It's the Monday after San Diego Comic-Con and I'm sitting back at home in 105F degree weather. I miss San Diego already! (editor's note: this post was written over the last two days :P)

2018 was the best show I've had since our debut at NYCC 2014. There were so many parallels between that show and this one. I'm blessed to have experienced both. 
​
This year, the week leading up to the show was especially hectic for me as I rushed to not only prepare for the con, but this Kickstarter as well as the imminent arrival of 5,000 pounds of book at my office doorsteps. 

On Monday I finalized touches on my booth for this year. Tuesday, the books came on three massive pallets, and on Wednesday we were off the San Diego for preview night. I did final shipping calculations on Wednesday night and on Thursday we launched

​

The response to the new booth and books has been overwhelming. Over the past year or so I've been feeling a bit of con-burnout. This show, I was determined to get our numbers back up and update our display for the first time in four years.

​Part of our wonderful updated display this year was a brand new customized Zephyr model made by Captain Nate Seekerman.

​I first met Captain Seekerman at Long Beach Comic Expo in 2015. He was in full costume and at that time did not have a muffler. He bought a copy of Skies of Fire and introduced himself with much gusto, though it was hard to understand him at the time because his costume didn't yet have a voicebox!

Since then I've seen Nate at various shows, sometimes in costume and sometimes out. This year at WonderCon this year he approached me with an interesting proposition. He wanted to make a to-scale model of the Zephyr.

This wasn't the first time someone has come up to us wanting to do a model. Everyone else who has asked over the years eventually flaked, so when Nathan approached me I was a bit reserved knowing that he had a challenging task ahead of him. 
​
Nate was a consummate professional. He kept us updated every step of the design process, showing us numerous work in progress shots to which we could only say "Awesome!" or give a thumbs up of approval.

Here's Nate's description of the Zephyr in his own words:
This project was based purely on the Steampunk aesthetic from the illustrations in "Skies of Fire" by Ray Chou and Vincenzo Ferriero. The Illustrations were incredibly detailed and they even had hand-drawn schematics of the Zephyr Airship in north/south/east/west. First step was to import those 2D images into Fusion 360, so the 3D blimp could be drawn exactly and scaled to 18 inches long. This process takes a few weeks, then it's onto breaking down all the drawn pieces into parts that can be printed with a 3D printer. 

In this case, we went another step and only printed the frame also called formers in PLA plastic, so Battens made of brass could be fit to create an inner frame. It took a week to print over 54 parts, so the skeleton could be assembled before applying Silk Paper, Dope Resin and Paint much like those balsa wood planes of the 1950's. And, before the Silk Tissue Paper is applied, the skeleton has to be wired for electronics which include 6 drone motors and 3 LED lights. Once the paper application and paint is complete, then the propeller engines can be soldered and glued into place. 

To finish, the rest of the small parts on the outside are now applied for a process that takes about a month. My favorite part is the electronics, because seeing a working airship is really great for the imagination. Of course assembly is always the most difficult, because you have to be so careful with the Silk Paper, until it's painted when the paint thickens the outer shell. In the future, I could see this printed at a higher resolution for garage kits that fans would like to build themselves!

Overall, I couldn't be more pleased with the way things have gone the last two weeks. It's been a rejuvenating series of events for me. Onwards and upwards!

​- Ray

Originally published 05/14/16 on Bleeding Cool.

Hey guys! My name is Vince and I am one of the creators of the Glow comic that is currently out on Kickstarter. Please check us out if guns and golems, mutants and magic, witches and warlords are your thing!
 
If you’ve found yourself here, you most likely wish to kickstart a project of your own or might just be interested in what we do. This is our fourth time back on the platform, and I thought it would be cool to share some ideas that worked for us in making our projects a success. So let’s jump right in! 
​

​Why have a good video?
 
Kickstarter is an awesome platform for indie comic creators to make their stories come true. Not only is the comic section of Kickstarter quite healthy, but you can show off pages and concept art to really stir the crowd into helping it make it happen. The visual aspect of comics is much more powerful than just writing out a story synopsis and a paragraph on how it will look.
 
At the top of each campaign, you also have a space to drop in a video.

