Great post. Thanks for sharing! It is especially interesting about the “95% done before launch” advice as I’ve seen the opposite from established creators, saying you should aim to do as little development as possible before putting your idea to the market and making sure it gathers interest. I guess this is down to the different optimum approaches for newer creators vs those who have a larger operation and following behind them 🤔
So I’m coming at this from a very specific project type:
1. I’m new
2. I’m making an indie game (as opposed to say, a D&D 5e supplement, which I think is a different ball game)
3. I’m making a relatively small game (it’s looking like ~44 pages)
4. I’m making a zine
Here’s more context to the “be 95% finished” advice that I found compelling:
1. If you’re actually new, as in you haven’t made a zine before, it’s really hard to know how long it’ll take to make the game. You’re going to get your timing wrong - you don’t know what you don’t know. Better to do that and figure out your process before you’re being watched by hundreds of kickstarter backers, which brings me to the next point…
2. Once the kickstarter is over, you now have a new role, customer service rep! And if you’re also behind on the game schedule, AND the one creatively responsible for writing it, you could get stuck in this position of KS backers yelling at you about where their game is, while you’re having massive writer’s blocks…and…that was giving me hives just thinking about it…
3. For physical products (and this is just what I’ve heard), the process of collecting people’s addresses, shipping, and getting them the product is a huge pain. If you plan your schedule where you finish 20% of the game, then fund, then take another two years to finish the game (even if this was a planned two years that your told your customers you would take), people will change addresses or forget about your game or stop answering emails or a bunch of other logistical things that will complicate the already complicated process of fulfillment.
95% done means 95% done by the creator - I’m not printing anything until the Kickstarter funds and I’ve got plans to have a few stretch goals (but they will be stretch goals to bring on additional collaborators for additional pdf content).
And yes, this does mean I'm essentially betting that Jukebox has an audience and people will want it. Part of why I think there is an audience is playtesting and talking to folks -- and we'll see if I'm right in October/November!
I just finished fulfilling my first zine-sized Kickstarter myself and this all tracks with the concerns I had. And my game was done and edited by the time I launched. I just had layout and art left to do. That felt a lot safer with so many unknowns ahead of me.
Good luck with Jukebox, by the way! It looks very cool. I followed on your prelaunch 👍
Definitely good tips! I’ve done three now, and I think doing as much as you can beforehand* and not getting sucked into stretch goals are very important.
*I think art and editing is the exception. When I had art in my zines I bought one or two pieces of art upfront for promotions, and had the test done when the funds came through. I shared some pieces as they were made as updates. Does add a bit of risk though!
Thank you for the very helpful article. I gathered up a similar collection of tips when I was doing research for launching my Critical Hit Parader zine. I also ended up choosing Kickstarter (during ZineQuest 5 back in February). I will refer back to your suggestions for my second issue. Looking forward to your Kickstarter launch!
Thank you! If you put together a list of tips in a blog or anything, please feel free to share if you're inclined (I'm interested and I imagine a lot of folks reading would be as well).
Unfortunately, I didn't really write anything down. You are much more organized than me! I listened to a lot of RPG Ramblings podcast interviews with creators who had done zines and crowdfunding: https://www.youtube.com/@rpgramblings896/videos. I also watched a lot of workshop videos hosted by Tony Vasinda from Plus One Exp: https://www.youtube.com/plusoneexp
> What does failure look like? One of the reasons I decided to go with Kickstarter is that for most of these smaller Kickstarters that failed to fund, I can see why – the art looks sloppy, it’s over-promising, etc. This wasn’t the case for some Crowdfundrs and Indiegogos that failed to fund, which anecdotally backed up the advice I got to stick with Kickstarter.
I'd love to hear more about why you think this might be the case.
Full transparency; Maka asked this over on the RisingTide discord (linktr.ee/ttrpgrisingtide) and I’m putting the take-aways here for folks to read"
Indiegogo: I don’t have too much to say beyond I wasn’t able to find many creators that were similar to me making indie games. If you want to see a zine campaign, Banana Chan’s Forgery successfully funded at 10k, but they are well known creator with their own publishing company: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/forgery#/
All jokes aside, it's always interesting to me when I see a campaign that, by all appearances, should be succeeding, but seems to be struggling. Just bad timing, some odd combination of circumstances, Saturn in retrograde?
Makes total sense and thanks for sharing Pidj! I'm doing a somewhat similar thing - I paid for cover art but anything else will come after the kickstarter.
