Reflections on my First Kickstarter – Part 3 of 3: Fulfilment

For those keeping track of parts one and two of this series, you will recall the relative ease that I managed the planning and execution of the Kickstarter campaign. Surely the fulfillment would be a similarly simple process right? 

(Narrator voice: Fulfilment was not a similarly simple process…)

As the dust settled on the campaign and I basked, momentarily, in the glory of its success, I soon realised that I had to get my finger out as soon as possible and sort out the printing and postage side of things. I’m going to make a confession here – I have always looked with a slight side-eye at kickstarter campaigns which are delayed due to ‘real life issues’. Never again. The thing is, for someone doing this alongside a full-time job, with limited evening availability and a busy ‘life’ schedule, even losing one day can set a project back a week, and those weeks soon build up.

Now the way you handle this is, of course, to not treat this as a parade of serial processes, doing one thing at a time, but rather as a series of parallel processes. Except, for many of these processes, they are interlinked. (I can tell someone is already screaming CRITICAL PATH at me here, and yes, I know…). It proves to be quite … complicated.

The Edit(s)

The first thing I had to do was finish the layout of the journals and hand them over to Lara for editing. A decision I made during the campaign was to retool, wherever possible, the ‘talking’ version of the pieces into a more academic ‘written’ version, taking out a lot of the jokes and colloquialisms etc. I set Lara to work with a highlighter, diligently ripping my words apart and then I had to go in and rewrite parts of the text. We did two passes of this in the end, but I think we might have inevitably left a few bits in – ‘needs another editing pass’ etc. I also had to do a lot of fiddling around with the layout, to make it sit right, including adding some new material to get rid of some white spaces! Even at the last moment, as  I was saving the final pdfs, I noticed an entire random bloody graphic asset just floating in the middle of a page! It was like editing whack-a-mole.

The ‘Backerkit’ debacle

This was a proper learning point for me – how the **** do you charge for postage after a Kickstarter. To this day, I’m still not completely sure. You see people use Backerkit, but I was advised that for a project this size, I shouldn’t bother. So what do you do? Bear in mind that this project happened right in the middle of Trump’s Tariff Funtimes, and I had already resigned myself to not posting to the EU due to their nonsense red tape requirements. 

My saving grace, it would appear, was the new Kickstarter beta version of their own ‘backerkit’. Great. I started to fill it out, realised I had made a mistake, clicked the back arrow on the browser and got kicked out of the beta! A frantic message to their support was answered two weeks later, and eventually, after escalation they discovered a way to let me back in. Only then did I find that to use it I would need a VAT number. For a £2000 kickstarter… OK, how do you get a VAT number? Well you need a Unique Tax Payer number and a Company Number. I was going to have to register for self assessment anyway, so sure, let’s bite that bullet, but then getting a company number … as a sole trader? Less easy than you would imagine. I bashed my head against that for a day or two and then decided that the time and energy and frankly emotional capital it was burning was simply not worth it so I decided to go a little left field in my solution.

The Postage Appeal

My solution was simple – just ask people, on an honour system, to paypal me the postage. I reckoned that there was enough leeway in my budgets for this to work, and it felt a lot less hassle than dealing with the nonsense of company registration at its seemingly glacial pace. And you know what? It worked. I think around 60% of all backers contributed to the postage fund and I’m completely OK with that. I was very explicit that if people couldn’t afford it, or saw this as a ‘me problem’ that’s fine, but loads of people paid, and some even threw a few quid in extra to help out. The gaming community is awesome.

The Books Arrive!

Luckily, or rather I should say, professionally, the printing of the books was flawless. I already have an established working relationship with my local printer and they do a great job at a very competitive rate. I knew this wasn’t a rush job for me, so I didn’t make it one for them, and then my other daughter, Emma, picked the books up for me and delivered them home. This part was the easy part. No shipping drama, no tariffs, no delays at ports.