​This isn’t necessary, but is a great way to make an awesome first impression, and you only get one chance at that. A video can show your passion for the project, add a fitting tone for your work through music, and offer a concise explanation of your goals and story.
 
Ray, my co-writer, and I are staunch believers in using the video element to its fullest potential. We both graduated from film school, so we understood its importance going in.
 
Here are our top 5 tips of making your video on Kickstarter:

 In this modern age of HD digital cameras and fiber-optic internet, viewers have come to expect quality when they press play on a video. You might be strapped for cash (probably why you are kickstarting in the first place), but getting good quality equipment is a firm investment into making good videos and bringing in more funds for your magnum opus.
 
Your video should mirror your project in quality. It’s a way viewers can gain confidence in what you do, and assures them that you are in full control of what you are presenting. Seeing your face for the first time with some great lighting and HD goodness is a good start for any kickstarter. It makes your video approachable and lends a face behind the project.

Of course, quality comes with a price. For Ray and I, we use the Nikon D7000 from our film school days. It’s a solid DSLR camera that offers 1080p video and was pretty competitive in quality back in 2010. Since then, better (and cheaper) cameras have come out, so you have a better assortment of toys to pick from. 

​The next thing is lighting. Sure, you could shoot outside on a sunny day, but you’ve got uncontrollable factors like wind and sound.  You’d want to shoot somewhere where it’s quiet, and you are undisturbed. Even with a quality camera, low/bad lighting can break your video. But, don’t worry. There is a cheap solution to this – the China Ball!

​This wonderful contraption can be picked up at your local hardware store for as little as 15 dollars! Stick a 200W bulb in one of these paper lanterns and you’ve got some amazing soft light for your video. They even use these things on blockbuster films, like The Dark Knight. Hey, if it’s good for Bats, it’s good for us!

This is one thing even filmmakers sometimes forget about. Directors often care more about getting good video than capturing good sound. After all, you can always “fix” the sound in post, right?
 
True, but you don’t want to go there. It is painstaking work, and the result can actually be terrible. Let’s make it clear:
 
SOUND IS JUST AS, IF NOT, MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE VIDEO!
 
Bad sound can be distracting, and at times, unnerving. The hiss from a camera microphone is enough to make someone click the back button. It’s also a telltale sign of an amateur video. 

To fix the problem, we use the Audio Technica ATR 3350 Condenser Lavalier. Don’t worry about the name. All you have to know is that it’s easy to use, produces nice sound, and is dirt-cheap! 

At about 36 dollars, this is a bargain! The jack plugs into a standard mic input. Just switch it on and off you go. You’ve got a good cord distance, and its small size ensures that you can hide it under your collar. 

​All right, so we have a camera, our awesome China ball, and a microphone clamped to our chest. We shoot the video. Great! What next?
 
Time to edit your video! I use Final Cut Pro 7 to edit our videos. It’s professional grade and really intuitive to use once you get a hang of it. You don’t need to go so far to cut your video together. As long as you have the time and are willing to put the effort, any editing software will suffice.
 
What’s more important is what you do with your edits. 

• Keep your video short! 2-3 minutes is the sweet spot for us. Anything longer and you’re going to send people to sleep. This is also enough time to bang out your story idea and maybe some important info you want your viewers to know.

• For us, 70% comic images and 30% interviews seemed like a good mix. The focus should be the comic after all, not the creators. Often, it’s nice to start off with an interview shot and then move to the comic. This allows you to continue talking over the images so people have a reference for the voice while getting a chance to see your work.

• The first 15-20 seconds of the video is a great place to have your best panels (preferably sequenced in a way to tell a story or create tension). These valuable seconds are important to draw the viewer in and get them riled up to watch more.

​

• The final few seconds of the video are important to. Often placing an awesome final image is a great send off for viewers who are unsure if they want to support you or not. It will remain with them and hopefully sway them to back your project later down the road. 

​Cool, so you have your images and your interviews put together in a rough video. Now comes time to finesse the work. Ray and I always want our videos to be as dynamic as possible in order to capture the tone and mood of the comic we are presenting.  We do this in two ways: music and easy motion effects on our comic panels. 

