My pals over at Calliope Games (including, especially, my old friend Ray Wehrs) have been running a Kickstarter for nearly two months now, called the Titans Series, and it’s about to come to a thundering close. The project is fully funded (which means IT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING!), and it shattered its first stretch goal.

It’s an ambitious project for which they’ve lined up a baker’s dozen of the top tabletop games designers in the world, including:

• Peggy Brown: Buzzword, Backseat Drawing, Qbitz, and many more!
• Rob Daviau: Betrayal at House on the Hill, Heroscape, Risk Legacy, Axis and Allies: Pacific, and many more!
• Mike Elliott: Dice Masters, Quarriors!, Thunderstone, Battle Spirits, Duel Masters, and many more!
• James Ernest: Kill Doctor Lucky, Lords of Vegas, Lord of the Fries, Pairs, Unexploded Cow, and many more!
• Matt Forbeck: Marvel Heroes Battle Dice, Brave New World, Descent: Journeys in the Dark Quest Compendium, Space Hulk: Genestealer, Monster Rancher, and many more!
• Richard Garfield: Magic:The Gathering, King of Tokyo, Netrunner, RoboRally, The Great Dalmuti, and many more!
• Seth Johnson: HeroClix, Golem Arcana, Double Double Dominoes, and many more!
• Eric Lang: XCOM: The Board Game, Quarriors!, Marvel Dice Masters, Kaosball, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, and many more!
• Mike Mulvihill: BattleTech, Shadowrun, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Golem Arcana, Mage Knight Dungeons, and many more!
• Paul Peterson: Guillotine, Smash Up, Pairs, and many more!
• Mike Selinker: Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Axis & Allies, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Lords of Vegas, Maze of Games, and many more!
• Jordan Weisman: BattleTech, MechWarrior, HeroClix, Shadowrun, Golem Arcana, Mage Knight, Tsuro of the Seas, and many more!
• Zach Weisman: Golem Arcana, Got ’Em!, and more!

I’m honored to have my name on that list, alongside many legends of tabletop game design I’m proud to call friends. If and when the Kickstarter cracks $175,000, I’ve agreed to chip in a brand-new design of my own for the project. I talk about it a bit here:

We recorded that during Gen Con last year, so if you want to know what I sound like a few days into a massive convention, here’s your chance!

The way the drive works is that you can pick any game you like by backing it at $25, and you can choose up to four more games for $25 each. Once you go over five games, though, you can get nine games for $145, which is a much better deal, and you can add extra games for $16 each.

They have ten games to choose from at the moment, and mine would be the eleventh. If the drive hits $200,000, Peggy Brown joins us for the twelfth game, and you could then get the whole set for $193. That’s nearly half off the entire series.

These are all going to be gateway games, the kinds of games hardcore gamers can sit down and enjoy with people who’ve only played Poker or Monopoly to that point. That makes them perfect for players of all kinds and wonderful for families too.

My kids are going to be helping me out with this one, and they could not be more thrilled about it. (That’s a picture of us playing Tsuro of the Seas at the Calliope Games booth at Gen Con last year.) If it sounds like it’s for you too, join the over 1,100 people who’ve already backed the Kickstarter, and brace yourself for a flood of great games.

First off, thanks to everyone who went over and backed the drive already. Kickstarters can live or die based on their momentum, and one that stumbles out the gate often never manages to fully fund. Because of you fine people, though, this drive exploded in its first day, and it’s been steadily growing ever since.

When Jeremy Mohler (Outland’s CEO and the project’s excellent artist) and I were discussing the Kickstarter, we spent a lot of time going back and forth about whether he should hedge his bets and start out with a black-and-white, print-on-demand version of the game or not. That would have allowed him to set the goal for the drive a lot lower, making it much more likely it would fund, but it also would have made it harder to switch to a traditional print run if the drive demanded it.

In the end, Jeremy decided to go with his gut and try for the higher goal so he could bring backers the book he really wanted to make: a full-color, high-quality, hardcover book printed on excellent paper. I’m thrilled that he did because the gamble has already paid off, and now all of the drive’s backers will benefit from that foresight.

