[Sorcerer Kickstart] Tactics after the second goal

[Ron Edwards]

Here's my insight: it's not about the total, it's about the per-pledger amount. Every pledge is about to become, effectively, a book pre-order. My no-overhead Kickstart is about to become a book print-and-fulfill project, which is to say, nothing but overhead.

I screwed up already by under-estimating the postage when I asked people to upgrade by $5 or $10. I should have made that amount higher, especially the latter to $15. In fact, I should have created a new pledge category with the shipping included and had people move their pledges there if they wanted the books - that would have been actually smart. But at that moment, I didn't understand that option existed.

Anyway, on a per-pledge basis, the average right now is $35. Judging by Trollbabe, printing a book of about this size will cost over $7, let's say $7.50 for estimate purposes. There are two books, so that's $15 for printing. Then there's shipping, which if I'm remembering right is $6 for U.S. and $15 for elsewhere, due to a recent adjustment. So all else being equal, every U.S. pledge makes me $9, and every pledge elsewhere makes me $5.

(See, it doesn't matter if an individual has "added for shipping." It's all about the average values.)

Well, that actually makes me feel a bit better. I'm not losing money per pledge ... until I remember that the whole point of this was to pay Nathan and Thomas, not to fulfill books. Fuck! OK, $2000 for Thomas, and about $1000 for Nathan if I recall correctly, considering the full load of work he and I agreed to late last year (PDFing all my books, Shahida layout, Sorc layout). Running the numbers some more, and figuring 300 pledges just for kicks, and splitting them half-and-half for location again just for kicks ...

$950 + $750 = $1700, which is not $3000. I'm $1300 in the hole! I have run smack into the thing I swore not to, which was to switch from fundraising to meet my need into product supply.

Granted, I made a lot of assumptions in the above calculation, but my point is that no change in the total number of pledges solves the problem, and I have no control over it so I can't skew orders toward U.S. sales.

And since I already asked people to upgrade for shipping, and since so many of them did that very nicely, I do not think I have the moral high ground to ask again.

Damn. The only solution is clear: to offer a new, very sweet $50 pledge reward that will be yummy gamer cheese, so people can switch to it. But it can't cost me a penny! Time, I can give; I may simply have to. But not money. This has to be pure benefit for them and pure effort for me.

Think! Think, think, think! (imagine me making crowd-inspiring gestures)

Best, Ron

Editing in: clarification. A new stretch goal is a terrible idea. It only adds (i) something for me to do, but worse, (ii) more pledges which aggravates the existing structural defect. I don't need more pledges. I need more per pledge.

[Christoph]

You can hold off sending me my copy till Shahida comes out, and send the two together once I've paid that game, that should save on shipping costs. If you can find a way to incite others to accept a similar deal, you might save some money and secure some additional sales of other games.

[Ron Edwards]

That's an idea, although I'm also interested in avoiding individualized specifications, if possible.

One thing I'm going to investigate tomorrow is the POD option at Publisher's Graphics, where I'd planned to print. They can serve as a complete fulfillment house. I have a good working relationship with them. I want to see if they're prepared to sign me on and also to handle a sudden order of this size, and whether the general package is cost-effective for me. It'll certainly save me the wear and tear of fulfillment in general. And at least I'll have hard numbers for the complete costs per type of shipment (U.S./other), which will help in arriving at the best new strategy.

Best, Ron

[Peter Nordstrand]

Fulfilling European orders from Europe ought to make shipping costs less expensive, would it?

[Ron Edwards]

H'mmm ... if they were printed there, yes it would. A lot. Thanks Peter!

Eero, can you and Jari hold a power-session emergency discussion right away? I would even be happy to concede full handling of orders, i.e., for the orders to go straight to Arkenstone, albeit directed from my site. I am not talking about publishing through Arkenstone, but only printing and fulfilling.

I also need to check with Narrattiva to make sure I'm not violating the terms of concession I have with them - which I think is only for translations in specific countries.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Wait, my math's off, although the problem's still there.