• For your background soundtrack, pick something that fits the tone of your piece. Be it a slow melody or an intense drum and base, it is the perfect way to give your imagery that vitality it might otherwise be missing. For music, we look through Kevin McLeod’s website. He’s an awesome musician who has a royalty-free selection as long as you credit him in the video.

• Music choice is essential as it sets the rhythm of your video. Make cuts between shots and images on important moments in the video. Is the music rising to an epic crescendo? Stick in that shot of an epic sky battle! It’s always a good idea to cut between melodic shifts in a piece.

​

• With images, don’t just have a static shot. Let it move! Have a sweeping landscape, pan across the image to accentuate that. Have a somber moment between two characters? Slowly zoom in on that image. Have an amazing world map? Zoom out so that the scale really shows. 

I hope you guys enjoyed this post and found something handy in order to help you on your own Kickstarter adventure!  We have some more tutorials on crowdfunding on this website, so please feel free to browse around!

And if our work strikes your fancy, please check out our current Kickstarter for Glow here.
 
If you have any  thoughts or questions, please feel free to comment or message us at www.mythopoeia.us/contact. 
 
Till next time, keep glowing!
 
Vince

In part one I talked about how continuing an ongoing series influenced the design of our campaign. Part two covered our experiences with research, analytics, and advertising, while in part three we explained the differences we see between offset and digital printing. In this post I’ll be detailing our shipping process, mostly discussing the materials and tools we use and why.

Shipping is quite an interesting experience. On the one hand it basically amounts to manual labor, but there’s something deeply satisfying about delivering to the people who supported you, especially when the names become familiar over multiple campaigns. It’s also nice having a natural ending point for the work.  Sometimes doing creative work feels like climbing an endless mountain -- you can always revise a script some more, or write more blog entries, try to get more press, etc.. It’s a good feeling switching it up every once in awhile, doing straightforward, honest work.

Packaging Materials

One of the things we greatly improved upon from the first Kickstarter was the packaging of our shipments. We were a bit naive about this the first time around, and shipped most of our packages with bubble mailers.

Web Tools


The online tools/platforms we use are designed to save us time. If need be, we could just do everything out of Kickstarter, but it would probably mean not only more labor for us, but an increase in the amount of packaging mistakes. The flip side is that the tools are an additional charge that takes away from our bottom line. 

• BackerKit

BackerKit is a back-end web platform designed to support crowdfunding fulfilment. There are a number of tools in its suite, the most important of which is a survey / spreadsheet system that helps creators organize backers by batch categories. So for instance, I can with the click of a couple buttons see all of the US-based backers who ordered a red sticker, copy of issue two, and postcard. Instead of packaging them individually, I can finish them all off in one go assembly line style. This saves us a lot of time and helps dummy-proof us from our own packaging mistakes. Of course, those types of mistakes are still made, but we're fairly certain the percentage is reduced because of the greater organization BackerKit provides.

The other main benefit of BackerKit is that it can act as a secondary storefront for add-ons or preorders. In our experience, this has helped BackerKit more than pay for itself. The addition of another storefront typically adds something like 8% of your original funding amount on average, which is a nice little boost. 

Pricingwise, BackerKit has a three tiered system where they take both a percentage of your total raised as well as some from the pre/add-on orders. Again, in our experience BackerKit has paid for itself and then some each time. That may not be the same for everyone. 


We decided to offload all of our add-ons to Backerkit for our second campaign. This meant not listing individual prices for the Kickstarter and telling people who wanted add-ons to wait for the BackerKit survey. I think we actually lost some potential revenue because we lost perhaps some spur of the moment purchases, but it saved us the hassle of having to figure out add-ons without a clear logistical system in place. 

So, would I recommend BackerKit to other Kickstarters? Yes…. but with some trepidation. The services BackerKit provide are great, but the customer service can sometimes be lacking. Keep in mind the only time we access BackerKit is during our fulfillment. If we have to wait for BackerKit to respond (which we’ve had to do time and time again), that means we’re not shipping books and twiddling our fingers. Both Vince and I have other commitments, so it’s hugely frustrating when the time we allocate to ship is wasted because the platform designed to save us time is in fact holding us up. 