Now that we’ve almost met the funding goal, stay tuned for upcoming news about stretch goals we can go for to make this book–and the entire game line–even better. Outland has some exciting ideas to put into play, and I think you’ll enjoy them all. And if you haven’t already checked out the drive, you’ll want to give it another look too.

We had a ball. It’s called the CORE RPG, and it uses a stripped-down system that puts the emphasis on entertainment rather than number crunching. If you like crunch, though, you’ll enjoy the innovative d6xd6 system, in which you roll two six-sided dice and multiply them to get your result.

Lester’s running a Kickstarter to get the CORE RPG into print. He set a number of stretch goals for it, and he’s already thundered through the first one for a fantasy four-pack of settings, which includes my Shotguns & Sorcery setting, plus ones from Doug Niles, Tim Brown, and Bruce Heard.

Because the mechanics are simple, the settings are short too, and Lester has lined up a slew of other authors and settings. Many more than he’s listed on his site so far. He’s already knocked down the first couple stretch goals, and he has lots more to come. The PDF of the rules including all the stretch goals will only set you back $9, and the print version’s only $21.

It’s a great deal from a fantastic designer, so be sure to check it out. It only runs until August 3, so go over and back it before the clock stops ticking.

A few years back, my pals at Reactor 88 Studios asked me to lend them a hand with their latest project, a horror-comedy film based upon InSpectres, a brilliant indie roleplaying game by my friend Jared Sorensen. I came in and wrote a new draft of Jeff Dohm’s original screenplay and served as one of the film’s producers, and I even played a lone zombie covered in melting makeup on a blistering Chicago summer’s day. Director Darren Orange did most of the heavy lifting with making the film actually happen, and I got to have a ball working with the actors and the rest of the crew.

The film debuted last fall and had a short run in a big theater in Chicago. Now Reactor 88 wants to release the film for people to enjoy at home, and they’ve launched a Kickstarter to make that happen. Head on over and check it out, and chip in if you like screwy fun. Like this:

• Production of the files for both the ebook edition and print edition.
• Editing
• Cover
• ISBNs
• Shipping (Mailers and Labels)
• Printing

There’s one huge thing I’m skipping over there, but I’ll get to it in a moment. First, let me tackle these things in order.

Production

I spent four years as the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, which was a a top-five tabletop RPG company at the time, and I trained the entire production department. Roleplaying game books are far more complicated to produce than a novel, so I felt confident I could handle most of the production of the books myself. I could have hired it out to someone, but I’m picky about my work – and I like to fiddle with things – so I decided to take care of it myself.

I didn’t know much about producing ebooks, but the basic principles are the same as they are for printed books. My friend Steven Saus was kind enough to give me a copy of his So You Want to Make an Ebook?, which served as an excellent primer. Then I figured out how to manage an even smoother workflow using my writing program of choice, Scrivener. I’ll get into that more in a later post.

My costs here are effectively zero, although that doesn’t account for the years of training and experience that allowed me to get away with that. For most people this will run roughly $250—$500 per book, although that can vary a lot. You can ask around for recommendations for good people, or you can try your luck with a new service-matching site like Writer.ly.

Editing

I also spent years as a freelance editor before I co-founded Pinnacle with my pal Shane Hensley. Again, I could have hired someone else to edit my books – and in a perfect world, I probably would have – but I opted to tackle it myself. I shanghaied a few friends and family members into helping me out with the proofreading, including my wife.

Again, my costs here are zero, but I recommend that most people hire an editor. For that, you can expect to pay anywhere from 1¢ per word on up. There are lots of great editors out there who are hungry for work.

Cover

There are two costs for a cover, actually: artwork and design. I’ve won awards for graphic design, so I felt comfortable polishing up my rusty Photoshop skills to handle that. I decided to go with iconic imagery and design because I want customers to be able to understand the cover at a glance when it’s only an inch or two tall on a screen. That also kept the design requirements closer to my skill level.

