[Sorcerer crowdfunding] Update and plans

[Christoph]

Hey Ron,

How is the project coming along?

Jim Raggi just posted an update concerning his Kickstarter-like projects. One remark he made was that since the money came in rather late, he didn't get to spend it all before the end of the year, so that it counts for profits for 2012, thus it gets taxed. Depending on US taxation laws, it might be a good thing to have the project money coming in early in the year.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi! Today is my day for announcing the plans, subject to certain discussions.

The first topic I need help with is choosing among Kickstart (tm), Indie Gogo, and whatever other services are available. I am not terribly concerned about the "keep it if you don't make the goal" issue, although that might be a secondary factor. My concern is mainly, which of these services is the easiest to use and manage.

The second topic is 3D printing. No one seems able to give me the kind of straight, 101 answers I need. Do you start with a picture? What kind of picture? From different angles? Every single tutorial I've looked at or personal answer I've received assumes I know twenty things I don't.

I'm right in the middle of drafting the information I was planning to post today. (I was distracted by "Oh David you're so embedded" and "Oh Paula you're so well-connected.") Suffice for the moment that I'm planning for December 1, and although the point about taxes is a good one, I think I can turn around the funds very fast because most of the goal is supposed to go to Thomas, and my layout guy will eat up a fair amount of the rest.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't know that Jim's operation has any impact on anything Ron is doing, but I should mention that the interpretation of the Finnish taxation system that he floated at his blog is pretty suspect. I've already recommended to Jim that he should visit the corporate tax office and talk it out with the bureaucrats, they'll explain to him how he can make reservations for committed expenses in his book-keeping, which'll reduce his nominal profits for the year. I'm no expert, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the way to deal with pre-order income.

I'd be surprised if the American system didn't recognize some similar idea. Crowdfunding monies are essentially pre-order commitments, they're more like a loan you're taking from your customers than pure profit.

[Miskatonic]

Ron,

Some blunt comments, coming from no place other than my gut, which keeps nagging me to bring them up. I'm sure you have well-considered reasons which will mitigate all of these. Please take them as friendly concern.

*The elimination of a middle-tier paperback seems off. The logic of "Just take it to Kinko's and get it bound!" is kind of ass. This seems like a step backwards from just running the whole project through Lulu. Presumably, the advantage of running your pre-orders through Kickstarter is to have money up front to do a non-POD volume print run, offering lower price/greater margins than could be offered from a POD or (yuck) one-off printing at a retail copy shop.

*$25 as a price point for the (post-Kickstarter) PDFs seems pretty Tiffany, although this is how much PDFs of the full-color coffee-table-book RPGs are going for at DriveThruRPG.

*A December Kickstarter competes with seasonal gift purchasing. I don't know how much of an impact that has.

*Have more high-end vanity tiers for people who have way too much money and are willing to give it to you.


Okay, less critically:

I'm no expert on the 3D printing, but I could try to translate the technical concepts for you. To use something like Shapeways, you'll need a 3D model created in 3D modeling or CAD software, just like a 3D model for a video game or an animation. You get this by hiring a 3D artist, exactly like you get artwork by hiring an artist. Do you need a sketch or something? I don't know, you'd have to work that out with the artist in question, who would need to interpret your specifications and create something. (Get in touch with me if this is all still frustrating.)

If you're stumped for what you could do for stretch goals, it seems pretty obvious to me you could reach out to the authors of the original Sorcerer mini-supplements and commission them to create revisited deluxe versions of those.

I'm excited to hear this is moving forward!

[Ron Edwards]

So! My current scheme has shaped up to look like this.

Products
Two PDFs: one is the annotated Sorcerer core book, and the other is the bundled supplements. They are available in both optimized read-on-screen and optimized print-it-yourself versions.

(Larry, I know I'm leaping off a board into the unknown, but my reasons are first, that I personally would have loved to buy PDFs which I could then print as books when and if I felt like it; and second, that I can no longer realistically send books overseas, so I want to provide some way of supplying customers who want books. I do plan to keep short runs of the actual books available for con sales and those few game stores worth dealing with, and if domestic demand warrants it, I'll expand to selling them directly.)

The big unknown for the crowdfunding is whether I get (or do I say "we make," is that part of the crowdfunding marketing-strategy?) enough to pay Thomas for the awesome covers. That's the goal.

I confess I have no stomach for stretch goals and super-extra stuff. It's just more work, bluntly, exactly what I don't need. If I lose participation because of this, I guess that's the price to pay for simply not seeing any way to make it work without making myself miserable. I'd rather give rewards for simply participating at a decent level.