It's $1350 + $750 = $2100, which is still not $3000, but rather $900 in the hole. It covers Thomas' payment, and I'd basically gut the Adept bank amount (never very large) for the rest. I'd end up breaking even, not in a very good way, the "not a pot to piss in" way.

Again: if I can come up with a pledge level of $50 (total) that would be fun and fair value for the person grading up from $30 or $35, and not costing me money of any kind (effort is OK), then I'm good. I plan to go to sleep with this question echoing in my head, hoping to wake up saying "Of course!"

And the European printing would be very, very good. Eero?

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

(Cross-posted a bunch.)

Huh. I know it's not exactly constructive to cry over spilt milk, but I have to say that I imagined that you'd put a little bit more thought into the numbers in this. I'd be too conservative to start to collect money in a preorder campaign without figuring out in advance what everything costs. Because I've pretty much learned the basics of how to do indie publishing from you, I have assume that you're just in too much haste over all this to plan in advance.

On the positive side, I haven't yet pledged any myself, so at least I'm not making the problem worse. Who knows, maybe you'll never reach $10 000, at this writing you're merely at $9 8905 :D

Putting that aside, that hardcover book would be the obvious move here. If you price that to account for the real costs of producing and shipping it (on top of your static costs like the art and whatnot), as well as profit, then you can straighten out your expenses structure by having many orders move to that from the under-priced pledge levels. Technically backers would get more value for their money out of sticking with the overly cheap softcovers, but there are two factors working to your advantage here:

• The backers consist of people who want to do good by you. You would probably get some backtalk if you just reneged on your promises because they were ill-considered, but if you instead offer everybody voluntary extra value for the sake of balancing your budget, then I would expect most people to be happy to switch backing levels to help you out.
• Most Kickstarter customers are interested in things like special editions and higher quality items, more so than the general public on average. I would not be surprised if a majority of the backer base would want to have a game they cherish in the most prestigious format available.

If you decide to try the hardcover stratagem, you've basically got two options there: a simple hardcover book that just transfers the existing work into hardcover, and the "heavy metal" prestige edition you've been mulling over. Either would work for the purpose of balancing your budget, provided that you can calculate the correct price point soon. Your campaign is pretty short, there's not too much time to make changes before the campaign ends and the contract between you and the backers solidifies. But if you can get the numbers, you could even put in both versions and let the backers sort it out themselves whether they want the $50 level for ordinary hardcover or $100 level for prestige version, or whatever.

It also wouldn't hurt to establish a new pledge level at $20 that includes the books in PDF but no physical books now that you're going to be printing books. Every customer who decides to downgrade because they genuinely don't care about physical books takes away $5, but they'll also take away the obligation to ship a book to them, so you'd actually be balancing your budget by doing this. There are people out there who genuinely don't even want a paper book, and they'd appreciate it if this choice was reflected in the price.

Also, you should consider stopping accepting pledges at the level that you've discovered to be underpriced, if that's possible in Kickstarter. (I seem to remember that it's possible to change the limits on a backing level mid-way, but who knows.) It is an entirely honorable move, and does nothing to hurt the current backers, who may consider their current deal a sort of early supporter bonus. Presumably any new backers will then gravitate towards whatever repriced levels you introduce. Of course it might be the case that the current numbers will become better the more backers you get, as you're still taking in more money than producing the books costs, even if only a little bit. Technically you could get out of the hole with no changes to the pledge levels, as long as you get so many backers that the worse-than-intended per-unit profits overcome the static expenses by sheer numbers.

One more strategy that you should seriously consider is to explain the situation to the backers, say you're sorry, set up new pledge levels for the softcovers and tell everybody who wants paper books to move to those new, appropriately priced levels. It's not a very stylish solution to withdraw your promise of free books, but it's the sort of thing that happens in an imperfect world, and ultimately the worst anybody can think of you is that you were a bit foolish with your promises. After all, an important point to remember is that there is no permanent contract here until the funding period ends: anybody who doesn't like your new deal can withdraw their funding altogether, and nobody is the worse for the wear. More foolish things have happened.

