Ends of the Earth Finances
Another ZineQuest, another small pile of money.
My goal with ZineQuests — all two of the ones I’ve done — is to go low-effort, low-cost, high speed, here is a thing you might enjoy with maybe some rough edges. This makes it quite difficult to do financial post-mortems on them because I have no collaborators and very little in the way of expenses, so basically I keep the lot and that’s that. (I wanted to buy a Steam Deck with it, but I have to replace my bathroom so it’s Sensible Adult Spending instead, boo hiss.)
So the rest of this post will be me trying to spin nothing into something.
1. Pre-KS Stuff
I got the idea to do this in… I want to say November or so, when I thought ‘oh I’ve got plenty of time to prepare for a launch in February’ and then I blinked and it was late January. I’d already got the basic details laid down and I’d done most of the map by then, thanks to stress-induced insomnia from everything else that was going on in my life, so I launched with minimal preamble or promotion.
Unlike Sunlands, though, this time I’d chosen to launch on February 1st, to try and catch that ZineQuest hype wave.
As a side note, a large influence on the way I designed the map for Ends of the Earth was Map Crow’s video tutorials on Youtube, particularly this one where he says ‘you aren’t designing a map, you’re designing a game board’. Good wisdom, that.
2. Income
Thanks to my backers, I raised £1127.03 after Kickstarter took their slice. That’s about £150 more than Sunlands. Did the launch date make a difference? Do I just have a bit more of a following now than I did then? Do people like this product better than that one?
Who knows. I certainly don’t, and the difference is small enough that I don’t think it matters anyway.
(I do know that I sold out of the 100 print copies this time, which I didn’t with Sunlands.)
Running Total: £1127.03
3. Reach? What Reach?
For the first time for one of my Kickstarter campaigns, I made custom links to help track where the backers for my project were coming from and actually remembered to use them.
The results were dreadful!
I had a custom link for Twitter, a custom link for Mastodon, and a custom link for the ZineMonth pile o’ zines page (which apparently isn’t meant for people running KS campaigns, oops). Of the 174 people who backed Ends of the Earth I got:
- 6 from the Zimo link.
- 2 from twitter.com, although not via the custom Twitter link, but maybe that’s because Elon Musk had already started hollowing out Twitter by that point.
- 0 from Mastodon.
Of the remaining 166, about 72% of them were delivered unto me by Kickstarter’s internal referral systems. This is why I have trouble funding on other platforms, even though I would dearly like to bail on KS.
I mean, this is a very small sample size from a very small creator; I’d love to know if other small-time creators experience the same thing. Like, I know Kickstarter’s referral systems are very powerful, especially for creators with no reach, but I’d love to start putting some numbers on that.
4. Printing
I went back to my friends at digitalprinting.co.uk, who printed Sunlands for me on very nice paper, and got them to print Ends of the Earth on the same paper with a slightly different cover colour in case you’re collecting my (two) zines. That informed my cover layout and interior font choices too; I want them to look sort of unified.
I ruined this, of course, by not considering the way I’d handled headers and other interior text layout decisions in Sunlands when I did the layout for Ends of the Earth, so they don’t look that unified. Oh well, zines.
Anyway, I spent £366.63 on printing.
Running Total: £760.40
5. Shipping
Just shy of £30 on packaging and just shy of £370 on postage came to £396.83 in costs to get the things where they needed to go.
When I posted Sunlands in 2020, I used a bit of layout trickery and sticker sheets to make doing customs labels for 80-odd envelopes easy, but when I tried the same scheme for Ends of the Earth it turned out that you’re not allowed to do that any more. Due to a Post Office hack in January all customs labels now have a unique barcode on them, so you can’t bulk print them without a special printer and a roll of labels.
So I spent a weekend manually writing 80-odd customs labels. It sucked and was boring but it went reasonably quickly in batches of 15–20. If I do this again I’m going to have to see if there’s an easier option.
Final Total: £363.57
6. Return on Investment
So, was all that work worth it for £363.57?
If you go back to my Sunlands post-mortem you’ll note that I didn’t earn anywhere near enough money to make the 40 hours I put into that zine worth it, so I said I’d raise my prices next time.
If you compare the Ends of the Earth campaign with that one, you’ll see that I didn’t do that. This is because learning from one’s past mistakes is for losers and weaklings.
No, wait, it’s because for ZineQuests I like to keep the price (and expectations) as low as possible, and £5 for a print copy just feels like a nice number. I don’t know how much work I put into Ends of the Earth because, as I mentioned before, I produced quite a lot of it in a sleep-deprived fugue between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. over the course of some number of days. How many? Who knows. Sleep-deprived fugue.
EotE definitely felt faster to write than Sunlands, though, so let’s assume 30 hours?
At my ‘this is a reasonable return on investment’ rate of £15/hour, a 30-hour project would need to make me £450 to be worth it. £360 and change is pretty far off that, but I did print 30 extra copies to sell at conventions (UKGE this year, Dragonmeet every year except that one time I got covid) and if they all sell that tasty extra £150 will push me into ‘worthwhile’ territory. Or if I sell a bunch more in electronic formats for $3–4 a go. So I think I’ll be alright.
Not minted, but alright.
