Page 501 - August 14, 2013

Hannu is so not going to go into that good night quietly, he'll swim awaaay! Will he be able to swim faster than the swan of Tuonela, hmm?

So in book-news: I've finally built myself a nice little interactive excel file with all my budget calculations for the possible aRTD book and the crowdfunding campaign! It's really handy, I can play around with different scenarios of the amount of people backing the project, at what levels, how I price the levels and all kinds of variables, and then a little box will tell me if I'll end up losing money or make a buck. So, by analyzing a bunch of other webcomic campaigns (mostly on Kickstarter) and how pledges tend to get distributed between tiers, I've been able to calculate that the goal of the campaign will have to be a whooping 29000$ for me to not lose money. Yeah, a tall order, and probably a difficult goal to meet. It seems pretty typical though, quite a few printing Kickstarters with hardcovers in the mix had an initial goal of around 30000 dollars just to cover the base expenses.

But truth be told I have no idea if aRTD has anywhere near the kind of readerbase size as the webcomics that I've seen cross that 30000 mark, and I have even less of an idea how much not being able to use Kickstarter might affect the odds. (Kickstarter doesn't allow non-US and non-UK projects.) On one hand Indiegogo makes it possible to also use Paypal which some people prefer, while on the possibly bigger hand Kickstarter has enormous on-site exposure potential and so many people already have accounts over there.

But hey, that's the point of crowdfunding right? Try and possibly fail spectacularly, then walk away without anyone losing anything, maybe with some hurt feelings and lessons learned. I guess we'll see how our little (or not little?) Redtail group compares to other webcomic readerships next month. Oh, and I spent yesterday working on a mockup cover design for the book, I'll clean it up a bit today and show it tomorrow! :3

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