Time flies: the price of self-publishing your own tabletop RPG — a year later
In January of last year, I wrote a piece on the cost of publishing two RPG game books, the MONAD System and its first setting, Nostalgia: La Flotta Nomade (The Nomad Fleet). The piece continues to get views and reads over a year later, and I thought it would be interesting to do a follow-up piece of what happened, how did it go, and what’s next for us.
Where are we?
In May 2018, The World Anvil has almost wholly fulfilled the Kickstarter launched in April 2017: all physical rewards have been delivered (in two waves, more on that later) and just a couple of digital Stretch Goals are still in the works. Our partnership with Hive Division, the company that allowed us to run the Kickstarter from Italy, is amicably concluded, and we’re now trying to figure out how to turn The World Anvil into a legal subject without recurring to individual business IDs. The reasons for that are numerous and mostly related to bureaucracy: there’s enough material for another post focusing on that in the future so we won’t linger on that now.
The MONAD System, format A5, ended up being a hardcover 308 pages long B/W book, while Nostalgia: La Flotta Nomade (A4, full color), 346 pages, was almost three times longer than original estimations. Since their release in November 2017, we published three more modules to support both the system (Dead Air, a post-apocalyptic mini-setting) and the setting (Raam Scoria and Luce e Ombra, both Nostalgia expansions).
As you can imagine, there have been unexpected expenses along the way, but besides having almost exhausted the first printing for both core books, we indeed have managed to establish a unique presence in the Italian market in a brief amount of time.
We’re full of plans for 2018 and beyond, but we’ll take a look at that in the future. For now, I’d like to discuss what it meant, in practice, to fulfill all the primary rewards of the campaign.
Cost of stretch goals
I think our campaign was an overall success. Funded on Day 1, the highest grossing RPG campaign at the time for an Italian RPG title without an English translation, tremendous community support, etc. Over time, I made a point of keeping the community frequently informed, without hiding problems or delays. By far, this was the main reason why our surveys on how we handled the campaign ended up with a 96% approval rate and a general appreciation score for the rewards provided of 4.81 out of 5.
If I had to redo the campaign over, however, I would change some things, and the first one would be how we handled Stretch Goals.
Stretch Goals are crucial to keep the momentum going after the first few days of the campaign: they offer an excellent opportunity to make an update, and they count as “extra stuff” most backers are eligible for. With the same investment needed to fund the base reward, one can end up with two or three times the material at virtually no extra cost. There are different ways to account for the additional costs of Stretch Goals: one is to work their price in the initial offer if one is confident about reaching them fast, another is to unlock them as add-ons, available for a price, with the additional cash usually going towards manufacturing.
Despite having the best cost estimations we could come up with before starting the campaign, we ended up making several mistakes:
Stretch Goals were not spaced enough from one another. On the one hand, it’s nice when you unlock something almost every day, hence the temptation to have small increases in funding goal between Stretch Goals; on the other, we vastly underestimated the time, effort and final quality we were going for. For example, three separate extra-modules quoted as PDFs ended up being a single printed product with two unique covers that needed to be delivered with an additional wave of shipping.
We made them KS exclusives. Many of our Stretch Goals were Kickstarter exclusives, and it was a massive mistake. While I know that some people believe that without Kickstarter exclusives there’s no Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), my practical experience is that most backers were just happy to get free stuff. Moreover, the vast majority of them approved of us putting the “exclusives” for sale — something we made sure of with a poll. The thing is: doing things well requires a lot of effort: writing, ordering exclusive illustrations, doing the layout, etc. This work just cannot be adequately done without losing a massive amount of money if the rewards end up in the hands of less than 200 people, and our Stretch Goals price tag wasn’t right to serve only that kind of niche.
Bottom line: do Stretch Goals, space them wisely (they will cost twice as much as you estimate) and avoid total exclusives — you can, however, do an exclusive print run with a unique cover for backers, for example. If you put a lot of effort into making a reward, you always need to be able to sell it afterward.
Shipping Expenses
Shipping expenses have been a nightmare. They are hard to estimate, and price changes according to who does the delivery, and size/weight of the packages. These are difficult things to evaluate before
1) you have the physical goods in hand and
2) before you know how you’re going to wrap and bundle them together (shipping boxes also come at different sizes and prices, and must be accounted for).
On top of that, initially, we budgeted for a single wave of shipping (the core books). However, our latest Stretch Goal, Luce e Ombra, aggregated three different PDFs in a physical book most backers would get for free. There was no way for Luce e Ombra to be ready at the same time of the core books. Hence it required a separate, costly, second wave of shipping.
One way to reduce the impact of that unexpected expense was to bundle Luce e Ombra together with preorders of new material. It worked reasonably well for us, and several people helped to keep costs in check picking their books up at events, but we still ended up paying an extra 1000€ to get the second wave of shipping done.
Additional fees for graphic design and editing
In the previous article, I aggregated costs of layout/illustration/revisions for the period 2015–2016 into a lump sum of 8778€ ($10 345). Post Kickstarter, and with 11 + 7 Stretch Goals unlocked, we doubled down on the products with additional 6800€ (about $8000) of expenses in these three areas (and I’m leaving a few things out, such as software licenses). While the total amount looks relatively insane for the niche market we’re going for, doing so allowed us to have:
1) Five beautiful, well-edited books + accessories on the market as of April 2018. This variety has already proven an advantage at events, where we have quite a few things to show to potential customers;
2) Have a lot of work done for future products and translations.
Being one of the few Italian projects that went as far as creating two custom fonts for its games, I believe our offer has a level of polish that is quite uncommon in the RPG landscape — especially for first-timers.
Printing Expenses
Prototypes aside — which you want to do to make sure you’re not printing hundreds of books that look entirely wrong — we ended up spending about 8600€ for the first print run of the books (300 + 300). That’s a total of approximately 195K pages/more than 1 ton of paper to store somewhere, and storage is an element to keep in mind when making these orders. Nostalgia, in particular, turned out to be way more expensive than it would be good for business. While the suggested ratio is 1€ printing expense to 6–7€ of price-tag on the cover, with that one, we’ve been closer to 1€ to 2.5€. This issue will be partially addressed with the second run of the books, which will be softcover for both books, but in general, we need to consider them as loss leaders — the products we need to get into someone’s hands to sell the rest of the catalog.
Printing expenses also need to keep events in consideration: t-shirts, flags, roll-ups are all things you need and are expensive. Since this is a different can of worms, I’ll discuss it in details in a future instalment of this series.
Overall investment
The main issue we need to crack going forward (if we put bureaucracy on the side) is how to pay for work. Making these physical products beautiful is so expensive in itself that there’s very little left to reward our work, admittedly the most crucial part of the process. Right now, and for the next couple of years, we’ll focus on recouping the initial investment, but we’re now laying down a plan for what happens from 2020 onward. Stay tuned if you want to know how we are thinking about IPs, shares, rewarding work and getting the right creative people on the team.
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I’ve put together a free mini-course on laying the right foundations for your crowdfunding campaign. I made a lot of mistakes with mine but you don’t have to. Learn more here.
You can follow the projects @theworldanvil or on Facebook.
You can find me at @tdebenetti.
The World Anvil website: http://www.thewordlanvil.com (English pages haven’t been updated in a while. We’ll do that when we have a strategy for the rest of the world)
The World Anvil Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theworldanvil/
The World Anvil Twitter: @theworldanvil
