The Black Pyramid
My previous experience in running a Kickstarter was not a great one. But for BP to not only be fully funded in over an hour but then to watch as people continued to show their support for something I created over the next two weeks; it is probably one of the most exciting and amazing moments of my life. It's definitely in the top 10; in there with the birth of my two daughters, marrying the love of my life, and graduating College. So this has been an amazing trip and has motivated me, even more, to continue to produce content for people to use in their home games. Many more adventures and creature content will be coming out down the road.
I have been mulling over everything that I have experienced and encountered during this whole process, wanting to write up a post mortem on how I approached the Kickstarter and all of the backer rewards and shipping. I think, much like any other time someone writes of their Kickstarter experiences, it allows others to learn from that experience and avoid a few of the pitfalls. I'll try my best to present this as easy and accessible as possible and try to not ramble on and on too much. Though honestly, I feel like I have already started to ramble anyway.
Stretch Goals
So first and for most. Don't add any new Stretch Goals, outside of ones you have already planned for. I almost added a new stretch goal, jokingly thinking that I would never hit that stretch goal. The Stretch Goal would have been if we Hit $2,000-3,000 that I would make a Mothership based animated short. Thankfully, I was smart and spoke to a few trusted folk and decided against it, because when the campaign came to an end, we were funded at over $4,000. As much fun as that would be and might be something I wouldn't mind doing someday, I have been super busy all spring and really wouldn't have had the time to do create such an animation. Usually, when I make animations for clients, I get at a minimum of $6,000 for animating a short. so this wouldn't covered the time It would've taken to make, to begin with, and would have cut into the time I would need to work on client projects. So it would have been a bad decision in the long run.I had two stretch Goals for Black Pyramid and both of those were things I already had planned and knew I could complete in time. The first one was for a full-color, double-sided map. The Zine is in black and white, in keeping with the spirit of the Zinequest restrictions. But when I created the maps that appear in the zine, I made them all in full color, in a similar style you see in the Dead Planet module from Mothership; isometric and color-coded into separate areas. So putting these together onto an 11x17 poster size sheet wasn't time-consuming. And considering the numbers they were printed in, they were also fairly cost-effective.
The second stretch goal was additional digital content. This content needed to be something that you could play by itself or as a continuation of The Black Pyramid scenario. Even before I put the stretch goal up, I was very sure what I wanted to do was expand upon the Pirates that play a very minor roll in the scenario. Originally when I conceived this extra content I imagined it as maybe 2-3 pages of content. Some random tables, a map, and some NPCs. But, as is my nature, this expanded to 15 pages of content, a zine by itself in all honestly, with a fully illustrated cover. Shown below.
Originally I just called this extra content, The Space Pirate Base. But when I was almost done with it I decided that it needed a kool Mothership worthy name. So looking at some of the content in the scenario I came up with the name Diminishing Returns. I would elaborate on what in the content helped me with coming up with this name, but I don't want to spoil anything for anyone reading this that might want to play through it. However, I will say one unrelated thing about the scenario in general. I hope you really get a kick out of the Vending Machine.
So for the stretch goals, they were all doable. Though to be honest, I dragged my feet to get the extra content done. It's one thing to have a ton of ideas, but its a whole another story to type all those ideas up and put them to paper. But I promised my backer that when the books came in and they went to download their pdf copies, they would be able to download the extra content at the same time. I got it done in time so that is all that matters. Though I had to do one update on the pdf when one backer noticed a few typos. No big deal. Easy fix. Next time I'll try to give myself more time to get the extra content put through the same proofreading process the main zine went through.
Kickstarter Fullfilment
So one of the steps I took that may vary with how many other content creators have handled their Kickstarters is that I took some advice from David Schirduan's blog, Technical Grimoire. In the linked post, he discusses whether or not you should use Kickstarters' own built-in system for collecting shipping costs. I have shared this blog posts with a few friends who do use Kickstarter every year or every other year to fund their various projects because one of the things they and many others run into is running out of funds when it comes time to ship their product to the backers. Shipping prices change, being readjusted every year and so it can be a challenge to make sure you're coving your ass when you set your Kickstarter funding goal.So David suggests that you set up a site on a place like Gumroad and goes into details, the good and bad, of why. I thought about taking this route myself and had started to create an account on Gumroad but, at the same time that this was all happening, my wife was asking how I normally would sell my RPG content. I talk with my wife about this kind of stuff all the time, asking her opinion because she can more often than not find the aspects that I have not taken into account. But I had never really talked to her about Gaming related things because she is not a gamer and if I do bring gaming up and ramble on and on about it her eyes glaze over. So I try not to do that. But with the Kickstart and the Weekly Monster drawing I do, this subject came up in discussion. My wife had been telling me that I should open an e-commerce shop to sell some of my artwork on stickers and such instead of losing money on sites like Redbubble. I thought it was a good idea but was unsure if I wanted to commit to a shop when she first brought it up. So long story short, I pulled the trigger and instead of making a Gumroad account, I decided to build an e-commerce shop attached to my Portfolio site, as its own subdomain. I would only suggest going this route if you already had a website like myself.