If anyone out there can actually show me a stretch goal reward that isn't a pain in the ass for me, then please speak up. Or to put it differently, if "we" were to exceed the goal by, say $1000, what Special Thing might you expect for it? I can barely conceive of providing one (1) thing along these lines. And who would be eligible for it, everyone? (impossible! It can't possibly work like that)

So, $1 gets you an acknowledgment.

$25 gets you the two PDFs. (Not to put too fine a point on it, I think each is worth $25, retail, especially if those Denmark covers come through. Sorcerer is more game than any other known to humankind, and each supplement is itself a revolution. I'm sick and tired of under-valuing it.)

$100 (as its own item, not in combination with the above) gets you the two books in very spiffy, custom physical book form along with the PDFs.

For additional increments of $25 (with or without the $100 above), choose one of the following:

Shot glass + T-shirt with cool logo/silhouette (guy or girl demon)
Demon figurine, or again, maybe a pack, depending on how pricey these are to make (Larry, thanks! That does help.) (For some reason, the only people who comment on this item on-line hate it, but I find that plenty of people get all squee-y about it in person.)
Dedicated playtest + feedback for your game in design
A bottle of tequila (just kidding! Or am I? How legal would that be?)

Do I need to say that higher levels of contribution will get you more on-line and in-text acknowledgment? Probably in $50 increments.

Finally, what page/program should I use? Which one is about keeping the contributions with or without the goal, Kickstarter or Indie Gogo? Is there something besides these two, and how do they work?

Do I understand correctly that I should make a come-on video? Should I get someone sexier than me to do it, or should I flaunt my nerdly-self for maximum audience identification?

And yeah, it'll have to be December 1. I would otherwise have to wait until well after New Year's, because post-Christmas is just as bad pre-Christmas, financially.

I want to launch in exactly one week, so I figure a few days of "Ron, no! Do it like this," will help refine it to its best possible form.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

For what it's worth it seems perfectly reasonable to me to drop cheap books out of the ordinary array of options. The times might be a bit early for it, but this'll be how things go in the future: you either read digital, or you get a good-quality hardcover book. I'm sure you'll get plenty of disagreement in 2012 about this, of course.

Also, I can't see anything preventing Ron from setting himself up with e.g. Lulu at a later date, after the crowdfunding. It is true that a POD printer that prints and fulfills on both sides of the Atlantic is probably the best small press option for getting cheap paper books to customers.

Have you considered printing a second run in Europe? That would be one way to provide for overseas customers without having to actually ship books overseas. Of course it's extra work to develop a relationship with some sort of fulfillment service.

Maybe this softcover book thing could be your stretch goal? "If we get to $10 000, I'll change my mind and actually set up to produce PoD-quality softcover editions of these books. The PDF customers'll get an option to upgrade to softcover books if that happens."

--

Regarding Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, my understanding is that they are mostly comparable except for the following points:

• Kickstarter is only available to American projects. (This is the big reason for why IndieGoGo is used at all, it seems to me; Europeans would use Kickstarter as well if they could.)
• IndieGoGo has a limit to the number of different reward levels you can have, and I think it at least used to be that you couldn't add or revise the levels after the campaign start.
• Kickstarter is considerably larger, and thus attracts more walk-in money. You can succeed with IndieGoGo, but it's easier with Kickstarter.
• Kickstarter has a slower and more powerful gatekeeping process: they'll review your project in advance and require more strident financial information compared to IndieGoGo. In fact, you probably won't be able to start at Kickstarter on the 1st. of December unless you've already started working on this.
• There are small differences in the terms of use and expenses of using each; it would be irresponsible to give a run-down of these details when anybody planning to use either service should really read the rules carefully for themselves.

IndieGoGo is the service that lets you have variable funding, by the way. However, I don't understand why anybody would want to use that: the fee they take is higher than it is for fixed funding, and there's nothing stopping you at either IndieGoGo or Kickstarter from simply lowballing your target number if you're afraid of not reaching it. It seems to me that it's a good practice in crowdfunding to only request for as much money as you need to pull off the project, anyway. It's not like people will not participate because you already reached your goal, as the case might have been a while back; rather, it seems like in the crowdfunding scene of today being 100% funded makes your project more interesting instead of less.

My sense of the current scene is that using a site outside those two doesn't make sense; other platforms are so small that you're better off just having a Paypal button and doing your own collection. A minor and unknown crowdfunding platform won't add reliability or noticeability to your collection, but they will take a part of the stake.