For the covers, I’ve used stock art – sometimes heavily modified – from sites like iStockPhoto and GraphicRiver, spending up to $50 a crack. If you do this, make sure that you pay for the proper rights for the art. The basic agreement usually only lets you use the imagery on a single website. If you want to do more – like use it on the cover of a book – you need to pay more too. 

My pal Jim Pinto helped me out with the logo for the 12 for ’12 challenge and with the Shotguns & Sorcery logo too. Because we’re old friends, he offered to do it for free, and I insisted on repaying his kindness with autographed hardcover omnibuses of the books his work graces. If you need to, you should hire Jim or someone with similar skills – like Aaron Acevedo, who created the Crescent City maps for my BNW novels.

You can hire a top-level artist for a brand-new book cover too. A great cover is maybe the best marketing tool you can have. Rates can range from $100—$5,000, depending on the artist’s quality and the demands on his or her time. If you go this way, though, don’t forget to hire an excellent graphic designer too, so you can get the most out of that wonderful cover you commissioned.

ISBNs

If you want to sell your book in a bookstore or through electronic stores like iBooks and Kobo, you need to purchase an ISBN, a unique number that identifies the book for the electronic sales systems. In the US, a single ISBN costs $125, 10 cost $250, 100 cost $575, and 1000 cost $1000. I knew I’d need more than 10, but I didn’t want to spend $575 on them, so I skipped this.

It turns out that Amazon – which sells more ebooks than all the other markets combined – doesn’t require ISBNs, nor does Barnes & Noble. To get my books into the other stores, I turned to Smashwords, which offers a free ISBN if you sell through their store too. They take a small cut too, but it takes a while for that to add up.

So my costs here are zero too.

Shipping

This is where it starts to get tricky. Your best bet is to figure out what the flat rates are for shipping something of the size of your book and assume that this is your worst-case cost for actual shipping. A padded flat-rate envelope from the USPS is $5.70 to send to what fits inside it to anywhere in the US, and it comes with a free envelope you can order from the Post Office.

The same envelope sent to China costs $23.95. That’s a huge jump, and it’s why you often see reward levels on Kickstarter say things like, “Add $20 for shipping outside of the USA.”

Depending on what you’re shipping, you can often get away with spending less than that. It may not be much, but over the course of hundreds of shipments, it can add up. I usually buy mailers and adhesive labels for my laser printer on eBay. Lots of the people selling things there need these kinds of supplies, and the companies selling those supplies compete hard on the prices for their business. A good padded envelope and a label should cost about 30¢ per book.

The USPS site doesn’t allow you to send Media Mail – a special type of mail service meant for shipping books in the US cheap – through its website. However, you can do this through PayPal. It’s $2.53 for anything up to a pound, and $2.98 for up to two pounds. They even toss on delivery confirmation for just 20¢ more, to help you make sure the packages actually arrive.

Printing

Printing can be the largest external cost to any novel project. If you’re printing less than a few hundred books at a time, you’re probably best off going with a print-on-demand (POD) service. In any case, using POD is a great way to figure your costs, as that gives you your worst-case scenario. You’d only switch over to a traditional printer if it brought the costs down.

I print my books through DriveThruFiction, which uses Lightning Source as its provider. The price for your book varies depending on the size of the book, the number of pages, and whether or not you have color pages inside it. DTF posts its prices openly, so you can compare them with others as you like. There may be other cheaper sources out there, but not by much, and there’s a kicker. If you sell your books through DriveThruFiction after the Kickstarter, they waive all setup fees. With most other POD services, those can stack up fast. Most charge something like $200 to set up a hardcover, for instance, but at DTF that doesn’t cost a dime.

I print my books at 6.14 x 9.21 inches. That’s the smallest trim (page) size available that matches for both hardcovers and paperbacks, which means I can use the same files for the interiors of both types of books rather than have to create separate ones for each. I just need to generate different files for the covers because the hardcover’s trim is a wee bit larger than the softcover, of course. Either way, the books run roughly 198 pages each.

