If there is anyone amongst my beloved readership who would like to be among my very special Vanguard of Heralds for the Kickstarter, please let me know privately or in comments! I am looking for people who are willing to a) commit to making SOME kind of pledge to the KS, even if it’s a teensy one, AND/OR b) give me a few shoutouts during the campaign on your social media shoutouts, especially during that crucial first 24 hours, AND/OR c) put up with the occasional email from me during the campaign. There may be Tokens of Appreciation in it for you. Gimme a holler if you’re interested! 🙂

So I don’t have any pretties to show you today — NOTHIN’ about this phase of the planning is pretty! — but I thought I would let you know where things stand, and offer a tip for fellow crowdfunders too:

1) Depending on when the video is completed — I have all the assets in to the animator now (::excited dance::), now it’s up to them — I am looking at a mid-October launch. I’ll announce the exact date soon!

2) I have my preferred vendors selected and priced, and shipping basically figured out.

3) I have MOST of my tiers/rewards/stretch goals figured out. This week I need to make the final decisions on those, edit the draft information I have on the draft KS page into its final form accordingly, and then do the graphical pretties that will tart the page up for your viewing pleasure.

4) A tweak to my number-crunching that may be of interest to my indie-creator friends…my mathy hubs suggested a new set of spreadsheet columns for both domestic and international backers. Basically, I take the cost of a tier to the backer, minus Kickstarter fees and the cost to fulfill rewards (i.e. the rewards themselves and the shipping), and that leaves you with what money you actually get left over from that pledge to fund the print run and the print run’s own shipping, etc. THEN you take the initial Kickstarter ask and figure out the answer to this hypothetical question: Supposing that ALL your backers were at that one pledge level. How many backers would you end up with at full funding, and after the costs to fulfill their rewards and the fees are taken out, are you left with enough money for your print run or are you in trouble?

So the columns of my reward-tiers spreadsheet now run thusly:

Price to Backer | Cost of Reward Item #1 (if applicable) | Cost of Reward Item #2 | ->Cost of Last Reward Item | Kickstarter/Amazon Fees (if Domestic) | Kickstarter/Amazon Fees (if Int’l) | Domestic Shipping Cost | Int’l Shipping Cost | US “profit” per Backer | Int’l “profit” per Backer | # of Backers required if this were the only tier pledged | # of Int’l Backers (for same scenario) | Total “profit” (i.e., total left for print run, etc) | Total if All Backers Int’l |

Now. Of course, this is a total hypothetical. You’re highly unlikely to have ONLY backers at, say, the $20 pledge level, and even more unlikely to have ONLY backers in France at the $20 pledge level. It’ll be a pie chart of pledge levels, and how many domestic versus international backers you’ll have depends on your fan base and other things, but it’s unlikely to be all or nothing unless you simply don’t allow international shipping (which is an option, btw. I don’t wanna go with it because I have too many readers across the globe :-).

However, this is a good exercise to see which of your pledge tiers are more “safe” financially and which tiers are not, and might need reconsideration as to cost or rewards promised. Especially since — as the research shows — certain reward tiers DO tend to be disproportionately popular. (As of right now, $25 is the most pledged tier on all of Kickstarter, for example.) Let me explain why you want to look at this hypothetical. Pardon the all caps, but this is important.

EVEN IF YOU ADD MONEY FOR INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING TO THE PLEDGES, THAT IS STILL CUTTING INTO YOUR “PROFIT” BECAUSE THAT SHIPPING SURCHARGE COUNTS TOWARDS YOUR FUNDING TOTAL — EVEN THOUGH IT’S GOING TO NOTHING BUT SHIPPING.

Kickstarter COULD fix this by setting things up so the shipping surcharges DIDN’T count toward the funding goal. But as of now, this is how the system is. So you can wind up royally screwed even if you fully fund.

Say, for example, I have a $40 tier with the book itself and some other lightweight/nonbulky physical stuff that sounds good. Great. I tack on $20 for international shipping. So the cost to a domestic customer is $40, to an international customer, it’s $60.

Okay. Off the top of that, Kickstarter and Amazon are going to be taking out a total of roughly 10%, so $4 and $6 are gone. Say that US shipping is about $6 (because it can’t go media mail because some of the reward, while light and flat, is not counted as “media” — if it were media only you could knock that down), and international shipping $20.

So after fulfillment — now we’re subtracting out that shipping, the fees and the cost of the rewards themselves you are left with roughly 15.40 from the domestic backer and 19.30 from the international backer. Sounds great, right? We’re in the black in each case. Should be safe?

Except, what if you ONLY had pledges at that level? You would fully fund, and be obligated to deliver rewards, at 145 and 97 backers respectively.

In this scenario, when you got done, you would have roughly $2800 or $2300 left over to fund your print run. If you’re looking at a $2500 print run, you’re not doing too bad. If your print run is more up in the $4000 range, however, looks like you’re in trouble dunnit?

Now. Again, you’re not going to have ALL your backers at that pledge level. But if what you have on offer, or general Kickstarter statistics, tell you that that $40 tier is going to be one of the more popular, you may end up with a milder version of that doomsday scenario. And you will be obligated to do fulfillment nonetheless.

So I’m going through and making some modifications to the tiers that popped out as being more problematic than their siblings — with, of course, the understanding that you can’t eliminate ALL risk and that you could always wind up being super unlucky and having ONLY international backers at the least “profitable” tiers. But hey, risk mitigation at least is good!