--

For your ancillary rewards, it should be noted that Kickstarter disallows sales of booze, so you're out of luck on the tequila front. Although Kickstarter is very loose in interpreting its own rules, I don't expect them to budge on this one. I don't remember offhand, but IndieGoGo probably has a similar limitation.

Regarding a video, I'm told that it's the number one good idea for a crowdfunding project at these sites to have a video. I don't watch them myself, so don't get the appeal, but that is the common wisdom. From the few videos I've seen I'd say that an earnest and genuine video showing off your own independent operation is probably better than trying for any sort of gloss. Of course you could still have other people in your video as well; in this case it might not be a bad idea to emphasize the long pedigree of the game by having well-known game designers speak on the video about their own Sorcerer experiences, for example. Art from the book and a suitable sound-track seem like good ideas for the video, too.

Finally, I would like to say that trying to get this done this year seems a bit over-optimistic. Were I in your stead, I'd take an extra month to choose a crowdfunding site, make a nice video and start premarketing the project. The latter especially might be a good idea: many crowdfunders make sure that their immediate social network is already well aware of the project in advance, so that they'll be ready to give money and spread the word once the project actually starts. This way the initial support can be gauged early on, and the project has maximum time to gain grassroots attention.

On the other hand, if those reasons for delay (time to learn about the service, time to make a nice video, time to premarket) all seem like so much foolishness, then I can't help but recommend simply doing your own crowdfunding web-page on your own domain. These sites are ultimately about trust and publicity, so if you're not interested in maximizing the latter and have no trouble with the former, then you might as well save that 5%+ and collect the money directly yourself. Less hassle and you can set your own terms.

[Miskatonic]

I'm assuming you've reviewed the reports that "harpy" offered near the end of The Forge. They seem to be the most comprehensive review of data I've seen of the numerous options and what works.

Indiegogo currently offers both the "we keep your pledge even if we don't hit the goal" ("Flexible Funding") and a more Kickstarter-like plan ("Fixed Funding"). Kickstarter used to not be good for people outside of the USA, but they've changed this recently. I haven't heard from anyone overseas how the new Kickstarter rules are treating them, though.

Here's Kickstarter's page for how to start a project. Here's Indiegogo's. They both seem like reasonably comprehensive tutorials.

I'm trying to think about what you could put in a video to show why Sorcerer is awesome. If it comes down to just you talking into a webcam in one take, maybe skip it. Do you have anyone who's handy with video production?

What else?

Emphasize that this is a nearly-completed product, to establish credibility that a pledge will result in actually getting something. If you've got a sketch of the art, include that in your pitch as a teaser of the final product.

Come up with cutesy descriptive labels for each level of funding, like "initiate," "adept," "sorcerer," yeah yeah. That seems to be a thing.

If you're offering the books as a set, perhaps you should do a nice slipcover, too?

Bottle of tequila? Exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about for premium tiers. Is what Eero said about no booze on Kickstarter true? Nuts.

[Miskatonic]

Oops. Frikkin' BBcode.

Indiegogo create a campaign guide.

[Ron Edwards]

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm not preparing well at one important end: the actual site to do this with. I think all three of your reasons to delay are absolutely correct, Eero. I'm in the opposite position of many Kickstart projects: I have most or all of the actual products, but am totally unprepared for the promotion. So I think it'll be best to kick this down to January 1.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

One interesting thing that I recently saw somebody do was that they made their project page at Kickstarter and then had it make some rounds in the community as a draft before he activated it. Apparently you don't need to start the campaign to publicize the campaign page, in other words. The benefit of doing this is that you can set up your campaign page with all the introductory texts, videos and reward levels, and then ask people for advice when you have everything ready to go. If something is amiss at that point, you'll still be able to change it, which is not true with all things after the campaign starts. (For example, in Kickstarter you apparently can modify reward levels mid-campaign, but only if nobody has yet pledged money at that level.)

The take-home point here is that it's entirely possible to prepare everything, the crowdfunding site included, and then sit on it a bit to consider things or wait for a good moment or whatever. Thus the sooner you start fiddling with the crowdfunding site of your choice, the better.

[Hans Chung-Otterson]

For what it's worth it seems perfectly reasonable to me to drop cheap books out of the ordinary array of options. The times might be a bit early for it, but this'll be how things go in the future: you either read digital, or you get a good-quality hardcover book. I'm sure you'll get plenty of disagreement in 2012 about this, of course.

Okay, then, I'll be Eero's example.

I think a lot of folks will frankly be baffled (myself included) that they can't buy a real book for less than $100. To be clear, I'm not saying the two-book bundle isn't worth that; it is, and I would pay for it if I had the money and were in the market for it (as it is, I only want the annotated Sorcerer as I already have the supplements. In the future, though, if the supplements were available to buy direct or in a local store I'm sure I'd snap 'em up).