Even before the Kickstarter Launched I knew I was going to follow David's advice and as such made sure everyone understood that by adding a disclaimer to the Risks and Challenges section of the campaign page. I can only guess that everyone understood what I wrote since I was never asked about it. If you choose to do this make sure you write it out in plain text so that there is no misunderstanding on how you are going to handle shipping. That you will be asking for them to pay for shipping at the moment they "order" their copy of the zine. With my Kickstarters, I the backers that they each will be getting a unique coupon to order their copy. This coupon removes the cost of the book but still applies the cost of shipping. These coupons can only be used once and to make it easier for me, I attached the backer's name to them so that I could see who had used their coupons and who still needed to order.
Coupons
At the time when I decided to go this route, the most I had done was make sure I could make a unique coupon using the WooCommerce plugin for Wordpress. It wasn't until later when it was time to make the coupons that I looked full into it. Not really a mistake on my part, but it could have been a big issue if it wasn't for the fact that WordPress has a lot of plugin support. Originally, with Woocomerce you can make unique coupons that can be limited to certain users and in how many times they can be used. But you had to go through and make each one, one at a time. Very long drawn out process to go through and making each one and making sure you check all the same boxes. Every. Single. Time. I didn't realize this until I sat down to do it. When I discovered this I definitely felt a little intimidated since I needed to make close to 400 coupons. But with a few minutes of searching on google, I found that there were a couple of Coupon Generator Plugins that you could get for free to make this process easier. So I generated two batches using a plugin. One for the people getting just the PDF and one for the backers who were getting the hard copy and PDF. Then I went through with my list of backers and assigned a code to each and sent those out with direction on how to use the codes and what to do.
Bonus Sells
The great thing about handling the backer rewards this way is that it made it very easy to allow the backers to make additional purchases. If they wanted to, a backer who backed at the lower level and got just the PDF could now also order a physical copy and pay the extra cost. Or a backer could order multiple copies as well as purchase other content I have up on the shop.
During all of this, I also discovered I could link a POD T-Shirt company to my Woocommerce and sell shirts that way. I wouldn't need to keep a bunch of stock sitting around on something I was unsure would sell. I made this illustration for a free product I put together for this year's anniversary of my weekly Monster drawings and loved how well it turned that I wanted to see it on a shirt. I heard good things about Printful and order two shirts from them, each with one of my designs on them. They came out beautiful and now they are up at my shop. But I digress.Printing
So when the money from the Kickstarter showed up, I was able to transfer my website to a new host so I could have the security certificate I needed to open an e-commerce subdomain. Now I just needed to send the Zine off to the printers. Throughout the Kickstarter and a few weeks after as I was getting everything set up, I was proofing the zine, using not only my wife but several other people, making and expanding the content where needed. I think its a really good idea to have someone who is unfamiliar with RPGs like my wife to proofread your game content. They will have questions that will help you see holes in the content and writing that you missed. During this time I also continued to add artwork, as well as, a new map that is in the final product to help fix any of the holes that I or others had found during the process. Pretty quickly, and much faster than my backers suspected, I had the final layout done and ready to go to the printers.I had originally planned to use a local printer, one that I had worked with before to make art prints and stickers. I had a history with them that I wanted to rely on, while also supporting a local company. At the same time I was also looking at Mixam, the same printers that Sean McCoy uses for Mothership. Actually, even before the Kickstarter had started I had spoken to my local printers. I wanted a rough idea of how much printing off my zine would cost which in turn helped me set the funding goal. When I had reached my goal, I sent them a rough of the layout and asked for a quote on the number of books I was foreseeing that I would need to be printed. This way I could compare it to Mixam's prices and choose overall what was the better option. On one hand, I could get it from Mixam but I have to pay for the books to be shipped to me. On the other hand, I could just pick them up from the local printers myself and save the extra cost of shipping them to me. So it came down to which, in total, was going to be the better price. The rough estimate I got earlier and Mixam's low print run online quote was pretty comparable. I was also hoping, now that it was fully funded and still had over a week left till the end, I would be able to a Mockup printed by the local printers to show on a Kickstarter update. We had discussed this originally when I talked to the local printers, they said they could totally do this. But after 3-4 pokes with email and one extra visit to the shop I couldn't get any quotes from them. The whole Quarantine really sealed the deal in the end when it came time to send the final doc to print. This all happened over two months or so if I recall correctly.
