Part 1 of this series is here.
As I write this, I am working on fulfilling the Kickstarter.
All told, I had 76 backers for physical books. Of those, one payment failed, four haven’t completed their Backerkit surveys, and 3 are locals that I know personally, leaving 68 packages to ship. One had a payment issue in Backerkit that was resolved, but missed my first export, and one has a stack of books, so they are getting handled individually. That’s 66 labels printed on Pirateship. There’s also 1 pre-order of a physical book, but somehow, the math still comes out to 66 labels printed today.
For the digital tiers, there was one with a failed payment on Kickstarter, which left 65 successful backers.
In Backerkit, I loaded almost all of the other digital games as addons. By far, the most successful was the Noternus Nights campaign and setting, but at least one of each sold. That came out to 64 addons from 41 backers for $206.09. It’s low, but Noternus Nights is released as a serial with a price that goes up with each chapter. For Backerkit, it was priced at $3.
So Kickstarter came out to $1821 pledged, which translated to $1618.81 net. Backerkit added $606, which translated to $538.49 net. That put $2157.30 in my hands. There are 5 more payments that should be coming in, but that’s probably just going to be shipping, so it should break even. I’ll be ignoring those here.
I played with ads. Reddit and Twitter ads were worthless. Facebook ads were a loss, but did push me over the line for funding. In the end, I hit the goal without the pledges I can attribute to Facebook, but I can’t guarantee I would have without those to push me over. Next time, I’ll still be running Facebook ads.
I printed 185 copies of the game, which cost $738.45. This leaves me with a small stack to take to a convention next month.
My shipping estimate was pretty spot-on. That stressed me out a lot. The actual shipping was planned following instructions here.
All told, I cleared $760.83 from this campaign. Not huge and not quit-my-job money, but it was nice to have the campaign succeed. That money has gone to fund a booth at a horror convention next month. That’s the booth fee, printing a few different books, and ISBNs for the print runs, which brought me negative again. Hopefully, that changes after the con.