It’s also a little buggy at times. It’s kind of funny because I’ve played video games all my life, right? So I know what a bug is… I know one when I see it. When I’ve talked to their customer service reps about certain technical issues in the past, their neutral response is always along the lines of ‘oh no… can’t possibly be something on our end!’ If not in words then in tone. I wish they would be a little bit less assured of their technology and a little bit more ...accepting of their faults.

That said, the added revenue is nice and there’s no doubt that the systems BackerKit provides are useful logistical tools. They’ve also gotten better as a service the longer they've been at it. 

• Stamps.com
  

For domestic shipping, we use Stamps.com to buy postage. Stamps.com costs about $15 a month, but they give you a free trial and some credit for postage when you first get started. The system is pretty intuitive and each package saves us an average of .25 cents over going to the post office or using BackerKit's built in postage (which goes through endicia). 

So, as long as you're shipping 60 media mail packages or more the service pays for itself and saves you money. It definitely saves you time over the USPS website, which is kind of a hot mess. 

Main benefit? You can cut and paste domestic addresses, and it has a plug-in that allows us to print for the DYNMO 4XL without having to fiddle around with settings. For each package that saves us maybe fifteen seconds, but it all adds up when you start to deal with hundreds of the suckers. 


Suspending the account is a bit of a hassle. You can't just do it on the website and have to talk to a customer representative. They'll try and appease you by offering free months of service, but I think they do that in the hopes that you'll eventually forget about it and keep on getting charged. Just got to stay on top of it and cancel right away. 

Domestic Shipping


We use media mail to ship the majority of our packages. This is the cheapest option so long as the package only contains books or other forms of media. Media mail is also measured by the pound, so there's a huge amount of leeway with regards to packaging material. That's why I said earlier that the switch to cardboard mailers - despite being heavier - did not effect our shipping costs. Two comics bagged and boarded is going to be under a pound in both chipboard and bubble mailer.

There's some info online stating that media mail is not suited for comics or magazines because those items contain ads. Our books don't contain ads because we self-publish, so...

Your mileage may vary. Know that USPS reserves the right to inspect any package that's shipped through media mail to ensure that the service is not being abused. Use your best judgment. 

International Shipping


So, international shipping is going to be a doozy no matter what. One of the main problems is that Kickstarter accounts for shipping as part of your total pledge goal. That means even if you correctly estimate shipping for different regions, international orders will inevitably shrink your margins because while the fundraising target may be the same, a disproportionate and unconsidered amount will go towards shipping internationally. Yaay. 

Still, it's just something you have to deal with. It sucks for us as creators, but it probably sucks even more for our international backers. They'll typically be among your higher backers because of shipping, and it's nice seeing that people from different places believing in your project. 

For Mythopoeia, we're a bit lucky in that Vince and I are based out of different parts of the world. I mean overall it's a net negative when it comes to working, but for shipping it's definitely a plus! Because Vince is in London, he handles all of the European and African orders we get (we haven't gotten an order from Africa yet), while I handle NA/SA/AustralAsia. 

To save costs, we'll ship a portion of the books directly to London from a printer. Unfortunately, we didn't properly account for merchandise shortages this second Kickstarter, and so I had to ship two international packages directly to Vince so he could fulfill the rest of his orders. That costed a lot of money... less than if I had to ship all the international orders, but still a decent amount.

Then something else happened. Because we were afraid of the merchandise getting lost, I stupidly bought a high amount of insurance on the packages I sent to Vince. The Royal Mail Service saw the purported value of the packages and asked Vince to pay a high VAT tax. He had to do it... it delayed European shipping by several more days, and in the end we probably spent as much money on European shipping as had I decided to ship it from here in sunny Los Angeles. The tax man got us, and he got us good. 

So advice for international shipping? Not much, because we haven't figured it out yet, either :). 

--------

Final Installment: Lessons Learned, Things We Would do Differently 

Part I: Continuing an Ongoing Series

Part II: Research, Analytics, & Advertising

Part III: Digital vs. Offset Printing

If you found this information helpful please be sure to check our comic, Skies of Fire. If you're already a fan, don't forget to sign up for our mailing list, follow us on twitter, and like us on facebook! 

Thanks all!
- Ray and Vince 

In part one I talked about how continuing an ongoing series influenced the design of our campaign. Part two covered our experiences with research, analytics, and advertising. In this post I'll be going over the differences between digital and offset printing (as we see it). I was going to cover shipping in this post as well, but it started getting long again so I guess that'll have to wait for part IV! 

