Kickstarter AAR: The Pamphlet of Pantheons

In February 2021, during Zinequest 3, I Kickstarted a small project called The Pamphlet of Pantheons. This was something that came to me on the spur of the moment in late January when I was reminded that Zinequest was happening. I'd been thinking about the concepts behind it for a long time, and I decided that the resulting project would be a good size for Zinequest. I wanted to try out a Kickstarter before launching a possibly larger one for The Magonium Mine Murders, and the limited scope of Zinequest made it seem like this was a good opportunity. 

In this post, I'm going to go over lessons learned and look at some of the things I did right and wrong. Let's start with what I did right: 

Keep It Simple

This was the first thing I decided when I started planning the Kickstarter. I had no stretch goals, and only two reward tiers: digital and print. I knew that the more complex the project was, the more opportunities there would be for me to make a miscalculation somewhere. 

Do It Yourself

I did everything for this project apart from the cover art, which had both good and bad effects. On the one hand, I think you could call the graphic design and layout "functional," but on the other hand I learned a lot and saved some money. I also did all of the shipping and fulfilment myself, which did wind up costing me extra money and time at a time when I really needed to be focusing on other things. 

Be Lucky

Probably the best thing to happen to the Pamphlet was an offer, out of the blue, from a friend who arranged for my Tim Molloy cover art. In addition to just being a cool cover, this did several things for the project: 

• It let me have a B&W cover but still look great, saving me some money. 
• It gave me a great image to use on social media to promote the book. 
• It added a little buzz and credibility -- cool Old School types recognise Molloy from Knock! 

Appeal to an Existing Audience

I would characterise myself as a "minor gaming community figure." I have about 900 followers on Twitter and a core podcast audience of probably fewer than a thousand people, of whom about 150 back me on Patreon. In absolute terms, that's not a huge number, but it's a lot better than shouting into the void, and it does mean that I have a platform to hawk my wares. It's possible that the Pamphlet would have done as well without Monster Man to promote it, but given the number of my listeners' names I recognised among my backers, I have my doubts. 

Benefit from Community Expertise

There's a growing number of RPG zine makers out there, and a lot of them have been through the bits you're struggling with. I received great advice about paper stock, cover weight, postage, and more. I'm very grateful. 

Of course, not everything went perfectly. Here's the thing I will definitely do better next time: 

Postage, Postage, Postage

Postage was by far the biggest expense of the whole Kickstarter. I did not anticipate how many orders would come from the US (over half of my print backers were in the US), and I calculated the postage a little too low on those orders considering that if you do postage through Kickstarter, it's counted as part of your Kickstarter and therefore Kickstarter takes a slice. I still made a profit on those US backers, but I could have done much better. 

Seriously, postage alone -- exclusive of packing materials -- cost more than everything else put together. 

Next time, I'm working out a separate US print run and getting myself a North American fulfilment partner. It will also save the nice people at the post office a lot of aggravation and I bet it won't be that much more expensive. 

Also, I ordered the wrong size of envelopes at one point, which cost me some money. Anyone want to buy some capacity book mailers? Going cheap!

Pricing

I have a bad habit of selling products at very low prices. This is partly because of, I don't know, low self-esteem or something, partly because I myself am very frugal, and partly because my mental index of what something costs in dollars is fixed at the last time I lived in the US, which was nearly 20 years ago. 

This was a bit of a mixed bag: I do think that there were a lot of people who shelled out for the digital edition of the zine because it was only £2, and since my overhead there was essentially nil, that's a good source of profit for me. But I bet almost all of them would still have backed it at £3 and been happy, and I would have made 50% more. And this low price was much more of a problem for the print edition, where there were real expenses to cut into my profit margin. 

Adding it Up

So here's a rough calculation of how the money went. Some of these expenses are functionally lower -- I'm registered self-employed and do report the income, so I'll be claiming the expenses as deductions. 

Kickstarter (after fees etc.): £1378

Direct and distro sales: £90

Online sales: £270

Total: approximately £1738

Software: £24

Packaging and stationery: £75

Printing: £140

Postage: £385

Total: approximately £624

That leaves me with a profit of about £1114, which is better than a slap in the face but not exactly retirement money. 

Now, the good thing is that at this point a lot of my main expenses are done but there's nothing to stop the book making more money. At present, I'm not promoting it very hard on DTRPG, but I still get a steady little trickle of sales, essentially money that I don't have to do any work for. Same goes for digital sales on Itch. It's also definitely done a lot for my follower count on social media and on Itch. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of my new Monster Man patrons came to the show via the Pamphlet. 

Also, while it seemed to me like I never shut up about the project, that doesn't mean that much outside of the communities I belong to. Big boosts to my sales post-KS always came from posting in relevant FB groups or having other people talk about the Pamphlet on social media (one Instagram post in particular got me a pretty substantial sales spike). Do more of that next time. 

So, for next time: 

• Price more realistically 
• Work with partners for international shipping 
• Be as loud about the project as I thought I was this time
• Explore new avenues for promotion

Overall, not too bad for a first Kickstarter: the backers got their books on time or close to it, I didn't lose money, and I learned a lot. 

Battle Ravens, wargames, and history

In my recent post about playing the upcoming game Battle Ravens, I talked about the challenges of writing historical wargames and board games. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately in conjunction with my work on the Gaming a Crusader Castle project.

Battle Ravens is an interesting game in this respect. In one way, it's essentially an abstract strategy game. You could absolutely rename the two sides Red and Blue and change the Ravens to Energy Points and you would still have a fun game. Indeed, the currency being called "ravens" doesn't make an enormous amount of sense other than thematically. Ravens, like wolves and eagles, are associated with battlefields in Old Norse poetry, but you'd think that more ravens would appear as the dead started to pile up.

These ones are getting ready for it to pop off.

People often talk about historical gaming as a "simulation," but I don't know that that's really a useful idea for a game like this one. Simulation presupposes a level of knowledge about the realities of early medieval combat that I just don't know we can claim. Historical accounts of battles are either highly poetic or very matter of fact -- "and the Danes had the victory," that kind of thing. We don't necessarily know what shieldwall combat was really like. Was it the kind of tentative skirmishing envisioned by John Keegan, with sudden bursts of fighting flaring up here and there, or was it more of your phalanx-style shoving match? 

Battle Ravens takes the view that it's all about the nebulous quantity represented by the ravens -- "momentum," perhaps, or "initiative," or maybe "cohesion" -- and about forcing a breach in the enemy's line where both numbers and elan are lacking. I think that is as reasonable an understanding of shieldwall combat as any. 

Of course, in reality there's no thousand-foot general allocating "initiative" to the different parts of the army, but other than directing reserves I don't know what a general in this kind of showdown is supposed to do in real life. It feels like most of the real tactical work is done before the fighting starts -- or at least you hope it is. 

So in general what I'm looking for in a game -- in historical terms, that is -- is not so much "does it accurately model this aspect of early medieval life?" I'm not sure I believe that's really possible. I'm more interested in "does it feel early medieval," but I recognise that that's a very subjective question. Perhaps I mean that I want to know if the game makes you think about some aspect of the early middle ages. And I think that Battle Ravens, for all its simplicity, does a bit. 

Here's the info about Battle Ravens again: Battle Ravens is going on Kickstarter on 20 November 2018; the Kickstarter will go until 6 December. Expected release date is April 2019. Retail price will probably be £35, but Kickstarter backers will be able to get the game for £30 plus a free Scottish army pack. The core game will include Anglo-Saxon and Norse armies, but they plan on making Norman, Scottish and Welsh ones for separate purchase; each will include counters and tactics cards. I reviewed a promotional pre-production copy of the game.