Comicalfoods is an indie food publisher that cooks up high concept food themed stories and shares recipes (process) for how we make them. Here is the recipe by Christian Ochoa, founder of comicalfoods, for how they created an indie publishing company.
A comicalfoods recipe for:
Creating an indie publishing company
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List your passions, skills, and possible business ideas you are interested in.
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Choose a business name that sounds good and is available for website and all social media platforms.
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Buy the domain name and create social media accounts under that name.
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Design a Logo
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Start out as a comedy youtube channel with your best friend for fun.
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Make 1 bad video, delete it and realize this is not what you want to do.
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Illustrate some low brow art for a mature audience to sell merch online
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Get bored of it and look back at your other business ideas.
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Write a 3 step business plan for another idea that starts off as a food blog that offers graphic design services with the goal of opening a cafe/book store.
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Set up an LLC in NJ (October 2017)
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Open up a business bank account.
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Create a simple website and start writing funny food blogs with the help of your sister in law.
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Design some food mascots for your brand that are different from other food characters.
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Hire a concept artist to help you design your mascots
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File for a name trademark when you aren't even selling anything yet.
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Find out you don't like writing comical food recipes.
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Get your name trademarked after running through some issues that had to be resolved with the USPTO.
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Read the comic book Saga
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Get inspired by it and all the years of reading manga to create your own comic book
- Redesign the Logo
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Burn down the food blog and replace it with a comic book publishing brand that focuses on creator owned stories and sharing "recipes" aka process
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Learn about business, branding, art, & comics from youtube mentors such as Chris Do, Jason Brubaker, and Bobby Chiu.
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Work on a young adult epic science fantasy project that still isn't finished but will give you experience on collaborating with co-creators, worldbuilding disease, writing contracts, project management, importance of knowing your audience, comic book prologues, concept art workflows, etc. (2017)
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Work on a smaller creator owned collaboration comic book project for a different audience (kids) that has an actual deadline and schedule. (September 2020)
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Create pitches and start on another comic book with a creature designer.
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Finish your 1st comic book.
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Publish it on Kickstarter and barely fund it due to having no existing audience and not marketing it well. (November 2022)
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Take a break from everything related to comicalfoods due to having no money and life stuff
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Continue to learn about business and branding from the TheFutur
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Have a kid. (2023)
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Take a look back at your publishing journey and reflect on it.
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Create a new plan that focuses on time management and how to keep creating stories on a low budget. (January 2025)
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Turn your epic science fantasy comic into an illustrated novel and then into a fusion book.
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Work on story pitches that focus on short stories
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Pitch a sci-fi/horror story to a writer and a creature designer
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Pitch a romantasy story to 2 writers.
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Start a new collaboration project that is a mix of sci-fi, cli-fi, and horror. (February 2025)
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Update your publishing website
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Rebrand. Redesign your logo, start creating style guide and social media templates
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Revive an old comic project to transform it into an epistolary story
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Begin to work on setting up a Youtube channel where you share your "recipes" process for how you build a publisher and cook up stories.
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Write this recipe. (May 2025)