Finally, regarding what you said to Christoph: I think that you're overly complicating things for yourself by trying to avoid individualized fulfillment. I understand that this is behind your insisting to deal with the shipping upgrades as vaguely voluntary, too; you don't want to keep lists of your customers and who has and who hasn't paid for their shipping. Everything would be much simpler if you accepted that you'll need to keep individualized customer records anyway, so you might as well track who has and who hasn't paid shipping for their books. Not only will this help your bottom line a bit by dropping the people who don't want the book and therefore aren't paying shipping, but it'll also make it easier for you to adapt your strategy going forward. Heck, it would be entirely trivial to offer the deal that Christoph suggested to everybody: chances are that you have many pledgers who are in no hurry to get paper books, they might be willing to wait until whenever to consolidate shipping.

(Regarding individualized customer accounts, remember that Kickstarter enables you to send a customer questionnaire at the end of the campaign to every backer, and such a questionnaire is considered part and parcel of normal Kickstarter culture nowadays. Furthermore, Kickstarter will compile the customer replies to your questionnaire into a spreadsheet for you. This basically makes it extremely trivial for you to not care a whit about how much and why people put money into the project as it goes along: you can just ask them afterwards whether they even want a paper book, where they want it to be shipped, what they wanted to buy with that extra $25 they pledged, and so on.)

Postscript-wise, I'll be happy to help if you can think of a good strategy going forward that relies on outside work or whatever. I'm not exactly unique in this regard, so if you can think of something sensible to restructure the project, we can probably find the workforce for doing whatever it is that needs doing.

[Dan Maruschak]

Ron, I don't know much about printing, but would it be possible and cost-advantageous to try to make it into a single volume instead of one base book and one supplement book? (Also, is your "every new pledge makes it worse" hypothesis inadvertently treating the art and layout as per-unit costs instead of fixed? If your "profit" per book is non-negative I can't see how increased volume should be hurting you).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

We can save the "gee I'm surprised you didn't think about it" conversation for later. Right now it's time to kill the foe.

The hardcovers shift is a great idea (turning it into a $50 option) but I want to discuss a different one because as you say, I need harder numbers before deciding on that. I ask you to focus on the following question without thinking ironically or creatively, because, with respect, you sometimes get all wrapped up in that.

Are you and Jari interested in handling printing and fulfillment for these books for all European orders? I stress, printing. This would be a very basic service for me, not an Arkenstone publishing venture although I'd be happy for the books to be featured at your site. Please let me know what terms would work for you, by email.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

You're right, Dan - as far as I can see from those numbers, getting more people to sign on at $25 per book should make the hole more shallow.

Regarding European printing and fulfillment, of course we can do that. Whether it ends up cheaper, however, is a complex question. If the numbers were to work, we'd be happy to help.

Finnish postages are pretty high: a parcel <2kgs (four old Sorcerer hardcover books weights in at 1.3 kg or so, for comparison) to Europe costs 18 to 23 €. We prefer to make our small shipments as letters, which are much cheaper (8.20 € for 1-2 kgs), but those are limited to <30mm thickness, which might not work for the new books. (The maximum dimensions for letter-class shipments are 250x400x30 mm, which sometimes enables shipping two sufficiently slim books side by side instead of stacked. Yes, the system is weird.)

Printing in Finland is traditionally a bit more expensive than in the USA. I could get some quotes from suitable digital presses if you've got the format, page-count and desired paper-weight figured out. Probably unnecessary if the shipping part of the equation seems unfavorable; I would be surprised if things had changed over the last two years so much as to make it considerably cheaper to print in Finland in comparison to USA. If savings were to be had here, they would likely be in the shipping department.

It's a smart move to run the numbers on separate European fulfillment regardless of other strategic nuances, so this isn't very time-critical in that regard; we can look into it after the Kickstarter, too. Also, maybe the numbers would be more favorable in Germany or Italy? They're more centrally positioned in Europe and have more population, after all, so it isn't unreasonable to assume that there might be costs savings there.

