kickstarter runs through the month of July, we’ll update this space with announcements of Year 4 goodies! :D
Day #1 announcement: We have TWO announcements to start with.
Taisei, a vocalist in the boy band 4LiGHT, is known for his poppy, electric stage persona–a mask he wears over an angry insecurity. He only started singing to keep up with his childhood friend Shou. When both boys were scouted in high school, they began to drift apart, and Taisei has watched Shou–with a superior voice but weaker stage presence–flounder in his own band. Taisei hates that he has the career his best friend deserves.
Suffocated by the restrictive life of a pop idol he never truly wanted, Taisei tries to reconnect with Shou…only to find that Shou has also changed under the glitz and lights of the stage. Taisei isn’t sure what to think of the new Shou–at least, until Shou kisses him.
This Kickstarter is to help fund another 12 issues of the magazine, but here’s the best part–Sparkler fiction comes in a lot of different packages, for whichever way you like to read. If you don’t want to follow serialized chapters in a magazine, we have complete ebooks for each series! Hate reading on your computer at all? We also have paperbacks! And some of our fantastic readers and creators have joined our tiers to offer you special bonuses, original art, and even commissioned illustrations!
But first, a few notes:
And now, the Kickstarter rewards!
We have some special bonuses that can be unlocked if we pass our initial goal! Stay tuned…
We’ve run five successful publishing Kickstarters in the past, and Lianne has managed more as a freelancer for Hiveworks Comics. Our reliable, enthusiastic staff has basically stayed the same as Year 3. There are always risks when you’re a small operation, but we’re all ready to do this for another year, if you’ll have us.
(If a backer is concerned now or in the future and isn’t satisfied with updates here or at sparklermonthly.com, our editors can be contacted directly at editorial@chromaticpress.com.)