The Big One: Writing

The largest cost for any novel, of course, goes to the writing. Some authors ignore their own time when they total up their costs. They don’t feel it’s right to account for their own time when setting their Kickstarter’s goal.

That’s their right. But they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re wrong from my point of view. This isn’t a hobby for me. I write full-time for a living. If I don’t make enough to cover my time when I’m writing, I can’t afford to write the book, and I need to write other things instead.

Literally, if I don’t make enough on the Kickstarter, I won’t write the book. I prefer that my kids eat.

How much your time is worth, though, is entirely up to you. Some may not be willing to turn on their computers for less than $30,000. Others might be thrilled with enough backing to pay for a snazzy cover.

Either way and everything in between is fine, as long as it fits your needs and your dreams. Good luck!

Bonus Section!

Bart Lieb reminded me that I should have mentioned one other cost: the percentage that Kickstarter takes before it passes the rest along to you. In my head, this falls more under “financing details” than “costs,” but either way, you need to account for it.

Kickstarter takes a flat 5% of the funding for any successful project run on its site. If you take in money on the side through some other method – like a PayPal button on your site, for instance – they don’t take any of that, but then it doesn’t count toward reaching your goal on the Kickstarter site either.

Kickstarter collects its funds through Amazon Payments. That makes it easy for anyone with an Amazon account to back a project, but it’s a challenge for those who can’t set one up, which is why some creators set up side deals on their own sites to accept PayPal or other means of payment. Amazon takes the fairly standard 3—5% to process those payments. The exact number depends on the amount of the various pledges, which makes it hard to pin down until the end. To be safe, figure on Amazon taking 5%, and you get to enjoy a happy surprise if they don’t do that every time.

In short, expect Kickstarter and Amazon to take 10% off the top of your successful project’s fund. You can figure that into your costs and should set your goal at least that much higher to compensate.

Without full access to Kickstarter’s data broken down by category, there’s no way to figure out what the average final number is in any given category, but even if you could calculate it, the result wouldn’t be all that useful. The totals skew hard based on reputations of the people involved, polish of the pitch page, and lots of other hard-to-quantify criteria. However, with a little bit of study, you can figure out what aligns with your project well and give yourself at least an upper boundary against which you can hope to smack your head.

I’ve run four Kickstarters for novels so far, and my next one may well be for a novel too – although perhaps a single book rather than a trilogy – so let’s take a look at that category. Kickstarter kindly provides a page for each category and subcategory that shows the “Most Funded” projects. So let’s check out Discover/Publishing/Fiction/Most Funded.

The top project is The Numinous Place, which cracked $75k. Before you get your hopes up though, dig a little deeper. You’ll see the project funded almost on the nose at 100%. Also, the average backer kicked in over $450. Two backers kicked in over $10k each.

I watched that one finish up. It looked like it was going to fail, and someone swept in and rescued it at the end. Unless you have a relative, lover, or dear friend with deep pockets, I think we can discount that as a good example.

The Regretsy book is really a fundraiser for the author – who runs Regretsy.com – to travel to Finland. Good for her for having such a fun, rabid fanbase, but we can throw that one out too.

The Plympton drive isn’t for a book so much as a publishing house.

The Steampunk Holmes book is great. I backed it. However, it’s an enhanced book developed as a multimedia app. I love that, but it’s not a straight novel, so for purposes of this analysis, we can discount it.

The Dinocalypse series beat all expectations and funded a full seven novels by five different authors by the time it finished. If you just want to write a single book, you could probably toss this one aside, but I’d count it as the first successful novel(s) project on the list.

Arena Mode states right in its title that it’s not a novels-only project.

The Hogben Chronicles and Long Hidden are a collection and an anthology respectively, not novels.

Hollow World is the first single-novel project on the list.

The Huck Finn project is an elaborate protest joke. It’s hilarious, but it doesn’t belong on this list.

So, if you’re looking at writing a straight novel or series, only two of the top 10 compare well, and if you’re a single person writing one book, there’s only one. And that caps your goal at $30,857.