Onwards...

International Printing / Offset

For issue one, we came dangerously close to not making our New York City Comic-Con deadline because we didn't consider China's Golden Week holiday into our scheduling. We ended up printing in the USA, which increased our costs by quite a bit. This time around, we knew we wanted to print in Asia if at all possible in order to save money. Doing so meant testing international freight shipping. Long Beach had an ongoing strike near the launch of our Kickstarter, so we were definitely scared the decision to print offset internationally would backfire on us again.

We ended up working with Sam and Jacob from Kraken Print. They're pretty awesome and print books in Taiwan, which is kinda my ancestral homeland. Gotta rep, y'know? The books took about two months from order to arrival. If we had to do it again, we would've bought the books before the Kickstarter went live. The shorter your backers have to wait, the better their experience will be. We did our best with the first Kickstarter, but we knew our book was done before this second one. Still, we could've gotten our backers their rewards sooner had we ordered earlier, like before the campaign actually started. Lesson learned.


The quality of the books turned out amazing. They do a Kraken' job, that Sam and Jacob. 

Pros and Cons of Offset

The primary value of offset is that per unit costs go down drastically as the amount goes up. At the time of writing, printing 1,000 copies would cost about $2,000, or $1.98 per book, while printing 2,000 costs $1.58 / per, and then you get down to near the $.51 / per once you hit quantities of 4,000, where it seems to flatline for a little bit. The cheaper your per unit cost is, the more money you’ll make per sale of physical book. Of course, you need to have the capital to put down a couple thousand dollars which can seriously affect your cashflow (I talked a little bit about this in part I), need to store the books somewhere, and then you need to see if you even have the demand to support selling that many books. That’s determined by not only the quality of the book, but your marketing and salesmanship. Don’t forget time, as well - yours selling the books at cons, packaging stuff, etc. 

Quality is another consideration for Offset Printing. Yes, the quality is a little bit nicer, but to the naked eye (and if your digital printer has good equipment) the difference can be unnoticeable. More on this later. 

The downside of printing offset is time and minimum quantity.  Offset Printers only becomes worth it at quantities of 1,000+, though every additional thousand copies you order dramatically decreases the cost. While there are offset printers all over the world, none are cheaper than the ones in East Asia. The actual cost of the book is almost nothing, but shipping the books is another matter. Freight is slow - about a 65 day process. The major publishers (AFAIK) mostly print domestically because of this very reason. The money they would be able to save printing in Asia is negated by the additional two and a half months of turnaround time they would need to account for. Plus, at the quantities they print at (10k+) I'm sure the price per unit becomes much more palatable printing domestically. 

So yeah, a lot of factors to consider. In this case we went with 2,000 of each book. I would take 1500 and handle the bulk of shipping while Vince would take 500 of each and handle Europe. It’s a little early to tell how fast we’ll run out. This is something that’s kind of on our mind on the business end of things. If we run out of books again before the next Kickstarter, we’ll have to reprint, which is seriously expensive. It’s waaay cheaper printing more upfront, but the last thing you want to do is get stuck with thousands of books you can’t sell. 

Talking to Printers

With printing (as with a lot of industries, it seems like), the key is learning the phrases. Instead of asking for a comic book, ask for a saddle-stitched, full color booklet, 36 pages on #100 glossy exterior, #80 glossy (and so on and so forth). If you want to learn about the printing process, PrintNinja has a ton of great info online. 

As long as you know the terms you can go to almost any printer - including local ones - and ask about their prices. Printing comic books is no different from printing anything else.  There is no magic sauce that makes printing comics somehow more difficult or arcane or whatever from other things you would want to print. The only reason there are specific comic printers online is because those companies saw a market to capitalize on, and have thus focused their marketing to comic creators. I'm not saying these companies are bad - most are great - but limiting yourself to just comic printers limits your options.

