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We launched our Kickstarter this last Friday, a smidge later than originally planned but at least still within the window of time I proclaimed when I made my vow on Twitter:
If you’re wondering why I put business lunch in quotes, well, basically because it was really just lunch. I mean, we’re married, we live together, and because of that we often eat together, but we aren’t always talking business at those times. In fact I’d say more often than not we avoid business discussions, but this time around our talk of how to plan out the next few weeks of Zombie Ranch with Episode 10 ending and WonderCon looming shifted into thoughts of a “work hiatus” where we could finally, finally get the Kickstarter we’d been planning underway.
Yeah, calling our launch a smidge late is mostly in reference to last week’s rambling blog where I was talking about getting things underway by last Wednesday. I believe our actual first mention of the idea of a Kickstarter to gather together a trade paperback volume was all the way back in June 2013, shortly before the climax of Episode 7.
Why did it take so long between then and now? Well, in part because of preparation, but to be perfectly honest I’d say the biggest issue was plain old fear. What if we weren’t really ready? What if we underestimated our funding needs? Or overestimated them so much the project would be doomed to failure? What could we realistically offer as rewards? How could we present ourselves so that not just friends and fans but potentially complete strangers might be interested in pitching in?
Worst of all: what if we threw a fundraiser and no one came?
I mean, to this day we honestly have no exact idea of what our reader base is, and even then we have little idea how many would actually be willing to toss some cash our way if asked. This project would be where we would find out, and if it ended up failing through lack of interest, well, it wouldn’t mean an end to our efforts but I can’t deny it would be something of a gut punch. Putting out a Kickstarter would be all but asking for the world’s referendum on our five years of work. It was, and still remains, a very scary thought.
But we finally committed to struggling past it, and make no mistake, there was a lot of work that got done between that March 16th tweet and now. Just setting the funding goal turned out to be a really big issue given all the horror stories we had heard from peers over the years. Then we had a momentary panic when some of the printing quotes we’d gotten last year turned out to be obsolete. An intended promotional channel I’d been saving for this occasion went belly up because the website it was operating through went down. Then there was the pitch text, the video, the reward tiers… even though many parts of a Kickstarter project can be edited after you go live, I mentioned last week that the idea of a mistake was near paralyzing to consider, since even a small typo might turn people away or give them the wrong message.
We perservered, though, and we launched, and now we just have to do our best to make it successful. You can, of course, help with that if you haven’t already (and you’re not reading this on May 11th or later). CLICK HERE, or on our neato keen graphic below, and consider pledging our way. If nothing else, your good vibes and spreading the word to anyone else who might be interested would be much appreciated!