If you'll get me good estimates of how large the books are, I can look more carefully into whether there is an affordable shipping option lurking here in between the strict letter dimension requirements and the horror that is the cost of parcel shipping from Finland. Also printing, if you think that this course of investigation has potential. Let's get back to this by email, if you see potential in it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

Yeah, my utterly negative assessment was a little overblown. 500 pledges total would solve the problem, assuming my half-and-half breakdown is approximately true. However, 500 is a lot to expect if nothing changes, considering the growth curve for the project is displaying a classic S curve and heading into level-off. Whereas if the average were to climb even to $40 per pledge, then the current (conservative) closing estimate of 300 pledges will meet the need.

Right now, my strategy goes like this.

1. Offer a great thing on a new $50 pledge reward, which I hope would encourage many people currently pledged at $25 (plus a bit extra) to switch to it.
2. Get the best deal possible for POD and fulfillment at Publishers Graphics, for U.S. orders.
3. Get a good fair deal from Arkenstone for printing and fulfillment in Europe, thus increasing the profit margin on those orders considerably.
4. Consider a hardback option for the $50 level, if and only if its increased printing cost does not obviate the gain in pledge. Even better, wake up tomorrow with an awesome idea for it, or to find such a thing waiting for me here in this thread.
(editing this in) 5. Maintain the current $25 with optional "juice," because as you are pointing out, it's not like they hurt anything.

If most or all of this comes together, then we can all look back at this 24-hour period and laugh about the time Ron nearly let his Kickstart get away from him.

Best, Ron

[Steve Hickey]

I really enjoyed our phone conversation a few years back about how to run Sorcerer at conventions. One option might be something like this:

Pledge $50 or more
You and Ron have a 15 minute conversation about a topic of your choice relating to Sorcerer. This conversation will be recorded as video (if it's via Google Hangouts) or audio (if it's by skype), and will be made publicly available on the Adept Press website as a resource for other Sorcerer players.

[Christoph]

There's a thing with the hardcover option: price per unit goes down the more you print in a given run, but do hardcover and softcover count as separate runs, even if you order them at the same time at the printer?

[Eero Tuovinen]

There's a thing with the hardcover option: price per unit goes down the more you print in a given run, but do hardcover and softcover count as separate runs, even if you order them at the same time at the printer?

Practically you should consider them separate "runs" at this scale. If you were doing very large print runs and worked with a big printer that has well established work-flows, chances are that they could work out significant savings for you in this sort of situation, but in a small press kind of thing I would expect any savings to be negligible. You would need to find that one special printer that really wants the job and is equipped to do the two kinds of bindings side by side.

In general it's not the concept of "print run" that creates the savings in longer runs. Rather, it's the fact that the set-up costs, which include the set-up for the binding workflow, are static and thus don't scale up as more copies are created at once. Doing two kinds of binding increases the set-up effort because two different binding workflows need to be prepared and used in the production. Meanwhile the actual printing workflow is not impacted, assuming the two types of book use the same paper, and same printing signatures. So you should expect to at least pay a bit more set-up cost for the addition of the second binding system. Potentially it's not as much as it would be if you were printing the two runs completely separately, but that depends solely on the details of the job - whether the printer cares to and can work two separate bindings for a single print run.

(If we were going technical, I would add that the signature thing would be a killer. Small press softcover books are usually printed on small signatures that do not suit stitch-binding, so you'd want your hardcover book to use some variant of gluing as well for it to be possible to use the same printed pages in both bindings. It's technically possible to get around this sort of thing, but I would expect it to only be worthwhile for a larger job.)

[Ron Edwards]

Lots of good news. Mainly that the new $50 items are being taken up, and that the average pledge value is going up quite steadily (a whole dollar just this morning!), even with newcomers pledging equally steadily at $25. Running numbers, I'm finding that even a slight increase in average pledge value makes a huge positive difference. If these trends continue, then my entire anxiety will turn out to be merely a moment in a larger (better) story.

Shipping costs in Europe are heinous! Given that and the added difficulty and funds of two separate setup costs, I think I'll try to arrive at an optimal Eurocentric system as a longer-term issue, and stay with a single print-and-fulfill process here in the States. Going completely POD will help a lot too, as that means no warehousing.

Best, Ron