What We Look For in a Printer

And btw, we're not experts at this by any means. Everything we know we've learned through the process of doing. So please take all this information with a grain of salt. That said, this is what we look for when working with a printer:

• Paper Quality - How does it feel? How does it look?
• Colors - What do the print colors look like? Are they accurate to our digital masters?
• Coating - Makes things more or less shiny, sometimes gives it a different look. What are our options? What does each look like?
• Binding - Very important. On two page spreads, are the two sides lined up? Is it bound evenly?
• Price - how competitive are the prices compared to other printers? 
• Customer Service - The tiebreaker. All of the above being equal, we will always go with the company that provides the best customer service. That means being attentive, professional, and courteous. 

A final note about the last item: sometimes we'll even go with a company that costs a little bit more if their customer service is outstanding. We've left companies with excellent print quality because their customer service stinks. This goes beyond the printers or merchants we use. Look, the last thing we want to deal with is someone thumbing their noses at us because they perceive us as small time or don't respect the work we do. 

A lot of printers deal with corporate clients who just throw money willy-nilly at their promotional materials. They rely on them not asking around, not double checking their prices and just accepting the $5k or $6k bill they need to print... postcards or something. Well, we're not them. Every dollar matters to us, so of course we're going to ask questions and make sure our money is being spent the right way. Sometimes when you ask a lot of questions without a lot of money people... ignore you or otherwise treat you like a second rate customer. There's a lot of that out there. Rather than dealing with it, we take our business elsewhere. 

The Variant 

For every issue we like to do Kickstarter exclusive variants. We figure these are like collector's editions, and as such Vince and I like to get a little crazy and work with artists from all over. We had a hard time picking this issue's variant, but in the end Vince came up with an awesome concept for a Japanese Sumi-e style ink wash / calligraphy.

He found Sato-san of MyCKs Studio, who does basically exactly what we were looking for: pop culture Sumi-E for things like Avatar: The Last Airbender. We talked about what to depict and settled on a key scene from the second issue: the moment Delmonte leaves William behind.

Sato-san delivered flawlessly. I love the interplay of blue and pink against the white negative space. It's almost like a flowery pattern you could print on a shirt! 

Printing Digitally On-Demand 


Because we only print the variants in limited quantity - usually around 100-150 - Vince and I turn to digital on-demand printing for the variants. The difference between on-demand and offset printing is honestly barely recognizable if you have a good printer. 

A comparison of our two different books:

This is something we were really hesitant about for our first issue. We were worried that the quality difference between offset and digital would be vast, but experience has taught us that it doesn't really matter. Every printer has different equipment though, and obviously the better equipped ones will deliver a higher quality product. 

We use Short Run Printing Ltd. because they've consistently delivered an excellent quality at a great price. Plus, their turnaround time is ridiculous, they're based in Arizona (close to LA), and their customer service is excellent. 

They really outdid themselves this time:

From a business standpoint, items like the Kickstarter exclusive Variant and Wax Seal allow us to appeal to hardcore comic book collectors. Even if we do get picked up by a publisher we will never produce these specific products again. As such, we can charge a little bit more for the items, but we also put a lot of care into their production to ensure that our backers are really getting something unique and hopefully irreplaceable. 

Since our main business model is to reward our existing fans with low costs, it's important that we have a higher tier option for those who want to maybe support us a little bit more. The Variant and Wax Seal fit those needs perfectly. 

Part I: Continuing an Ongoing Series

Part II: Research, Analytics, & Advertising

Part III: Shipping

---------

If you found this information helpful please be sure to check our comic, Skies of Fire. If you're already a fan, don't forget to sign up for our mailing list, follow us on twitter, and like us on facebook! 

Thanks all!
- Ray and Vince 

Research is of the utmost importance when running a crowdfunding campaign. First of all the information is all right there; Kickstarter itself never takes off old campaigns, so you can always see successful projects and use them as a template. Second, the market is always changing. It’s important to keep a pulse on what’s been working lately to make sure your project is utilizing best practices. 

Combined with Kickstarter, Kicktraq allows an individual to get deep into the nitty-gritty of crowdfunding. For instance, I can look at an individual project and see that on Day Twelve they had a huge day, far above their average. What caused it? If I then go back into the Kickstarter, look at the post updates, maybe I can correspond the bump with a specific press interview or promotion the campaign ran at the time. Maybe the source of press is something I can explore for my own campaign in the future, or the promotion is a good idea that I can keep in my back pocket. 

