[Circle of Hands] Blatant promotion campaign

[Dragon Master]

I'm definitely with Moreno on this one. Just based on the bullet points you listed, I'm looking forward to getting a copy in my hands.

[Ron Edwards]

I keep going back and forth on the PDF pledge amount. I started at $10, then became infatuated with multiples of 3 for some reason and changed it to $15, but then my own reaction to that as well as Rafu's comment (which was identifical to my reason) has led me to think $10 is the right value. And then I remember that people happily pledged $25 for the new Sorcerer PDFs, many preferring PDF only even after they were converted to books. So ... damn it! Back and forth.

Best, Ron

[Dragon Master]

Given the quality I've come to expect (design-wise) from you, I'd certainly be willing to go $15 for the PDF... Though I'll likely be going for a PDF/Book combo either way.

[Moreno R.]

These days people usually expect to pay less than $15 for a pdf of a new rpg  (waiting for some bundle or other offers you can find a lot of good new rpgs for less than $3 each, or even for free). By the other hand, you have a proven track record and a lot of people that would pay $15 without a second thought for "Ron Edward's new rpg".

If you lower the price, you get less from the people that would have brought it at $15, but you have bigger chances to have new buyers, even not familiar with your previous games, attracted by the game description.

So, I think that the unknown factor in this, is how many new buyers you can attract. You know the revenue you would lose on every copy, but not the (eventual) increase in the number of copies. And this second number doesn't depend only on the price: how will you promote the game? Where?

From the description, this is probably, among all of your games, the one that would have the bigger chances to attract players (and buyers) that don't know anything about Indie games or your name. So, if you ever wanted to make a big push to increase your readership, this would be probably the right horse. By the other hand, this mean promotion, with added work and time needed to make it work.

[Callan S.]

How much do you want?

Simply plot how many you'd estimate would pay $10, how many would pay $15, how many would pay $20.

Which one lines up the closest with how much you want?

[lumpley]

If you start at $15, you leave yourself room to lower it to $10 in the future to capitalize on a swell in interest. If you start at $10, you'd have to lower it to $5 to do the same. (Maybe $7.)

I can tell you that, back at the end of 2011, the one-two-three punch of winning those awards, Monsterhearts' publication, and lowering the PDF price from $15 to $10 turned Apocalypse World's sales from declining to growing. Winning the awards and Monsterhearts wouldn't have done it by themselves.

-Vincent

[Rafu]

Vincent, this might mean that, say, the perfect price point for an off-the-shelf PDF would be 15. But, as someone committing to an advance pre-order/crowd funding campaign, I would expect to get a better deal than the regular off-the-shelf customer, right? So, if 15 is the baseline, maybe 10 or 12 in the kickstarter, which is the price you would consider when running a special sale or whatever at a later date...
Gosh, OTOH this means that we're now setting price-points in indie RPGs like in the retail fashion market? "Tag" prices being an inflated thing that only exists as the baseline for sales, discounts, factory outlets etc. which are still expected to make a significant margin. Weird!

[Ron Edwards]

Rafu, from your comment at the Kickstart preview:

I understand you sort-of take a point of pride in pricing your PDFs higher than most

I don't, actually. I assigned $25 to each of the Sorcerer PDFs entirely by accident. My plan was to charge $15, but in the machinations of setting up the Un-Store and the Paypal button and all that crap, I typed in $25.

I realized the mistake the next day, and decided I'd have to go back into the interface and do it all over again ... but by the time I really got around to this, people had already ordered. A lot of people had already ordered. I was amazed: people were willing to pay $25 each for these? The same price as the book, only without shipping (and granted, one of the files is printable as the book)? I decided to suffer the pain and agony of the profit margin and didn't change the price.

I've changed the PDF pledge for Circle of Hands back to $10, though.

I'm wondering if the stretch goal for hardback should be set lower, to $7500, because I'd like to see some reason for people to put in more than $30. Perhaps it shouldn't even be a stretch goal?

[Dan Maruschak]

Maybe this is an idiosyncratic reaction, but I found it odd that the Kickstarter page starts off by talking about the imprint/collective activity from a designer's perspective ("Take your old Heartbreaker RPG manuscript...") and not about the specific game project that the potential backer would be contributing to. It even took me a minute to realize that "Circle of Hands" was the name of a particular game and not the "redemption project" in general. I think it would make more sense to me if you led with the game and then explained that it was the first game of a new imprint.

But, as someone committing to an advance pre-order/crowd funding campaign, I would expect to get a better deal than the regular off-the-shelf customer, right?