In the end, I went with Mixam since, even now, I have never heard back from my local printers. I have no idea what was going on with them or anything. Currently, with the pandemic, they might be shuttered at the moment but I doubt they can afford to do that and they are trying all kinds of things to remain open like many of the other local small businesses.
My only issue with using Mixam is that they only do Digital proofs of your books. They don't print one copy off and send it to you to check over. I rather have a physical proof to look over, especially if I have images in a spread that bridge two pages. Other than that they were very helpful and easy to work with. Mixam had my zine printed in very little time and out to me within a week. I also had them print the poster size maps that all the backers were getting. Both look great in my opinion and I will probably use them again in the future.
Proofreading Pitfalls
Now that is not to say that there were no issues with the zine when I got them. But much of that was my fault. When I was doing the proofreading of the zine, I had the text in a separate document and when things were updated I would copy and paste them back into the layout document in inDesign. I thought this would be fine but a few things did get past me in the final layout that I'm a little embarrassed about. These have since been fixed in the PDFs and all future reprints. One really bad mistake is in the section about Archeology and that is a mistake that happened during the copy and paste process. Learning from this experience, for the next project, I will have all the proofreading be done in the PDF of the layout itself once I start doing the layout. Honestly, since I do all of this myself, for the most part, from art to writing to layout, I should have waited to do the layout at the very end after all the proofreading. Lessons learned.Shipping
I think the biggest hurdle I ran into was Shipping. I did a lot of research on shipping. A lot. Having heard all the horror stories and knowing a few people who had shipping issues when it came to shipping after a Kickstarter, I wanted this to be handled as well as you possibly can. And overall, using my website to handle the shipping worked for the most part. The information I gathered through my research allowed me to set my shipping prices so that I wouldn't be causing myself additional costs due to miscalculation. Except for international shipping. In all my research I missed one key factor when it came to shipping internationally.There are many options when it comes to shipping through the USPS, often it's hidden on the USPS site but during my research, I read about small press content creators, comic artists, and zine makers, who used the International Flat parcel Retail option. This is the cheapest way to ship internationally, and so I had planned to use this option, which would make it a little cheaper for my international backers to get their zine. Well, when it came time to ship those zines, I discovered that back in 2018 this postage was removed as an option to the general public and especially e-commerce sites. Why? Who knows.
So now I was looking at Double the cost after all these fine people had already paid for shipping. It was going to hurt. This was a difference of $10 - $12, each and I had a significant number of international backers. Once again, my wife came to the rescue with her excellent google fu skills. She not only discovered why the postage site I was using to print off shipping labels couldn't sell me international flat retail postage but also discovered a solution. Stamps.com back when the post office made this change, saw an opportunity to broaden its customer base. They offered to ship International Flat retail by using a loophole. They have a large company that still qualified for this postage, so what they did was sell you the postage through their site, when you print that postage it will redirect your mail to one of their facility where it will get the correct outgoing postage. This way your mail is piggybacking on their discount and qualifications as a large retail business to get your package to where it needs to go. That's the long and short of it. Stamps.com basically found a loophole to the whole situation. Now, Stamps.com is not free, unlike the site I use - Pirateship.com. You pay a monthly fee to use their site for shipping, which is fine if you ship a lot. But they do give new customers a free 4-week trial.
So I took advantage of their services for 2-3 weeks and then canceled it once I got the majority of my international shipments out the door. Then before I canceled the account with them I updated the international shipping price to the correct range so that any new international orders would have the correct shipping applied.
Pirateship
I can't recommend Pirateship.com enough, by the by. It was suggested to me by my local post office when I dropped off the first 40 packages. The mailman I was working with said that his girlfriend runs a Etsy shop and used them for all her shipping needs. By using this kind of service I wouldn't have to waste time while he applied postage to all the packages one at a time or waiting in line. I could just drop them off and leave. It took a little over 3 weeks to get most of the package out the door. Now I am at the point where I can drop off packages twice a week as the orders slowly come into the shop.
Stripe
Now there was one more minor issue I ran into when handling all of this, which made it take a little longer before I could start to ship all the zines to the backers. When I set up my Woocommerce shop, I opened a Stripe account to handle payments. What I did not know at the time was that when you first open a stripe account it takes one full week before they transfer the funds to your bank. Normally the transfer happens as often as you have it set in the settings of your account. But buried on their site somewhere was this little clause. So that held me up a week. I wanted to bring it up just in case someone follows my path and runs into the same issue. Just account for that extra week that you'll have to wait to receive those funds.Conclusion
That's pretty much everything I can think of. I hope you find this insightful and it can help you in your own endeavors.
As usual, if you like the content I put up and want to support my efforts you can purchase RPG Content, Stickers, and T-Shirts from my Shop. You can also show support by subscribing to my Twitch or Youtube channel. And as always you can become a Patron over on Patreon where patrons get free content every month.
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