However, we’re not done yet. Checking the rest of the publishing categories, you can find other projects that might line up well with what you’re doing. It’s kind of odd, but the best-funded publishing project of all time is actually a T-shirt from Planet Money, which cracked $590k. The best-funded narrative is To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure, a pick-a-path book based on Hamlet, which raked in over $580k. Similarly, The Maze of Games – which is listed under games but described as an interactive puzzle novel – took in over $171k. The Geek Love anthology – full of great stuff but not all narrative fiction – racked up $32,707.

The best-funded pure narrative is Wollstonecraft, a middle-grade series that wound up being four books long, which brought in ($91,751). It’s in the children’s book category, which is mostly filled with picture books.

In any case, we shouldn’t set a goal by checking out only the top entries in any category. Moving down the list of fiction projects, and tossing others out based on the criteria I used before, I’d come up with the following top ten list.

To toss another wrinkle in, Kickstarter doesn’t seem to differentiate between pounds and dollars on its list. Mostly Harmless – An Elite: Dangerous Novel, for instance, took in £17,005, which at today’s exchange rate is $25,711.56. That would put it at #7 on the list above. It’s a tie-in based on a video game though, so you could be forgiven for throwing it out as a good comparison point.

If you did that, though, you might want to toss out the Dinocalypse books, which are based on a tabletop RPG. And Pwned, which is based on The Gamers films. And Through a Glass, Darkly, which is based on the Delta Green RPG. So, if you focus the list to original novels for adults – which is what I’m most interested in Kickstarting myself – it looks more like this.

I tossed out a few other suspicious projects that fell inside this range. As a rule of thumb, any drive that took in over $100 per backer and funded by less than a 10% overage got the boot.

Note that two of my own projects (the two 12 for ’12 drives shown) made this list. However, those were drives with multiple novels. Let’s go even farther and toss out projects that launch with multiple books.

Now, some of these drives wound up giving their backers more than a single novel or story. The No Dominion drive actually started out with just a novella, but it wound up rewarding backers with more than a novel’s worth of fiction.

Two of the drives above – The Girl Who Would Be King and Pirate & Hoopoe – also featured a lot of illustrations, blurring the lines a bit. If you like, you could toss those aside too, but I’m inclined to leave them in for now, mostly because the numbers start to compress at the bottom end as we fall into the $12,000 range.

Notice that the top entry has wound down to $30,857, and the bottom level has fallen all the way to $13,690. That’s a far more realistic bracket to plan for than to get suckered in by the larger list.

To sum up, if  you want to launch a Kickstarter for a single original novel for general readers, you should set your goal at $12,000 or less. If your total costs add up to more than that, then you need to step back and reevaluate. If your plan relies on you shattering all records to succeed, it’s probably not a good plan.

All true, but why is that? Why are tabletop games outdoing even video games, which are far more popular in general?

It has to do with the economies of scale of plastic miniatures.

(If that sentence put you to sleep, move on. Now. I’m going deep here.)

Every one of those games on ICv2’s list is a game or product that features lots and lots of plastic figures or terrain. Most of them started out with a decent amount of plastic in their boxes, but as each Kickstarter grew, the producers tossed in more and more plastic bits until the drives went from “cool stuff” to “awesome bargain on cool stuff!”

The Reaper drive for their Bones figures line is a perfect example of this – and was also the top-grossing drive, raking in more than $3.4 million. Their most popular reward came if you backed them at their $100 Vampire level. At the start of the drive, that got you a total of 67 figures. By the end, you racked up 240 figures, plus a number of other neat things, like a copy of my Hard Times in Dragon City novel, which unlocked at the $3 million mark.

So how did Reaper manage to nearly quadruple the number of figures they offered while keeping the price the same? The secret’s in the plastic.

Casting metal miniatures is a labor-intensive process that involves pouring molten metal into a spin-casting machine that distributes the metal into hollow cavities cut into a vulcanized rubber mold. The molds wear out after a while, and you have to make new ones. The metal’s a little pricey, but the rubber’s cheap, so it’s a great way to make miniatures if you’re making a few thousand or less.