I think you'll also catch flak for that $25 for two PDFs pricing. It's worth it to me, and if the campaign goes forward as-is it's what I'll be chipping into. Still, very few people who want the physical object are going to be thinking, "Oh, I'll just snag the PDFs and print 'em off at Kinko's", I think. People who want the annotated book and can't afford it likely won't shell for the PDF--they'll just see an expensive book and move on. Gamers who mainly butter their bread electronically will also likely balk a bit at the price unless they're big into Sorcerer or you.

I'm not trying to convince you to change your structure, Ron, but just to provide a data point. I've backed maybe twenty Kickstarter projects and my gut tells me that crowd will be puzzled by your pricing structure (and not just my gut; I've had conversations about this with people who really like your stuff that are also confused). If you're throwing the whole shebang out at $2000 I think you'll be fine as-is. I just think you have a lot more opportunity to get more sales and more folks interested if there's a lower-tier that gives out the physical book, one or the other.

Put me down for, "I hope dearly that the physical books will be available direct after the campaign".

I just went back and looked at Dungeon World's Kickstarter (probably the most successful indie Kickstarter) stats: They offered a PDF at $5 and a softcover at $25. Again, I think your PDFs are fine as-is, but a book at $40 or even $50 will be a lot more popular. DW's hardcover kicked in at $65.

[Eero Tuovinen]

You'll get no disagreement from me, Hans - that's pretty much how I expect a majority of the audience to think. I recognize that I belong in a minority in this due to my let's say uncommercial spending habits; to me it makes sense to mostly not spend money on things, but when I do, I don't mind paying pretty well for a nice product. The normal "best value" compromise product is thus not necessarily the most appealing to me.

(Yes, I probably wouldn't buy many roleplaying games at all if I didn't retail games as a hobby.)

I understand that the point in putting a high price point on the PDF is to take a stand on the value of a game in digital format. The pressure on pdf prices has always been downwards, and strongly at that, so seeing a game pdf selling for book prices is naturally shocking. It's a brave gesture, and Kickstarter is the perfect context for it to succeed because people as often as not pay for early access and to support the author. In a long-term market context a high-priced pdf probably just encourages piracy, I suspect.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thinking about digital reading and the future of the book, it occurs to me that Ron might want to consider doing an EPUB or some other digital format version of the books as well. PDF is getting a big long in the tooth in the progressive circles, so to say; it was never intended as a digital distribution format originally, after all, so it does a good job about being printable but is not so good for digital reading devices.

That's another worthwhile stretch goal, incidentally, although it does cause extra work.

[Ron Edwards]

H'm ...

First, I'm not sure if I wrote it wrong or what, but the crowdfunding contributor gets both PDFs for $25, which is good value. Whether the per-PDF price after that point is too high is an issue for another day, although I do see your points. I am even tempted to consider saying, post-crowdfunding, "if you buy Sorcerer PDF, you buy all of it" at a price perhaps at $30.

Neophobia is a real thing. No one thought anyone would buy any electronic form of a book, ever. Everyone thought electronic formats would destroy the demand for physical books. Everyone thought that electronic payment was doomed to terrible credit-card fees and other burdens which would make it impractical. Everyone in gaming thought that deviating from the standard-size core book on the FASA model was market suicide. Everyone in gaming thought that gamers didn't really play, but only read the books and fantasized about it.

And now you tell me there's no demand for a PDF which someone can buy, then trot off somewhere local and print as a book? Come on. Don't listen to your gut. Your gut has shit for brains. (Also, did you see that above, the customer gets an optimized for-electronic format and the print-if-you-want format? If they don't want the latter, they can ignore it.)

I'm adding a stretch goal: if you want the book as a physical object, then I have to make the stretch goal of $2000 beyond Thomas' pay. The good news is that every contributor who put in the $25 earmarked for the PDFs will get the books too, if this happens. I'm hoping that the $2000 will cover both printing and the *fuck*I-hate-it*shit*bastard packaging and shipping.

The ebook/other-format suggestion is also very good, good enough to be a policy consideration with or without stretch goals. But I could happily make it one.

At last, I'm getting the hang of this stretch-goal thing in terms I can understand and enjoy. Thanks guys!

Best, Ron
edited to fix an important numerical typo - RE

[jrs]

Ron,

Regarding international shipping, check out this kickstarter campaign: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/783115992/medium-rare-and-back-again-a-tolkien-cookbook. Note that there is an upfront additional charge for shipping outside the US.

Julie