Last Chance To Kickstart Hail To The Victors

but didn't really want Brian scaring my kids......

If we were all smarter we should have kickstarted the 10K fund and had Brian show up at a random Michigan event in the Terrell Pryor jersey.

You'll get to write it. Within reason.

30 minutes

I'm sure Brian thought out the contribution levels and gifts well, but the lower ones were more or less at cost. While donating the higher amounts are priced enough above cost (making assumptions about the value of Brian's time) to really help fund the project, the purpose of donating the lower amounts is to help with liquidity. They move some magazines and t-shirts now when they need the publishing money, rather than sell them later and pay back the publishing money (which they couldn't reasonably do; at best they would have some killer interest rates to pay back which might make publishing not worth the risk).

The plus side is the fundraising went really well. The minus side is that since so many of us have already pre-ordered the mag, not as many will likely buy it once it comes out.

I've heard horror stories of Kickstarter campaigns going south because the relative costs and contribution levels weren't thought out well enough, and the costs they would bear weren't anticipating well enough. But, like I said I'm sure Brian thought through the costs well, and since the goal was exceeded so much it should still be profitable. To answer your question directly, BursleysFinest, I think the "extra" money from this would be used the same way profits from selling the preview in a normal year would be used -- maintain the site, pay Brian's and Ace's bills, and yeah, maybe hold over for publishing next year's edition.

I think I can answer better than Brian on 1 and 2. For 3 I can only tell you what he told me.

1. Not at all. The $20k was basically the point at which we figured if we print the fewest possible books we could still pay the contributors and our losses would be such that our wives would stay married to us.

We set the funding goal for about half my projected overhead for the project if we printed the minimal amount we were quoted for. The better the KS did, the more we planned to print. Remember that Amazon and Kickstarter get a cut, and we still have to ship these and house these, plus a lot of those sales were t-shirts so we could have some heavy expenses still. Right now we are actually at about zero profit for the entire project, but we have enough to pay the contributors upfront, which is a big deal to us. There's still a lot of books to sell. The Kickstarter gave us the overhead to make that happen, because printing a book involves writing big checks.

2. This year's edition is gonna be maximum size and maximum niceness. We're using the best stock the printer has. The plan was always if we're going to do it, it's gonna be the best paper, and as big as we can make it before we cross the line on shipping weight.

3. Most of the profit is earmarked for site improvements, two specific ones that are really big.