Researching failed projects is just as important as researching successful ones. What I’m talking about is the great looking projects that otherwise fail. The obvious ones, well… it’s not hard to figure out why they’re not working. But the good ones that fail? There’s a lot to be learned there. Was the reward price point too high? The goal too ambitious? Long video? Unclear prospectus? Market reasons? Ask yourself what is it that made this otherwise fantastic project fail, and see if you can avoid making the same mistakes. 

Seeing the Slump

Here's a link to our Kicktraq for Skies of Fire: #1-2 Print. 


So clearly we got hit hard on day six. To this day we're not exactly sure how much the natural drop off is a result of Kickstarter's algorithims and how much outside factors contributed to the fall-off. Like I said, neither Vince nor I are statisticians, so we had only our intuition to go by, but intuition was telling us that something was off. 

There's a natural tendency to panic with a Kickstarter because of its limited timeframe and the emotional investment you are dedicating to the endeavor. It's hard to see the forest from the trees and all that. I think resisting the urge to panic is important, but being pragmatic about the numbers is equally as important. We knew based on our research that you can reasonably predict a Kickstarter's total based on the first two weeks, and our numbers were trending in the wrong direction.  

Experimenting with Ads

We decided to test out ads via facebook. The experience was very enlightening. It's a little bit frightening how nuanced you can get with targeted advertising but.... it worked. Our flatline saw an uptick. We didn't have the analytics at the time to really dig into it, but I think Kickstarter has since implemented more tools. The most important metric was there, though: we got over a plateau and climbed back up:

Advertising is something we've been learning more about lately. It's a very tricky thing... advertising has a lot of negative connotations for a lot of people, including us. Still, it's the fundamental evil in this capitalistic world we live in. In order to be discovered you need to be seen, and that's the need ads serve. 

I think educating ourselves about ads has given us new perspective on the whole endeavor. It's ridiculous how much information is stored online. The big business of the internet is using data to identify and profile people, so companies can sell you exactly what they know you want. That, and porn. What a world we live in. Anywho --

Other Ad Services

This time around we had a lot of people emailing us offering their services. There were a lot of marketing companies and a couple of web developer-types who offered to drive traffic to our site. We were always open to see what people were offering, so we always asked them just that: what are you offering?


The funny thing is we almost never got a straight answer. Too vague, too technical, too simple -- the answers ran the gamut. I think this is because measuring advertising is a bit nebulous in general; it's easy to piggyback off of success, but it's hard to show direct correlation. At least, if the tools are not there as they weren't at the time with Kickstarter. 


Marketing is a rabbithole of a subject, but the bottom line is you should be careful with people promising things and offering their services. Most of the stuff you can do and learn yourself. In general, as a creator and entrepreneur the more you can do yourself, the better off you'll be. Never pay for something you can learn, unless your time becomes a more precious commodity. Luckily, we aren't at that point yet, so learning new skills is still the modus operandi for Mythopoeia. 

The Failed Thunderclap(s)

Advertising-wise, one thing that did not go as plan was our usage of the Thunderclap platform. Thunderclap is a service which offers to automate twitter messages / facebook statuses with an ad at a set time and date. We thought it might be a good kick off the project, but it never worked out.

The Last Days of the Campaign

Because the ads worked out well, we let the campaign ride for most of the Kickstarter. We stopped a couple of days before the final spotlight for Kickstarter would kick in. The last few days are always the best. We actually were all meeting for a creative pow-wow over in Bucharest, Romania. Vince had gone to London Super Con earlier in the year, and met an organizer from Eastern European Comic-Con. She offered to comp our table, so we all decided to meet, work, play, and plan the next step. 

It was great celebrating with everyone and making new fans in Bucharest. In general, the European scene seems a little smaller but really, really enthusiastic. We literally brought our last box of books with us to Romania and sold out in under two days. That meant it was time to go back to the printer! 


Read Part I: Continuing an Ongoing Series

Read Part III: Digital vs. Offset Printing

Read Part III: Shipping


---------

If you found this information helpful please be sure to check our comic, Skies of Fire. If you're already a fan, don't forget to sign up for our mailing list, follow us on twitter, and like us on facebook! 

Thanks all!
- Ray and Vince