The "kickstarter backer = bargain hunter" thing seems like a weird assumption to me. I'd normally expect Kickstarter backers to be alpha-fans, i.e. the people who'd assign the highest value to a creator's work, which means they'd be more comfortable paying a high price than the average customer would be (as long as they don't feel like suckers for paying more for the exact same thing, i.e. they're getting the "special edition" or whatever, because nobody likes to feel like they spent money for no good reason).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

I feel the same way about both things. I am really struggling with the general vs. the individual-product aspect of this Kickstart. Perhaps the order you suggest is the way to go. I'll do some editing to see how it looks.

As for the bargain-hunting ... my point of view is the same as yours, but I have found that the Kickstart backers who want bargains are very, very committed to their point of view. And they represent a substantial portion of the Kickstart backer population. I don't agree with them and I can't argue with them, so I have to find some way to satisfy them - otherwise I don't get enough backing - without simply digging myself into the red (which they refuse to believe is the reality of their POV).

[Rafu]

I'm not sure whether this is going to become a thread-derail, but I know that, Ron, you'll boldly step up and stop me in that case, so I'm not worried. Talking about Kickstarter and bargain-hunting looks interesting to me, because there are so many directions such a conversation could actually go, and I'd like to point out a few.

A disclaimer: I might the one who first raised the PDF price-point issue, and I might be playing the Devil's advocate in favor of bargain-hunters (well, sort of), but, please, I wouldn't like anybody to think I'm committed to this "viewpoint" at any level, and especially there's nothing ideological or even theoretical in it to me. I have I could have it my way, we writers would just be putting out writings for everybody to read free of charge, and the society as a whole would be feeding us, dressing us and giving us shelter free of charge because just because we deserve it (fundamentally, as human beings, not because we're writers and there's anything special about writing). If I could have it my way, money would cease existing. My current timid attempt to reconcile my ideology with my survival in a world very adverse to both is going the Patreon + copyleft licensing way, where I put out writings (games) free and have an interface in place for people to support me with whatever amount of money they subjectively think they can spare (so that I can, hopefully, spend my time writing games rather than looking for an elusive "real job"). I've set my suggested contribution levels quite low, because I'd rather have a million people giving me a dollar than one guy giving me one million. That's where I'm really coming from.

Now, more pragmatically: widespread adoption of Kickstarter (and clones) by game self-publishers sure is a great thing for micro-entrepreneurship (despite being full of dangerous pitfalls, too), but when you crowdfund the editing, layout and printing of a book, what you're doing amounts to a pre-order campaign for the book — I can't see how that could be a contentious point. Pre-order campaigns are great for self-publishing, since they solve the issue of needing capitals from some other source before you can publish, and also help a lot in figuring out a reasonable size for your printing batch: what's not to love in that?
But, Dan, as you actually point out (just read your own post twice), in order to make people commit to paying you money in advance - as opposed to just buying a book off the shelf - you've got to give them back some extra, something they would be unable to get otherwise. This might be a signed book, a limited edition, an otherwise unavailable hardcover, some posh gadget... This might as well be an intangible: such as "getting it before anybody else", this promise causing so much irrational nerdrage when it's broken. In fact, all Kickstarter campaigns do by design include the intangible rewards of "being part of it", "helping someone achieve something which would otherwise be impossible", etc. That these lofty, noble feelings are actually being commodized is at the core of the whole Kickstarter concept and its remarkable success. Even the time-limit for funding built into Kickstarter is craftily designed to commodize an intangible: your opportunity to "be part of it" is limited to this very moment in time, affecting your decision process (you know you can't just sit on the fringe for a while but you've gotta commit right now).
Now, a bargain price is just another (quite tangible) "thing you couldn't get otherwise", putting it on the same level as numbered, signed copies, or gadgets. Of course, different rewards appeal to different people, and Kickstarter knows: hence the subsystem of reward tiers associated with pledge amounts.
Now, I can't help but feel it's maybe a bit odd when we assume that a customer pledging for a higher-than-off-the-shelf-price amount is noble and pure in their desire to help (and would of course have made a high pledge even if there was no super-limited gadget involved), while a customer pledging for a lower-than-off-the-shelf-price amount is a bargain-hunter willing to get advantage of the entrepreneur. Such a view implies an amount of classism, or, rather, adopting the privilege of high income as the default viewpoint.
Now, it might be (it is even likely, I dunno) that a majority of Kickstarter users are white-collared members of the privileged technocratic elite of North America, who could all well afford to sustain game-writers by buying all of their books in advance at twice the regular price. Most crowdfunding campaigns include high pledge tiers designed to attract these people (and some self-publishers are know to have fallen into significant time and effort sinkholes to produce the related extra-limited rewards, not always achieving a net gain in the end).
But, OTOH, including bargain-price digital rewards and the like provides an affordable entry-point for other sorts of people: people for whom, say, 10$ is quite a significant commitment, and their choice is maybe to get the (digital) book at this "bargain" price or never to get it. People committing to an advance payment/pre-order option, and basically taking a risk, only because they know a regular, later date purchase might be out of their league — or people really willing to help out a fellow despite not having much to share. I'm counting myself as one of these people, despite probably having it easier than others.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rafu,

