Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

When this goes live, the Kickstarter for Heroes of Ramshorn will be a mere four hours from completion. As of the writing, it’s sitting at about $2,500. Funded, and with the Pathfinder stretch goal reached, so that’s a lot of extra work for probably very little profit. I had originally hoped that putting the Pathfinder goal low would allow me to hit it sometime in the doldrums of the midpoint of my project, and thus bring in a new surge. Unfortunately, this Kickstarter proved significantly less successful than the last, so that didn’t happen.

If I can’t raise at least $3,000, preferably from at least 150 backers, then this campaign represents a significant contraction of my audience. Although I do have an outline for a third installment, I’m uncertain whether I will bother actually writing it. We’ll see how I feel after I’ve finished the Pathfinder conversion of Heroes. Certainly in this scenario making Ashes of Ramshorn will be purely to tie things off for the people who really liked Strangers and Heroes, who, regardless of whether or not there were enough of them to make this viable, did all they could reasonably be expected to in order to make these adventures a success.

If I raise between $3,000 and $5,000 from between 150-250 backers, then that represents somewhere between a minor contraction to a minor expansion of my audience. Regardless of exactly where the number lies, it’s definitely worth making a third adventure to see whether or not things are petering out, stagnating, or growing steadily.

When I first started the Kickstarter, I told myself that if I raised over $5,000 from over 250 backers, I could call that an unqualified success. It would mean that I had retained most of my existing audience and seen significant growth. I estimate that I need to make about $7,000 per Kickstarter in order to pay for expenses and, combined with the income my professional GMing makes, be able to become a fulltime creative professional. If I could get over $5,000 on this Kickstarter, that would mean my audience is still growing and strongly suggest that hitting $7,000 reliably might soon be viable.

At this point, it seems very likely that this is not the case. It is still possible, though very unlikely, that I’ll get enough Pathfinder backers at the very last minute to make this Kickstarter comparable to my last one, at which point I have to wonder if I’ve hit my ceiling or if I just need to commit more time to growing my audience and backlog.

The long term strategy runs face-first into a second issue, however: 5e won’t last forever (indeed, its expiration date is most likely sometime between 2020 and 2022), and once people move on to 6e, or if 6e sucks they move on to Routelocator or whatever, my adventure library needs to be updated to the new edition or else it becomes near-worthless. People do occasionally buy third party adventures for deprecated editions, but it definitely won’t be enough for me to draw continuous income from my backlog through those means. If writing adventures is going to make up a significant portion of my creative income, it needs to be bringing in enough money to do that based on new releases. Right now, it looks like it’s probably barely covering expenses.

On the other hand: Books. Books – particularly ebooks, which is definitely what I’d be doing – tend to make between $3-$4 per sale rather than $14-$17. On the other hand, not only do books almost never go through edition changes, books have considerably lower initial costs. I need only a single cover illustration, much lighter formatting work, and require at most one map, often none at all, and certainly require no tokens. The bigger my audience gets, the more the higher price point but higher initial costs of an adventure makes sense, but real life has terrible game balance and the audience for books is actually considerably wider, even considering the niche genres I’d be writing in.

So, writing books is probably the way to go here, even though it can’t draw anything except seed money from my professional GMing success.

Back in the first year of this blog, when I was absolutely committed to doing the blog-a-day thing once a day for an entire year, I churned out a lot of junk. Ultimately I think it was worth it. The junk fell into the archives and ultimately hurt no one, while the good articles that got squeezed out in between form a foundation of interesting posts I can show people. Back in the day, if I knew I wasn’t going to be able to post the article I planned, I’d slap something together in 30 minutes. Now, I’m already two days past when I planned my ongoing Immortal Cure posts would be out, but it occurs to me that I could probably slam out a pair of cheap better-than-nothing articles to have something to replace them (in the sense that given a choice between reading the article and staring at a wall for the same amount of time, most people would read the article). I’m told that back in, like, 2008 or something, these 300-800 word blog posts is what blogging was all about, and my 2,000-word articles would face incessant demands for tl;dr.

So here’s number one of those, and maybe I’ll figure out number two sometime, I dunno. I got this cyberpunk deck of cards from a Kickstarter I backed, though. They’re good cards and I like them. There’s a lot of good art, but my favorite might be the one that’s just labeled “your card,” so you can literally deal out cards until “your card” comes up.

I am announcing a brief intermission after it is already over instead of when it began. The reason why I’ve missed a few days of review articles is mainly because I was working on an outline for a novel and also deciding that I really don’t want to bother with this whole board game let’s play podcast thing. I liked the first one, but the overall quality trend has been downward, especially for something that takes so much time and effort to assemble, and I don’t think I’ll be saving it. Regardless, reviews will resume on Saturday.

My Kickstarter is a little over a week from completion, is 88% funded, and is quite likely to hit 100% during the final 48 hours. The trouble is, the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal – which will likely bring in considerably more backing if hit before the final 48 hours – is still $550 out. The odds I’ll hit that in time to bring Pathfinder hopefuls in are pretty slim. Worse, some of my current backers may have backed only out of the expectation that the Pathfinder stretch goal will be hit, and back out when things get close to the finish with that stretch goal still out of reach. This could lead to new pledges and cancellations dueling one another, a duel that the new pledges could ultimately lose out on, bringing the campaign to an ignominious conclusion just as it seemed on the threshold of victory.

On the other hand, 48 hours is a long time, so if the final surge quickly carries me over the $2,000 funding goal, I can start posting to Pathfinder subreddits to try and get us up to that $2,300 stretch goal, and if I’m really lucky, what would ordinarily be the final surge could carry me to the $2,300 stretch goal in the penultimate 24 hours, allowing me to advertise the campaign in its final day to Pathfinder as “this is definitely getting a conversion” rather than “please back so that it will maybe get a conversion.” It’s still hypothetically possible that tipping over the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal at the eleventh hour could lead to enough backers pouring in to count the campaign as an unqualified success (when the campaign started, I pegged that number at 250 – enough to show signs that my audience was growing, which it needs to do in order to make this gig stable), but it’s not very likely.

If the project does end up funding but not hitting the Pathfinder stretch goal, I could run a separate quickstarter specifically to try and fund that conversion. This would require me to make a new Kickstarter campaign, which would be a hassle, but it would also give me fairly solid evidence of how big the Pathfinder audience really is. One possible reason why this Kickstarter has gone poorly compared to the last is because the Pathfinder audience is holding off until the conversion is locked in, and that I’d be doing much better had I gone with a higher initial goal and baked the Pathfinder conversion into the default project. The Pathfinder conversion quickstarter would give me pretty good evidence as to how much of the campaign’s comparatively limited success is due to that particular factor.