The Gaming Room Becomes a Post Office

I am not a natural user of the postal service. I don’t sell games online very often, and when I used to sell Duty & Honour/Beat to Quarters through mail order, I was working somewhere with a post office in the building and the postmaster was my friend. Now, going to the post office is a ten minute hike uphill into town and then a wait in a long queue. It’s awkward, time consuming and can only really be done during office hours. So just getting a price for postage can be a pain in the arse, or so I thought.

There was a lot of learning here. Some digital kitchen scales and a tape measure allowed me to pinpoint the probable postage size and cost, but I still put a package together and got it weighed and measured, to be doubly sure. Now I had to work out how you get the addresses from the backer survey (oh yes, the backer survey…. That’s important too!) onto the envelopes, in a way that doesn’t involve handwriting. I considered an old school mail merge/label printing set-up using some kit at work, but this seemed fiddly. There must me a simpler way. How do people get these nice pre-paid postage labels? Surely they don’t take them to the post office? Surely?!

I was contemplating a few weeks of meticulous handwriting and stamp licking, when I absent mindedly googled how to send bulk mail and came across the arcane wonder of the Post Office’s online postage service. OH MY WORD. This was an absolute revelation, powered by the quick purchase of a little thermal printer and some labels. You can buy postage online, input postcodes and addresses and voila, it creates a label which you can simply print out. It is so satisfying to see all of those labels flying out of the printer. 

Sure, the printer set-up cost about £70, but it’s something I will use again and again as online postage is way cheaper than getting it at the post office. It’s remarkable!

What have I learned?

That old adage of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ has never been so apt in my world, as it is now. You think you know how all of this is going to play out, but you never, ever know for certain. 

The entire crowdfunding thing works and can work well for a small press publisher. This is not exactly groundbreaking science, but it is for me in my old school ways. I’ve certainly been convinced that there is a route to market here for other material, both Liminal related and also for other things, which can be used.

I understand the road bumps along the way a lot better nowadays. If/when I do my next campaign, I will sort out the postage well before I start the campaign, and I will have done my due diligence in terms of company formation etc. because the modern world may have delivered the wonders of online postage, but it has a lot of processes that have significant roadblocks within them, and you need to be prepared. Nearly two weeks to get one query sorted by Kickstarter was nonsense. I tend to view the world in a very positive light and the sheer edifice of bullshit I was presented with, post campaign, came as quite the shock.

This was definitely a bit of a ‘getting my feet wet’ exercise, with all of the dials turned down to 1, to keep things simple. No frills, no extras, no stretch goals, limited scope and to be fair, a limited production quality product. The next step is working out which dials to wiggle for my next project – almost certainly production values, for a start.

I also learned that there are some unexpected bonuses – the extra visibility of the campaign seemed to bring the D&H/BtQ fans out of the woodwork, which was lovely. They are the games which refuse to go away! I was never inundated by random companies/people trying to help me run my campaign, which was great. I had very polite and friendly interactions with people on the platform in public and through messages, employing a problem solving ethos to some of the sticky issues that came up, where possible. Maybe it’s the Liminal community, but people were generally lovely.

I think the biggest takeaway from all of this for me, was what I learned about myself. I never see myself as a conservative actor in my life, but I do recognise that I can be very averse to putting myself into positions where I can be criticised or commented upon by people in general. I’m naturally quite shy, which comes as a shock to the people who know me even passingly as I have a reputation for being quite the opposite – but masks exist for a reason. I’m also very assured with what I know, and tend to try to find solutions within that knowledge set. What this experience has taught me is that I have to push myself to find clever solutions to problems,  rather than brute force them with simple, but hard work options. I have to plan for failure better, rather than assuming as I always do that things will work out in the end. And I have to have faith in myself to weather the challenges and not to let perfection derail success.

Would I do it again? Abso-friggin-lutely. I already have two projects lined up on the development block as it stands, and assuming they don’t crash and burn in testing, they will be rolling around sooner rather than later.