I understand your outlook - no personal accusations intended.

During and after the Sorcerer Kickstart, so about one year ago, I wrote extensively on this topic. At the time, I decided to run a Kickstart for S/Lay w/Me predicated on added value - every increment of raised pledge meant an increment of a wide range of cool things to choose from. It didn't work very well, and I received a lot of feedback from people who were convinced, even honestly aggrieved, that the goal was not the same as the reward. I don't like it - at all! - but I am not personally inclined to argue with reality.

As a side point, pre-ordering is actually quite an aggravation for a publisher like me. It places the production on others' schedule rather than my own, for one thing. I would much rather simply pay for my production from my current business capital rather than force both customer and myself into a form of speculation. But! I am not going to belabor that point. Pre-ordering is the reality-based context for running successful Kickstarts for RPGs, and we all must cope.

More discussions led me to your conclusion as well, that if one is to run a pre-order type Kickstart, then the backers (early adopters) need something special, and that is indeed fair. Paul Czege has eloquently argued that such backers place incredible value on being considered important, which is why, for example, they get so angry if anyone gets the book before they do. Guy Shalev also explained in detail how limited rewards, either in terms of how many can get it, or it not being otherwise available, are premium items for such backers. My concern is that "something special" cannot be expressed as "a good deal," or "getting it cheap." Backers seem incapable of understanding that if I don't receive a certain margin from every sale, then I go out of business; I've been astonished that many people seem to think that it's OK to receive their book at cost of printing and fulfillment.

In this case, I'm applying the lesson from Sorcerer: that people appreciate the cost and difficulty of acquiring excellent art, and they are willing to become production partners, producers in movie terms, so that the item can look a certain way. I've built the reward structure a little bit more intelligently this time, and I've also added the hardback upgrade, satisfying the need for an especially nice limited item.

I do think there needs to be one more special tier of some kind, perhaps in the $60 range or something like that, which provides a unique item, but after the Sorcerer and S/Lay "cool items" barrage, my brain is a little empty, and I don't have much time this year for extra-work items.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Vincent, the only tricky part about the reduction is that pledge tiers can't be edited once they're in play. So I'd have to set up the initial PDF sale with a capacity (100 or whatever), then activate the cheaper one. Which would kind of piss off the initial pledgers, I think. And if I made it transparent from the start, then I think people would wait for someone else to take the hit for the pricier pledge.

I may not have understood your suggestion, though. If you were talking about the difference between getting the PDF via the Kickstart vs. buying it later, then that's different. I'm not sure how it would play out either way. On the plus side, the $5 S/Lay w/Me PDF is a constant seller, that's for sure, and to a lesser but also real extent, the $5 Mutual Decision.

[lumpley]

Oh, yeah, no, I was thinking of a year from now, two years from now, and just assuming that the kickstarter price would be the same as the ongoing price. I wasn't suggesting changing mid-kickstart.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

So ... recent work includes:

1. Placing the PDF at $12
2. Altering the multiple-book order to a sensible price-point
3. Adding an "about the game" section which I confess isn't much more than a link to the list-of-awesome; if I had the skills to put in some decent little dice pictures, I would
4. Putting Ralph's name in the list in an attempt at sympathetic magic.

Considering:

1. Adding some very limited-in-number but verrrry tempting special tier at $60 or so
2. Starting with the hardcovers available, and never mind stretch goals
3. Removing the oh-so-mean criticism of the incompetent, fucked-up, unbelievably unprofessional, stupid projects that collected X dozens or hundreds of thousands of dollars which evidently went for ... uh, something ... or nothing, or um. I don't think the KS staff really understands how angry people are about that.

Really looking forward to:

1. Art by Amos Orion Sterns to add to the page - I'm excited about this!
2. Finishing the playtest draft which is looking good but demands a lot of work right now