The Traveler’s Guide to the Goblin Fells finished crowdfunding on August 16th. It had 268 backers and raised $4,415.
It’s not a particularly inspired panik-kalm-panik. A bad thing happened, then it went away, then it came back.
I’m going to try and give the Kickstarters more generic sounding names going forward, to see if that’s the secret sauce that made Elemental Chaos more successful than the rest. I’ve only got two books left before the series either lives or dies, and it’s starting to look like “dies” is just about locked in. It’s not over until October, when the final book of the first six Kickstarts, but it’d need to be a pretty dramatic turnaround at this point.
Marketing-wise, running ads on PodCastle is slightly profitable, so that was cool, although unfortunately there’s not really any way to make it scale. I learned about PodCastle by happenstance, there isn’t a larger network of podcasts I can branch out into (the PodCastle people do have several other podcasts, but they’re on other genres, which means my fantasy D&D book probably won’t get the attention there that it did on PodCastle, and the margins on this are already pretty slim). I also had a commissioned class from Alex Bobrow, the Caltrop Core person, and while that doesn’t seem to have brought in more than it cost, it did bring in some new backers, and might plausibly grow over time if I keep at it. Hopefully the time it takes is three months or less, because that is the amount of time that I have.
Chamomile Has A Blog 