However, if you can sell more than that many miniatures, you should make your figures in plastic instead, as the molds for these last virtually forever and the figures only cost pennies apiece. The trouble is that the injection molds for plastic figures are cut from steel, a process that costs thousands of dollars per figure rather than dozens. A small company can’t afford to make hundreds of these molds at once, at least not without a huge cash influx.

And that’s where Kickstarter comes in. If you can get your backers to pledge enough money to cover your steel molds, then you can give them lots of figures for their money. Better yet, if you bust through your initial funding goals, you can set stretch goals for new figures and toss them into the mix for either little cost (as low-cost add-on options) or bundle them in for free.

When the Reaper drive started, the per-figure price of their Vampire level was $1.49 each, shipped to your door. That’s a phenomenal bargain when you consider that most metal fantasy gaming figures cost around $5 each – or much more if you’re into a game like Warhammer. By the time the drive was over, the per-figure price fell to under 42¢ each.

Every time Reaper’s backers broke another stretch goal, the bargain got better and better for them. That gave them lots of incentive to tell their friends about the deal and rope them into joining the drive, and the effect snowballed with each stretch goal knocked down. By the time the drive ended, it was such a fantastic deal for anyone who’d ever pushed figures around a table that it became nearly irresistible.

All of the other miniatures-based triumphs follow this same kind of model. The recent Dwarven Forge Game Tiles drive, for instance, (on which I did a little consulting) followed this to the letter, and it brought in over $1.9 million.

Most other types of Kickstarter ventures cannot pull this sort of thing off. If you’re Kickstarting a novel, for instance, it’s hard to offer lots more novels in a time frame that makes sense for most readers. Evil Hat managed something close to this by bringing in lots of authors for its Spirit of the Century novel line Kickstarter, and the strategy made that the #5 fiction drive ever. (By my count, it’s actually the #1 straight novel drive, but that’s a separate post.)

The nature of minis, though, means you want to have as many of them to play with as once as you can manage, and with enough money a producer can manage this in a reasonable amount of time. It makes it a natural niche for a top Kickstarter – if it’s run well. It’s not something just any company can pull off though. There’s a lot of hard-won knowledge, skill, and expertise that goes into running and producing a successful line of plastic figures, and Kickstarter makes for the perfect way for the people who have that particular combination of things to capitalize on it.

• Rite Publishing’s Lords of Gossamer and Shadow
• Caias Ward’s Trigger Happy
• Paradigm Concept’s Witch Hunter
• Robin Laws’s Hillfolk
• James Wallis’s Alas Vegas
• John Wick’s Wicked Fantasy
• Savage Mojo’s Dungeonlands
• Christian and Jody Lindke’s Cthulhu Claus Greeting Cards
• Gareth Michael-Skarka’s Far West
• Stone Skin Press’s Fiction Anthologies
• Zombie Orpheus’s The Gamers: Hands of Fate
• Reaper’s Bones

I’m also involved with a few Kickstarters still in the works:

• Larry Elmore’s Sovereign Stone RPG (cracked my stretch goal and still has 4 days to go!)
• Spectrum Games’ Cartoon Action Hour (about $1,750 short of my stretch goal with 11 days to go!)
• Hal Greenberg & Neal Levin’s The Awakened (about $8,350 short of my stretch goal with 18 days to go!)
• The Onyx Path’s Exalted (about $45,000 short of my stretch goal with 17 days to go!)

On top of all this, I’ve consulted on a number of drives behind the scenes, helping my friends build proper drives and execute them well. Note that not every stretch goal my work has been put up for has been reached, although the successes vastly outnumber the failures. In all cases, I’m sure the basic drive contributed a lot more to the successes of those Kickstarters than my offerings, but I’m always thrilled to be a part of so much fun. If you supported any of these Kickstarters – or my own 12 for ’12 drives – thanks for giving me the chance to do that.