Great post. Thanks for sharing! It is especially interesting about the “95% done before launch” advice as I’ve seen the opposite from established creators, saying you should aim to do as little development as possible before putting your idea to the market and making sure it gathers interest. I guess this is down to the different optimum approaches for newer creators vs those who have a larger operation and following behind them 🤔
So I’m coming at this from a very specific project type:
1. I’m new
2. I’m making an indie game (as opposed to say, a D&D 5e supplement, which I think is a different ball game)
3. I’m making a relatively small game (it’s looking like ~44 pages)
4. I’m making a zine
Here’s more context to the “be 95% finished” advice that I found compelling:
1. If you’re actually new, as in you haven’t made a zine before, it’s really hard to know how long it’ll take to make the game. You’re going to get your timing wrong - you don’t know what you don’t know. Better to do that and figure out your process before you’re being watched by hundreds of kickstarter backers, which brings me to the next point…
2. Once the kickstarter is over, you now have a new role, customer service rep! And if you’re also behind on the game schedule, AND the one creatively responsible for writing it, you could get stuck in this position of KS backers yelling at you about where their game is, while you’re having massive writer’s blocks…and…that was giving me hives just thinking about it…
3. For physical products (and this is just what I’ve heard), the process of collecting people’s addresses, shipping, and getting them the product is a huge pain. If you plan your schedule where you finish 20% of the game, then fund, then take another two years to finish the game (even if this was a planned two years that your told your customers you would take), people will change addresses or forget about your game or stop answering emails or a bunch of other logistical things that will complicate the already complicated process of fulfillment.
95% done means 95% done by the creator - I’m not printing anything until the Kickstarter funds and I’ve got plans to have a few stretch goals (but they will be stretch goals to bring on additional collaborators for additional pdf content).
And yes, this does mean I'm essentially betting that Jukebox has an audience and people will want it. Part of why I think there is an audience is playtesting and talking to folks -- and we'll see if I'm right in October/November!
I just finished fulfilling my first zine-sized Kickstarter myself and this all tracks with the concerns I had. And my game was done and edited by the time I launched. I just had layout and art left to do. That felt a lot safer with so many unknowns ahead of me.
Good luck with Jukebox, by the way! It looks very cool. I followed on your prelaunch 👍
Definitely good tips! I’ve done three now, and I think doing as much as you can beforehand* and not getting sucked into stretch goals are very important.
*I think art and editing is the exception. When I had art in my zines I bought one or two pieces of art upfront for promotions, and had the test done when the funds came through. I shared some pieces as they were made as updates. Does add a bit of risk though!
Never having attempted to crowdfund anything, this was a useful primer. Thank you.
Thank you for the very helpful article. I gathered up a similar collection of tips when I was doing research for launching my Critical Hit Parader zine. I also ended up choosing Kickstarter (during ZineQuest 5 back in February). I will refer back to your suggestions for my second issue. Looking forward to your Kickstarter launch!
Thank you! If you put together a list of tips in a blog or anything, please feel free to share if you're inclined (I'm interested and I imagine a lot of folks reading would be as well).
Unfortunately, I didn't really write anything down. You are much more organized than me! I listened to a lot of RPG Ramblings podcast interviews with creators who had done zines and crowdfunding: https://www.youtube.com/@rpgramblings896/videos. I also watched a lot of workshop videos hosted by Tony Vasinda from Plus One Exp: https://www.youtube.com/plusoneexp
> What does failure look like? One of the reasons I decided to go with Kickstarter is that for most of these smaller Kickstarters that failed to fund, I can see why – the art looks sloppy, it’s over-promising, etc. This wasn’t the case for some Crowdfundrs and Indiegogos that failed to fund, which anecdotally backed up the advice I got to stick with Kickstarter.
I'd love to hear more about why you think this might be the case.
Full transparency; Maka asked this over on the RisingTide discord (linktr.ee/ttrpgrisingtide) and I’m putting the take-aways here for folks to read"
Indiegogo: I don’t have too much to say beyond I wasn’t able to find many creators that were similar to me making indie games. If you want to see a zine campaign, Banana Chan’s Forgery successfully funded at 10k, but they are well known creator with their own publishing company: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/forgery#/
Crowdfundr: I’m going to drop a game mentioned by another creator in the discord https://crowdfundr.com/disastergames?ref=ab_6ihgrVa0Sil6ihgrVa0Sil since they did a twitter “autopsy” https://twitter.com/NaviMusing/status/1622628644144177158 – another resource is checking out the campaigns in Tabletop Nonstop: https://crowdfundr.com/spotlight/tabletop-nonstop/ where you can see a bunch of small TTRPG projects – I think ultimately I feel not informed enough to say exactly why one zine on Crowdfundr funds versus doesn’t, but there were definitely some solid looking (to me) games that didn’t fund.
The illusion shatters!
All jokes aside, it's always interesting to me when I see a campaign that, by all appearances, should be succeeding, but seems to be struggling. Just bad timing, some odd combination of circumstances, Saturn in retrograde?
Thank you for sharing your crowdfunding findings!
Makes total sense and thanks for sharing Pidj! I'm doing a somewhat similar thing - I paid for cover art but anything else will come after the kickstarter.